The Seventy and the Serpents

He also appointed seventy other apostles besides the twelve. Now if the twelve followed the number of the twelve springs at Elim, why should the seventy not answer to the same number of palm trees in that place? Whatever antitheses are drawn out of the comparison, what has chiefly produced them is a difference in the circumstances, not a difference in powers. But if a man does not keep the difference in the circumstances in view, he is very apt to conclude that there is a difference of powers. [a]

When the children of Israel came out of Egypt, the Creator brought them out loaded with their spoil of gold and silver vessels, and with bundles of clothing and kneaded dough besides. Christ, on the other hand, told his disciples not to carry so much as a staff for the road. But the first were thrust out into a desert, and the second were sent into cities. Weigh the difference in the two occasions and you will see that it was one and the same power that fitted his people out for the journey, according to their scarcity in the one case and their plenty in the other. He cut their supplies down where they could be replenished in the towns, exactly as he had piled them up where nothing but the bare desert lay ahead. He forbade them even to carry shoes — he under whose own protection the people did not wear out a shoe in all those years in the wilderness.

“Greet no one on the road,” he says. What a destroyer of the prophets Christ is, to be sure, seeing that this is a rule he took over from them! When Elisha sent his servant Gehazi on ahead of him to raise the Shunammite woman’s son from death, I rather think these were his orders: “Tie up your robe, take my staff in your hand, and go. If you meet anyone, do not greet him; and if anyone greets you, do not answer him.” For what is a blessing on the road but the greeting men exchange when they meet? And so the Lord commands as well: “Whatever house they go into, let them say, Peace to this house.” Here he is following that very same precedent. Elisha laid the same greeting on his servant when he met the Shunammite: he was to say to her, “Peace to your husband, peace to your child.” These are the sort of antitheses we ought to be drawing. They set Christ beside the Creator instead of tearing him away from him.

“The laborer is worthy of his wages.” Who is better placed to hand down a sentence like that than the Judge? To decide that a workman has earned his pay is in itself a judicial act, and there is no award that is not reached by a process of judging. The Creator’s law backs him up on this point too, for he judges that working oxen are laborers worthy of their pay: “You shall not muzzle the ox,” he says, “while he treads out the grain.” And who is so good to man as the one who is merciful even to cattle? Besides, when Christ pronounced laborers worthy of their pay, he in fact cleared of blame that instruction of the Creator’s about stripping the Egyptians of their gold and silver vessels. The men who had built the Egyptians their houses and their cities were surely workmen worthy of their wages. They were not being schooled in a fraud. They were only being set to collect the pay owed them, which there was no other way of getting out of their masters.

That the kingdom of God was neither new nor unheard of, he affirmed in this very way, while at the same time telling them to announce that it had come near. It is what was once far off that can properly be said to have come near. If a thing had no existence at all before it came near, it could never be said to have approached, because it had never stood at a distance. Everything that is new and unknown is also sudden; and a sudden thing first takes its place in time when it is announced, since that is when it first puts on a shape. It will be impossible, then, for such a thing either to have been slow in coming through all the while it went unannounced, or to have been drawing near only from the moment the announcement begins.

He goes on to add what they are to say to any who will not receive them: “All the same, be sure of this: the kingdom of God has come near you.” If he is not laying this down as a threat, the instruction is a thoroughly useless one. What did it matter to them that the kingdom was at hand, unless its arrival brought judgment with it — even for the salvation of those who did take the announcement in? For if a threat can stand without ever being carried out, how are you to find in a god who threatens one who also acts on it, and in both a judge? So too he commands that the dust be shaken off against them as a testimony — the very grains of their soil that might be clinging to the sandal, let alone any other dealing with them. But if their inhumanity and inhospitality were to get no reprisal from him, what is the point of putting a testimony on record in advance, when a testimony plainly forebodes some threat?

What is more, when the Creator in the book of Deuteronomy forbids the Ammonites and the Moabites to be received into the church — because, when his people came out of Egypt, those nations cheated them of provisions with inhumanity and inhospitality — it becomes plain that the ban on dealings with such people came down to Christ from him. And the form of words he uses, “Whoever despises you despises me,” the Creator had already addressed to Moses: “It is not against you that they have grumbled, but against me.” Moses, in fact, was as much an apostle as the apostles were prophets. The authority of the two offices will have to be divided equally, since it comes from one and the same Lord, the God of apostles and of prophets.

Who is it that is to give “the power of treading on serpents and scorpions”? Is it the one who is Lord of every living creature, or the one who is not god over a single lizard? As it happens, the Creator has promised through Isaiah to give this very power even to small children: to put their hand into the viper’s den and over the nest of the young asps and take no hurt at all. And we are well aware — without doing any violence to the plain sense of the passage, since these dangerous creatures have in fact proved unable to hurt where there was faith — that under the figure of scorpions and serpents evil spirits are foretold, whose own prince goes by the name of serpent and dragon and every other of the most notable beasts in the Creator’s power.

This power the Creator conferred first of all on his Christ, as the ninetieth Psalm says to him: “On the asp and the basilisk you shall tread; the lion and the dragon you shall trample underfoot.” Isaiah says the same: “On that day the Lord God will draw his holy and great and strong sword” — meaning his Christ — “against that dragon, that great and twisting serpent, and he will kill him on that day.” And when the same prophet says, “The way shall be called a clean and holy way; nothing unclean shall pass over it, and there shall be no unclean way there; but the scattered shall pass over it, and they shall not go astray on it; no lion shall be there, and no ravening beast shall come up on it; it shall not be found there,” he is pointing out the way of faith, the way by which we are to reach God; and to this way of faith he then promises the emptying out and subjection of every harmful animal.

Finally, you may discover the time the promise is set for, if you read what stands just before it: “Be strong, you weak hands and you feeble knees. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf shall hear; then the lame man shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute shall speak plainly.” So it was when he proclaimed the good his cures were doing that he also put the scorpions and the serpents under the feet of his holy ones — he who had first received this power from the Father in order to hand it on to others, and who then displayed it in the order in which it had been announced beforehand.