Jesus Sends Seventy-Two To Meet And Get Transformed

For a person of faith, ‘God comes, ever comes’ is a constant experience; logically, it also means that God goes, ever goes to the other. We read in Romans, “God came to save us when we were still sinners.” At another point of time in history we were the other to whom God came. Throughout his earthly journey, Jesus demonstrated a radical commitment to crossing boundaries, meeting others. This wasn't merely a strategy for spreading his message—it was a fundamental aspect of his vision for humanity. He didn't establish a comfortable base and wait for people to come to him. Instead, he was constantly moving—crossing territorial boundaries, cultural divides, and social barriers. He didn't try to change people from a distance through arguments or condemnation. He shared meals with tax collectors, conversed with Samaritan women, touched lepers, and welcomed children. Each encounter was an act of radical hospitality that said, you matter and your story matters.

Jesus didn't keep this mission to himself. In Luke 10: 1-12, 17-20 we witness Jesus sending out 72 disciples, two by two, to towns and villages he himself would visit. This wasn't delegation, or making Jesus’ going easier—it was multiplication of encounter.

Luke 10: 1-12, 17-20 reflection, meeting the other, jesus sending the seventy two.

Jesus understood something profound about human nature: we are naturally inclined toward "contact bias"—the tendency to surround ourselves with people who look like us, think like us, and share our experiences. This bias creates invisible walls that separate us from one another, breeding misunderstanding, suspicion, prejudice, and eventually, hatred.

When his disciples returned from their mission, they had experienced something transformative—not just in those they met, but in themselves. They had become bridge-builders, wall-breakers, agents of divine connection. Their names, Jesus told them, were now written in heaven.

In Northern Ireland, the peace process was advanced not just by political negotiations, but by programs that brought together Protestant and Catholic children to play sports together, share meals, and discover their common humanity. When children who had been taught to fear each other found themselves laughing together on soccer fields, the devils of prejudice that Jesus spoke of began to lose their power.

Salvador Dali, the master of surrealism, placed elements in unrelated places and showed them in completely unusual and unfamiliar angles. His purpose was to make people see others from angles and associations that are not conventional and taken for granted. He famously says, ‘every seeing is reinventing oneself.’

Now going back to the gospel passage of Jesus sending the seventy-two will have a new meanings and layers.

Firstly, Jesus tells them take nothing for your journey, no clothes of protection, no sticks of defence and offence, no haversacks of prejudices and doctrines. You are going to listen and not so much speak, you are going to receive and not so much give, you are going to understand and not so much understood. As the old wisdom goes, no one can fill a cup that is already full.

Secondly, Jesus challenges them to check the truth of a dictum that they had held, we are sheep and others are wolves. The metaphor of the wolf is used for men who are violent and cruel in the Old Testament (Jer 5:6; Ezek 22:27; Zeph 3:3). Jesus tells them, go, meet your wolves and come. Meeting the other requires courage—the courage to step outside our echo chambers, to risk having our assumptions challenged, to discover that those we've been taught to fear are, in fact, remarkably similar to ourselves. It requires the humility to acknowledge that our perspective, however deeply held, is incomplete, if we have not met the other. When the 72 disciples returned, they carried with them stories, experiences, and transformed perspectives that would influence everyone they subsequently met. We don't hear even one making a mention about the wolves. The conversations don't eliminate differences, but they transform how those differences are understood and respected. Perhaps the wolves were in their minds. The devils in their minds of prejudice and ignorance fall away when genuine encounters occur.

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