Matthew 10:1-42, The Twelve Apostles and the Coming Persecutions
Chapter 10 reads like its Jesus’s halftime speech to the apostles, only it’s not very inspiring. “It’s gonna be rough, but you’ll get some good tackles and score some points, people will cheer but mostly they’ll throw things at you and the other team is going to score and beat you up pretty good. And, the whistle is gonna blow before you accomplish the primary objective.”
But don’t worry about all of that, just move the ball down the field.
I actually wonder if Matthew (and the other apostles) assumed things that Jesus didn’t actually say, only in that, I wonder if they assumed that all would be fulfilled in their lifetime and read that into Jesus’s teachings.
Maybe Jesus was saying: move the ball down the field, and then the next generation will move it some more, and so on. And now here we are, a hundred generations later and the ball has moved, some generations shave lost yardage, others gained, but our job is to join the game in progress and continue to move the ball.
Journey Through Scripture 