In Matthew 10:16 Jesus tells the disciples whom he is sending out to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. This may seem a rather strange thing to state, but I suspect that in Jesus’ time, just as today innocence is widely equated with being naive to the point of being dumb.

If you look at much of the moral teaching for families, the ‘good guy’ is usually not only incurable honest but incredibly stupid! This is not reality.

Jesus pointed out that the world was full of ravenous wolves, and that we were sheep among them. Being innocent requires that we choose not to think or act in the way that the world thinks or acts; being wise must mean that we are all too aware of the attitudes and actions of the world around us.

We accept that there is murder, adultery, deceit and much more, but somehow fail to anticipate that it will be directed at us as those who belong to Christ (Matthew 10:25). If they hated him and did all that they could to defeat him can we expect less?

But Jesus also promised that he would build his Church and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. We have the victory and it is in Christ and his wisdom (1 Corinthians 2), we just need to understand that it is wisdom and innocence that go hand in hand, not innocence and dumbness…

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 28th, 2002 at 12:00 am and is filed under Devotional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.