Christ sent his disciples out as “sheep among wolves” (Luke 10). He is the defenseless Christ who used his power in the service of mercy and expending himself in ministry to others. He withdrew from the opposition of unbelief and would not use his power to defend himself or overpower those who sought to destroy him. This Christ sends out his followers and tells them to “be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves”. Martin Franzmann writing about this said that “only by centering his will completely in the will of the Father who sent into the world a weak and contradicted Christ, and only in the impulse of the Christ’s power and compassion, convinced by the afflatus of God’s Spirit of the absolute worth of a love which seeks nothing and gives all – only so can the disciple succeed in being neither foolish nor devious, neither naïve nor cynical, neither foolhardy nor cowardly and compromised. Only so can a disciple live and dare in the strength of his hope without being made a featherheaded enthusiast by it. Only so is a man capable of a wisdom that does not make him a gray, grim and careful ecclesiastic, and capable of an innocence that does not make him a happy and hurtful ecclesiastical blunderer.”
