Have No Fear of Them (Matthew 10:16-33)

June 21, 2026, Year A, Proper 7, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 10:16–33, Psalm 69:1–15, Jeremiah 20:7–13

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you on this Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.

We are in, the long green season of growth that carries us from Trinity Sunday all the way to Advent. On Trinity Sunday we stood on the mountain in Galilee and heard the Great Commission that opens this entire season: all authority, all nations, and the promise, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20, ESV) 

And last Sunday we watched that commission take its first concrete shape. Jesus looked at the crowds with compassion, harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd, told the disciples to pray for laborers, and then made them the answer to their own prayer. He gave the Twelve authority, a message, and a manner: the kingdom of heaven is at hand; heal, cleanse, raise, cast out; you received without paying, give without pay. If we had stopped reading at verse 15, we might have imagined the mission would be received with open arms everywhere it went. This morning Jesus finishes the briefing, and he is ruthlessly honest about what is actually coming. 

Let’s start in verse 16: “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.” (Matthew 10:16, ESV) Not sheep among sheep. Not even sheep among strangers. Sheep among wolves. The image is deliberately alarming. Sheep have no natural defense against wolves. They cannot outfight them and they cannot outrun them. Their only safety is the shepherd. And Jesus, the one who looked at the crowds last week and saw sheep without a shepherd, now sends his own sheep into wolf territory, on purpose, with his full knowledge of what wolves do.

So how are sheep to survive among wolves? Verse 6, “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16, ESV) Wise: the Greek word is phronimos (FRON-ee-mos), shrewd, prudent, clear-eyed about how the world actually works. And innocent: akeraios (ah-KEHR-ay-os), literally unmixed, pure, without guile. Hold those two together, because the disciple is to be neither naive nor cynical. Naivety gets the sheep eaten. Cynicism turns the sheep into a wolf. Jesus asks for the combination the world almost never produces: people who see everything clearly and still refuse to fight with the wolves’ weapons.

Then verses 17 and 18 get specific, and we should not rush past how specific they are. Courts. Floggings in the synagogues. Governors and kings. Jesus is describing, in advance and in detail, what the book of Acts will record happening to these very men. Peter and John before the Sanhedrin, commanded not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus, released, and returning to their community to pray for more boldness rather than less. Stephen before the council, giving the longest sermon in the book of Acts to the men who then dragged him outside and stoned him. Paul flogged five times in the synagogues, shipwrecked, imprisoned, standing before Felix and Festus and King Agrippa, and appealing finally to Caesar in Rome. None of it took God by surprise. And notice the purpose buried in verse 18: “to bear witness before them and the Gentiles.” (Matthew 10:18, ESV) The arrests are not interruptions of the mission. They are the mission. The courtroom becomes a pulpit. The persecution becomes the delivery system by which the gospel reaches governors and kings who would never have entered a synagogue to hear it. God wastes nothing, not even the malice of his enemies.

And for that hour, verses 19 and 20 give a promise: “do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” (Matthew 10:19–20, ESV) This promise is made for a specific context: not the Sunday pulpit for unprepared preachers, but the moment of crisis when a believer is seized and stood before power with no time to prepare. In that hour, the Spirit of the Father speaks through us. We saw the Spirit fall at Pentecost just four Sundays ago; here is one of the things he was sent to do.

Stephen before the Sanhedrin in Acts 7 is this promise fulfilled. Luke tells us that even before his arrest, his opponents “could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking.” (Acts 6:10, ESV) When they brought him before the council, his face was, Luke says, like the face of an angel. He gave the longest sermon recorded in Acts. He did not defend himself; he preached the history of Israel's rejection of God's messengers straight through to the rejection of the Holy and Righteous One. He was not finally the one speaking. And the Spirit who spoke through Stephen is the same Spirit who has been given to the whole Church. The promise of verses 19 and 20 belongs not only to the apostles but to every believer who is called to account for the faith.

Verse 21 is perhaps the hardest verse in the passage: brother delivering brother to death, fathers betraying children, children rising against parents. This happened in the first century, and quickly: the Jewish Christians expelled from their synagogues, the family fractures that ran through households across Judea and the diaspora. And it has not stopped. It is happening today in Iran, in North Korea, in China, in every place where confessing Christ carries a cost that reaches home. Jesus says this in advance so that when it comes, it does not destroy faith. The deepest wounds in persecution have always come not from governors but from family. He does not hide it. 

And then verse 22: “and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 10:22, ESV) Endurance, not brilliance, not visible success, not winning every argument, is the mark of the saved. The call is not to win every encounter. The call is to still be standing, still confessing, at the end.

Verses 24 and 25 give the logic underneath all of it: “A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master.” (Matthew 10:24, ESV) If they called Jesus Beelzebul, if they looked at the Son of God casting out demons and credited the prince of demons, what exactly do we expect them to say about us? Beelzebul was not a mild insult. It was the most severe accusation in the religious vocabulary of the day: this man's power comes from the lord of the flies, from the ruler of demons. They looked at the most obviously holy life ever lived and attributed it to the devil. If they got Jesus that wrong, we should not be shocked when they misread us.

The servant should not be surprised to be treated like the master. And there is a strange comfort hiding in this. When the world maligns the Church for bearing the name of Christ, the Church is being treated as its Lord was treated. The accusation is not evidence of the Church's failure. It is evidence of the Church's identity. We are in the family. The insult is the proof.

And now we come to the center of the passage, the verses from which our title is drawn. Three times in six verses, Jesus says do not be afraid. Verse 26: “So have no fear of them.” Verse 28: “do not fear those who kill the body.” Verse 31: “Fear not, therefore.” Each fear-not comes with a reason, and the three reasons together are nothing less than the theology of Christian courage.

The first reason, verses 26 and 27: have no fear of them, “for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.” (Matthew 10:26, ESV) The truth wins in the end. Every slander against the saints will be exposed as slander. Every hidden faithfulness will be brought into the light. The wolves operate by intimidation and concealment, and Jesus says the concealment has an expiration date. So speak: “What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.” (Matthew 10:27, ESV) The gospel was never meant to be a private spirituality kept safely indoors. It is housetop news.

The second reason, verse 28, is the most bracing sentence in the passage: "do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10:28, ESV) Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not cure our fear by telling us nothing bad will happen. Men may indeed kill the body; he says so plainly. He cures the fear of men with the fear of God. There is a right ordering of fears, and that ordering has a liberating effect that reaches far beyond the courtroom.

Pastorally speaking, most of what we call insecurity in daily life is disordered fear: fearing the opinion of a creature more than the judgment of the Creator. The anxiety about what people think of us, the dread of being wrong in public, the quiet management of our reputation and our image, the way we soften or suppress what we actually believe to avoid disapproval: this is the fear of men operating below the surface of ordinary life, never rising to the level of persecution but doing its quiet damage nonetheless. And Jesus does not cure it with self-confidence. He does not tell us to believe in ourselves. He tells us to fear God. When the fear of God is rightly placed, everything else shrinks to its proper size. The person who genuinely fears the one who holds both soul and body becomes, paradoxically, much less afraid of everyone else, because every other fear has been located, named, and outranked. The wolves' power runs out at the grave. God's does not.

And then immediately, and this order matters enormously, Jesus turns from the fear of God to the tenderness of God. Verses 29 through 31: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:29–31, ESV) The God whose judgment we rightly fear is the Father who attends the funeral of every sparrow. The cheapest life in the marketplace, two for a penny, does not fall to the ground apart from him. And the hairs of our head are not counted in bulk. They are numbered. Known individually. The third fear-not rests on this: the God who holds eternity in his hand holds us in his hand, and he has counted what we have long since lost track of. We are of more value than many sparrows. For those of us who know something about bodies failing and strength fading, this is not a small promise. Nothing about us, not one thing, falls to the ground apart from our Father.

The passage closes with the confession, verses 32 and 33: whoever acknowledges Jesus before men, Jesus will acknowledge before the Father; whoever denies him, he will deny. This is the destination of the whole discourse. Everything lands on this question: the wolves, the courts, the divided families, the threefold call to fearlessness, all of it arrives here. Will we confess him out loud, in public, where it costs something? Not in the heart only. Before men.

What does that look like in practice? It looks like being willing to say grace at a restaurant table. It looks like answering honestly when a colleague asks what we did on Sunday. It looks like not changing the subject when a family conversation turns to faith. It looks like showing up at this Table week after week, in a culture that has decided the Church is irrelevant, because our presence here is itself a confession. None of these is the Sanhedrin. None of these costs us our heads. But each one is the small daily exercise of the same courage that carried the apostles through courts and floggings, because acknowledgment is a habit, and the man or woman who will confess Christ before a king has been confessing him in smaller rooms for years. The mission of the Church does not survive on private belief. It survives on public confession, sustained by a rightly ordered fear and an unshakeable knowledge of the Father’s particular care.

Our Old Testament reading this morning gives us a man living inside this exact tension six centuries before Jesus spoke. Jeremiah 20. The prophet has just been beaten and put in the stocks by Pashhur the priest for preaching the word of the Lord, the first recorded physical persecution of Jeremiah, and when he is released, he erupts: “O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me.” (Jeremiah 20:7, ESV) 

Hear the honesty of that. Jeremiah complains to God about God. He has been faithful, and faithfulness has cost him everything. And he tries to quit: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” (Jeremiah 20:9, ESV) He cannot stop. The word will not stay in. And by verse 11 the complaint has turned: “But the Lord is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble.” (Jeremiah 20:11, ESV) And by verse 13 he is singing: “Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers.” (Jeremiah 20:13, ESV) That is the whole arc of faithful suffering in seven verses: anguish, honesty, the fire in the bones, and praise on the far side. 

And Psalm 69, which we prayed together this morning, walks the same road: “Surely for your sake have I suffered reproach; shame has covered my face,” (Psalm 69:7, ESV) the psalm of the one whose suffering is explicitly for God's sake and who still cries out to him. Jesus did not invent the cost of speaking truth. He inherited it, fulfilled it, and handed it to his Church.

And this Wednesday, June 24, the Church keeps the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, and there is no better face to put on this entire sermon. John is everything Matthew 10 describes. He spoke in the light what he received in the dark. He confessed before men: before crowds, before soldiers, before a king. He rebuked Herod to his face for taking his brother’s wife, and it cost him prison.

In that prison, John sent his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matthew 11:3, ESV) The man who had declared Christ the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world was sitting in a cell, and the doubts came. Jesus did not send rescue. He sent a report: the blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised. Go and tell John what you hear and see. That is enough. 

The sparrows do not fall apart from the Father, and John did not fall apart from the Father, even when the Father’s answer was not release but perseverance. John's head cost him. The men who killed his body could not touch his soul. And Jesus said of him that among those born of women there has arisen no one greater up until this point. Mark the providence of the calendar: in the very week we hear Jesus say have no fear of them, the Church remembers the man who didn't.

So here is where the passage leaves us. We are not first-century apostles facing the Sanhedrin, and most of us will never stand before a governor for the faith. But every one of us knows the smaller courtrooms: the family table where the faith is quietly mocked, the conversation where staying silent is easier, the culture that increasingly regards what we believe as foolish or worse. And underneath most of that silence is not a reasoned decision but a disordered fear: the fear of disapproval, the fear of being thought strange, the fear of losing the good opinion of people whose opinion is not, in the end, the one that matters.

The same three reasons hold in those smaller rooms. The truth will be revealed, so speak it now rather than waiting for a better moment. The better moment rarely comes, and the word spoken quietly and honestly in an ordinary conversation has more weight than we tend to think. God alone holds eternity, so order our fears rightly: the man or woman who fears God rightly is freed from the exhausting work of managing what everyone thinks of them, and that freedom is what makes the small daily confessions possible. The person across the table cannot determine where we spend eternity, and the one who can is the Father who has already numbered the hairs of our head. And that is the third reason, the one Jesus saves for last: we are known. We are counted. Nothing about us falls to the ground apart from our Father, not the hard conversation, not the mocking, not the quiet years of faithful endurance in a culture that has stopped listening. The one who endures to the end will be saved. Have no fear of them.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.