I send you forth. — The nominative pronoun is emphatic, “It is I who send,” and that not so much as an assurance of protection, but, as the words that follow show, as reminding them of their responsibility as His delegates.
As sheep in the midst of wolves. — Nothing can be more striking than the union of this clear foresight of conflict and suffering with the full assurance of victory and sovereignty. The position of the disciples would be as sheep surrounded by a flock of hungry and raging wolves, the wolf being here, as elsewhere in the New Testament, the symbol of the persecutor.
Wise as serpents. — The idea of the serpent as symbolising wisdom, seems to have entered into the early parables of most Eastern nations. We find it in Egyptian temples, in the twined serpents of the rod of Æsculapius and of Hermes, in the serpent-worship of the Turanian races, in the history in Genesis 3 of the serpent that was “more subtle than any beast of the field.” For the most part it appears in Scripture as representing an evil wisdom to be fought with and overcome. Here we learn that even the serpent’s sinuous craft presents something which we may well learn to reproduce. When St. Paul “caught men with guile” (2 Corinthians 12:16), becoming “all things to all men” (1 Corinthians 9:22), he was acting in the spirit of his Master’s counsels.
Harmless as doves. — Better, simple, sincere — i.e., “guileless.” The Greek indicates more than simple harmlessness — a character in which there is no alloy of baser motives. Once again truth appears in the form of paradox. The disciples of Christ are to be at once supremely guileful and absolutely guileless. Our Lord’s reference to this symbolism gains a fresh significance when we remember that He had seen the heavens opened, and the Spirit of God descending “like a dove” upon Himself (Matthew 3:16). In and by that Spirit the two qualities that seem so contradictory are reconciled.