Failure Is An Option
“If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet.” — Matthew 10:14
I’ve heard this scripture used in a harsh and spiteful way by church leaders in the past. Interpreting it as permission not only to give up on people, but to communicate as they go, “I don’t want anything to do with you anymore.” It has always been hard for me to imagine Jesus encouraging His followers to engage in such spiteful behavior.
Recently, I read another interpretation that makes way more sense to me in Travis Collins’s From Street to Steeple:
Maybe ‘shaking the dust off your feet and move on’ is a way of saying ‘failure is an option.’
Jesus didn’t want discouragement to stick to His disciples. If they were willing to go where He said to go and do what He said to do, the outcomes of the mission weren’t on them. Jesus tells them up front that they will experience rejection and persecution for participating in His work. Not everyone was going to embrace the kingdom values that He was bringing. But when the inevitable ‘failures’ occurred, Jesus wanted them to simply shake it off and move on to the next thing He would give them to do.
