There is something deeply unsettling in Christ’s instruction to His disciples in the tenth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel. We might have expected Him to say, “I send you as lions among wolves,” or perhaps as soldiers entering battle. Instead, He says: “Behold, I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt. 10:16). The image is so familiar that we can easily fail to notice how strange it really is. A sheep possesses no claws, no fangs, no natural means of defending itself. Its security lies almost entirely in the shepherd. Christ does not promise that the wolves will disappear, nor does He suggest that His disciples will be spared danger. He sends them into the midst of it and asks them, even there, to remain sheep.
This does not mean that the Christian is called to be naïve. Christ immediately joins the innocence of the dove to the wisdom of the serpent. The disciple must recognize evil for what it is. He must understand how deception works, how power can manipulate, and how fear can silence conscience. Yet he must never allow his knowledge of evil to become fascination with evil, nor permit prudence to decay into calculation. He must see the wolf clearly without beginning to admire it. This is one of the central tensions of Christian life, i.e. to live in a fallen world without permitting the world’s fallen logic to enter and possess the heart.
The prophet Hosea helps us understand where this kind of discipleship begins. Before the disciple is sent forth, he must first return. “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,” the prophet says (Hos. 14:2). Israel has wandered and been unfaithful, but the Lord’s first response is not revenge. He remains the Lord, and He asks us the same steadfastness, so His first response is healing: “I will heal their defection; I will love them freely” (Hos. 14:5). God calls the sinner back not merely to pardon him, but to restore him. The wounded sheep is summoned again to the Shepherd, because only a heart that has first been healed can remain steadfast in the presence of wolves.
Psalm 50 gives us the prayer of such a heart: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me” (Ps. 50:12). This is more than a request for moral improvement but a plea for interior re-creation. The Christian does not simply need better habits or greater self-control. Such would be merely on the surface, merely moral. He needs a heart purified of duplicity, resentment, fear, and the desire to be accepted at any cost. It is not enough to survive externally among the wolves if one has already begun to imitate them internally. The heart must become clean enough to resist evil without becoming bitter, courageous enough to speak without hatred, and humble enough to remain dependent upon grace.
This is also where the doctrine of hell becomes more serious than we often allow it to be. Hell is not merely the destiny of spectacular villains or obviously wicked men. It is the final condition of a soul that refuses mercy, refuses conversion, refuses truth, and in the end, refuses Love itself. It is what happens when the sheep no longer desires the Shepherd, and this drama of salvation is not limited to extraordinary moments. It unfolds in the small interior choices by which a soul gradually learns either to belong to God or to withdraw from Him.
Dante understood this with extraordinary force. At the threshold of Hell, before he encounters the tyrants, murderers, traitors, and violent sinners who populate the deeper circles, he first sees the souls of those who never truly chose. They lived, he writes, sanza ’nfamia e sanza lodo—“without infamy and without praise” (Inferno III, 36). Dante associates them with the angels who were “neither rebellious nor faithful to God” (Inferno III, 38–39). These souls did not commit themselves to great evil, but neither did they commit themselves to the good. They wanted safety more than truth, comfort more than sacrifice, and self-preservation more than fidelity.
The scene is chilling because Dante does not begin his journey through Hell with monsters. He begins with the morally evasive. Their sin is not dramatic but profound. They have refused the dignity and danger of choice, teaching us that neutrality is not innocence. To refuse to choose the good is already to fail to love it. The disciple who has been sent as a sheep among wolves cannot indefinitely say, “I will belong to Christ inwardly, but I will not stand with Him publicly.” At some point, silence ceases to be prudence and becomes fear.
Hannah Arendt saw something similar in the modern world when she wrote about the “banality of evil.” Evil is not always dramatic. It does not always appear with horns and fire. Sometimes it appears in the form of a man who no longer thinks, no longer judges, and no longer listens to conscience, but simply repeats slogans, follows procedures, and does what everyone else is doing. Reflecting on Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who helped organize the deportation of Jews to the death camps, Arendt spoke of “thoughtlessness” as something capable of immense destruction.
By this she did not mean mere stupidity but the frightening absence of interior judgment, i.e. the failure to stop, to think, and to ask whether an order is just or whether an action of obedience is evil complicity. Eichmann, in Arendt’s portrait, was terrifying not because he appeared as a demonic genius, but because he appeared shallow, bureaucratic, and ordinary. He hid behind clichés, procedures, official language, and the machinery of the system. This is precisely why Arendt’s insight remains so disturbing. Evil can advance not only through hatred but through emptiness, through the refusal to think before God and conscience.
A man can therefore become an instrument of terrible evil not because he is grandly demonic, but because he has become morally shallow. Dante reveals the danger of a will that refuses to choose. Arendt reveals the danger of an intellect that refuses to judge. Christ addresses both when He commands His disciples to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Wisdom requires thought, discernment, and the courage to see reality truthfully. Innocence requires a heart that has not been corrupted by hatred, calculation, or the desire for domination.
The two must remain together. Wisdom without innocence becomes cunning. Innocence without wisdom becomes naïveté. The Christian is called to something more difficult than either. He must be perceptive without becoming suspicious of everyone, prudent without becoming manipulative, courageous without becoming violent, and innocent without surrendering judgment. Just when one wonders how this is all possible, we are reminded when Christ tells His disciples not to worry about how they will speak when they are handed over. He is not telling them not to think. He is telling them to think, judge, speak, and suffer in the presence of God, trusting that “the Spirit of your Father” will speak through them (Mt. 10:19–20).
This is why the image of sheep among wolves is so powerful. The wolf is not only the persecutor outside us but can also take the form of fear within us that brings us to conformity, cowardice, ambition, resentment, the desire to be admired, or the instinct to survive at any cost. The deepest danger is not merely that the wolves devour the sheep but that the sheep begin to envy them.
The Christian does not conquer evil by becoming more violent, more cunning, or more ruthless than evil. This would be a surrender to the logic of the wolf. The disciple conquers by remaining with Christ. He may be weak and surrounded, but he belongs to the Shepherd and is not abandoned. His confidence does not rest in his ability to outmaneuver evil but in the fidelity of the One who sends him.
It is impossible not to think here of another scene in the Gospels. The disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee when a violent storm arises. The waves break over the boat, and experienced fishermen begin to fear for their lives. Yet Christ is asleep (Mk. 4:35–41). His sleep is almost as disturbing to them as the storm itself. The danger is real. The boat is filling with water. The One who can save them appears not to be acting. In desperation they wake Him: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mk. 4:38). How often we ask that! We look at the storms that buffet the Church, at the moral confusion of our culture, at the growing hostility toward the Gospel, and even at the personal trials that unexpectedly enter our lives, and we find ourselves asking the very same question: “Lord, do You not care?” His apparent silence can seem almost unbearable.
Yet the Lord rises, rebukes the wind, and says to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” (Mk. 4:39). Then He turns to His disciples—not to scold them for recognizing the danger, because the danger was real—but to reveal that they had forgotten the most important fact. “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” (Mk. 4:40). The decisive fact was never the violence of the storm. It was the presence of Christ in the boat. The same is true of the sheep among wolves. Christ never promised that there would be no wolves nor that there would be no storms. He promised something infinitely greater, i.e. that He Himself would be with us. The disciple’s courage is not founded upon his own strength but upon the presence of the Shepherd. His apparent silence is not His absence nor His sleep indifference. Even when He seems inactive, He remains Lord of the wind and the sea.
That is why, when I find myself before something greater than myself, I often remember the words of the Psalm: Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini, qui fecit caelum et terram—“Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth” (Ps. 123:8; cf. Ps. 124:8). Our confidence does not rest in our cleverness, our influence, or our ability to outmaneuver the wolves. Our confidence rests in the Lord who made heaven and earth, the Lord whom even the wind and the sea obey (Mk. 4:41).
Back to Hosea, we are reminded that God does not simply forgive His people but heals them: “I will heal their defection; I will love them freely” (Hos. 14:5). He creates in them a clean heart (Ps. 50:12), not merely so that they may experience His mercy but so that they may become His witnesses. A healed heart becomes a courageous heart; a purified conscience becomes a discerning conscience. The disciple who has returned to the Shepherd can now remain faithful, even when surrounded by wolves.
Perhaps this is the deepest lesson of Christ’s command to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt. 10:16). Dante reminds us that neutrality is not innocence. Hannah Arendt reminds us that thoughtlessness is not innocence. Christ calls us beyond both. He asks us to think clearly, to judge rightly, to love courageously, and to remain innocent without ever becoming naïve.
The Christian’s task is neither to escape the wolves nor to imitate them, but to remain so close to the Good Shepherd that, even in the midst of storms and surrounded by wolves, he never ceases to recognize His voice. The wolves will always be with us. The storms will continue to arise. But the final word belongs neither to the wolves nor to the waves. It belongs to the Shepherd, whose voice still calms the sea, strengthens the heart, and leads His flock safely home.
Photo by Siddharth shah on Unsplash
