Matthew 10:11-15

They were to stay with "worthy" hosts, not necessarily in the most convenient or luxurious accommodations. A worthy person would be one who welcomed a representative of Jesus and the kingdom message. He or she would be the opposite of the "dogs" and "pigs" Jesus earlier told His disciples to avoid (Matthew 7:6). By this time there were probably people in most Galilean villages who had been in the crowds and had observed Jesus. His sympathizers would have been the most willing hosts for His disciples.

The greeting the disciple was to give his host was the normal greeting of the day. If his host proved to be unworthy by not continuing to welcome the disciple, he was to leave that house and stay somewhere else. By withdrawing personally the disciple would withdraw a blessing from that house, namely, his presence as a representative of Jesus. The apostles were to do to towns as they did to households.

"A pious Jew, on leaving Gentile territory, might remove from his feet and clothes all dust of the pagan land now being left behind . . . thus dissociating himself from the pollution of those lands and the judgment in store for them. For the disciples to do this to Jewish homes and towns would be a symbolic way of saying that the emissaries of Messiah now view those places as pagan, polluted, and liable to judgment (cf. Acts 13:51; Acts 18:6)." [Note: Carson, "Matthew," p. 246.]

More awful judgment awaited the inhabitants of the Jewish towns that rejected Messiah than the judgment coming on the wicked residents of Sodom and Gomorrah that had already experienced divine destruction (Genesis 19). The unbelievers of Sodom and Gomorrah will receive their sentence at the great white throne judgment (Revelation 20:11-15). The unbelieving Jews of Jesus’ day would also stand before Jesus then. One’s eternal destiny then as now depended on his or her relationship to Jesus, and that was evident in his attitude toward one of His emissaries (cf. Matthew 10:40; Matthew 25:40; Matthew 25:45). In that culture people treated a person’s official representative as they would treat the one he represented. The apostles could anticipate opposition and rejection as Jesus experienced and as the Old Testament prophets had as well.