THE GREAT COMMISSION

From today’s Gospel reading (John 20.21):

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

These words from John’s Gospel are the equivalent of what is often called “The Great Commission” at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his followers out into all the world to make disciples of all nations, to teach them and to baptise them. In Matthew this scene takes place on a mountain-top in Galilee within the account of Jesus's last Resurrection appearance. In John (who is always different), it takes place in the evening of the first Easter Day inside a locked house in Jerusalem. But the meaning is the same: this is the moment when the risen Christ sends his disciples out to continue his mission: As the Father has sent me, so I send you.

This is where the disciples turn into apostles. “Apostle” comes from a Greek word meaning just that: one who is sent, often in the sense of an ambassador: one who is sent out on behalf of a ruler. We could also call them missionaries which means more or less the same: this time it's based on a Latin word, which also means being sent.

We tend to think of apostles and missionaries as being special people with a special role and ministry in the church, and indeed the apostles as such were only present during the first Christian generation. And this has led us to think of mission as something for church leaders, clergy or specially trained cadres like the people we used to call missionaries.

All of which tends to obscure the fact that all Christians are sent by Christ. In recent years there has been something of a rediscovery of the truth that the Great Commission is in fact addressed to all Christians, that mission is something for everyone. This is brought out in our Sunday liturgy when we say in the prayer after communion: Send us out in the power of the Spirit to live and work to your praise and glory. Which is a pretty good summary of Jesus's commission to his disciples in John chapter 20.

This emphasis on being sent out is an important reminder that the Church mustn't get turned in on itself. Too often the Church is excessively preoccupied with its own life and its own concerns, not to mention its own quarrels.

It's easy for the Church to get too inward-looking in our society where we are a minority group, a small group of the like-minded who gather together to do the things that Christians do. People around us see us as just another voluntary association for people who like that sort of thing, just another interest group catering for the needs of a certain kind of person.

It's easy for us to slip into this way of thinking and to concentrate too much on ourselves and our own needs. Of course the Church is here, among other things, to help people with their problems, but we mustn't turn into a sort of therapy group aiming primarily at enabling people to cope with life's difficulties.

And it's easy for us, as a church made up mainly of foreigners, to become a social group providing community and company for people who are feeling a bit lost in a strange society. Again, it's OK for this to be one of our functions, but the risk is that it becomes our main concern, so making us too inward-looking, too much focussed on ourselves.

Far from being inward-looking, the Church should be other-focussed. Archbishop William Temple said that the Church is the only society that exists for the sake of non-members, and while this is probably rather unfair to quite a lot of other bodies that exist to help and assist people in all sorts of ways, the point he was making is an important one.

To put it another way, the Church exists primarily for mission. The chief duties of church membership should focus on the world outside.

But what exactly do we mean by “mission”, a word we trot out almost too easily these days? What is it that Jesus sends us out to do? When people think of mission, they probably think first of mission as preaching the gospel, which it certainly is. But that is not all: mission also means service to others, and especially to people in need of whatever kind.

But if we look first at mission as preaching the gospel, two questions arise: how do we do it, and what is the message we are sent out to share? Not long ago, I got into conversation at a party with a young man who had had practically no contact with the church. I think he was rather intrigued to be faced with a priest, and certainly he had never come across such an exotic species as an Anglican priest.

So he asked me: well, what are the differences between all the different churches? I started by saying that though there are all sorts of differences and disagreements on matters of interpretation and practice and organisation and so on, nonetheless most of the churches could be said to agree on “the basic message of the gospel”.

“Oh, right”, he said, and then neatly threw my rather facile remark back at me and said - “and what is the basic message of the gospel”? Well that's a pretty good test to set yourself: how would you, while balancing a glass and a plate in the middle of a cocktail party, sum up the basic message of the gospel in a one-line answer, a soundbite?

I can't quite remember how I got out of that one. I hope I said something reasonably sensible, but I suppose I would like to have said that the basic message of the gospel is to get people to understand that God loves them. Or to develop that just a bit: to tell people that God offers everyone fullness of life and forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.

If this, or something like it, is the basic message, there are, I think two ways of communicating it. First, obviously, through words, as I tried to do. But also, and just as important, through deeds. In fact I would prefer not to present words and deeds as if they were two separate activities. They should be inseparable: we really communicate through the kind of people we are, and this is expressed both through what we say and through what we do. In a sense, we, as persons, are the message.

What is vital is that what we say and what we do go together, that our words and our deeds express the same message. In other words, that we have integrity. A person with integrity is a person whose words and whose deeds fit together, give out the same message. And it's worth mentioning here that the people Jesus was most critical of were the ones whose deeds did not fit together with their words, the people he called hypocrites.

So the person is the message. After all, when God wanted to speak to us, he sent a Person. The human person Jesus of Nazareth was the embodiment of God's message to us. Jesus is the message of the gospel, what he said and what he did, in fact the totality of the person he was. And Jesus, in turn, sends us out as people who now embody his message.

John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Church

15 April 2007, Second Sunday of Easter

Year C, Gospel: John 20.19-31