CHRISTIAN MISSION

“...but you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit which will come upon you, and then you will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judaea and Samaria, and indeed to earth’s remotest end” (Acts 1, 18).

THE ORIGINAL MISSIONARY
 Mission begins with God, the God of divine exodus, who leaves his home and writes his mystery into the history of his people. He loves enough to extend himself in a total self-communication. “God is so incredibly in love with his creation that he personally invests himself in it” (Meister Eckhart). He could hardly wait for that day when man would suddenly awaken to the fact of God abroad as man, totally involved in a history and culture, member of a working class family, citizen of a nation oppressed; a God immersed in a world of births and deaths, with its experience of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, illness, insecurity and tor-ture, of unemployment, work and leisure. And all with this purpose, that by the transfusion of the divine all ages and conditions of human living would be trans-formed, transfigured and elevated.
 In the Word made flesh, not only Spirit speaks to spirit, but Flesh speaks to flesh. Our flesh has ceased to be an obstacle; it has become a means and a media-tion. It has ceased being a veil to become a perception. The Son of God did not come wearing his humanness like an overcoat, but rather brought the essence of being human to its capacity of revealing what God is like, The body of Christ is not clothed in idyllic silence, since the Incarnation means what it has always meant: something messy, noisy, smelly, bloody and painful. By becoming human, “God was writing his autobiography in the language of real flesh and blood” (Dorothy Sayers). In fact, he was in the person of Christ pulling and struggling with humanity in first-century Palestine and ever since, with his shoulder to the wheel of the human predicament, truly the Word made flesh, a force let loose in the world for man’s transformation. To believe this is good news, not only for modern man but for all humankind for all time.  A religion that constantly seeks the miraculous, the exotic, the other-worldly and  the defeat of nature, cannot help us to come to terms with our humanity, with the tasks of home and factory, of politics, school and church. Such a religion blinds us to the Risen One in the rising of the bread in the oven and the budding spring flower in the soil. Thus the full force of the tension between faith and hope are brought to bear on the world, thereby expressing itself, not by a flight from the world, but by a definite commitment to it. This is perfectly continuous with the Easter appearances of Jesus, which are quite clearly phenom-ena of mission. (“Go and tell.....”  “Go out into the whole world...”) Easter pro-claims and promises the exodus from the world of sin and misery to one of “jus-tice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit” (Rom 4, 17). It is the sum-mons to transform the world, not fly or contemn it.

CHRIST CENTRED MISSIONARY
 All those who are centred on Jesus Christ must partake of his involvement or mission. And they will find God in the most unlikely places and human situa-tions: in the hungry and naked, sick, criminal and oppressed.
 The secret of Jesus’ infallible insight and unshakeable conviction was his unfailing experience of solidarity with God, which revealed itself as an experience of solidarity with man and nature. This made him a uniquely liberated man, uniquely courageous, fearless, independent, truthful and hopeful. Why would any-one want to arrest, try and destroy him ? They found him too dynamic to be safe, too “missionary” to be pinned down ! He spoke about a power that they never un-derstood: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; then you are to be my witnesses.” He could say that precisely because he had received that power already and increases it continuously by sharing it generously with anyone who is willing to witness to him even to the shedding of his blood, as he did. Those who enter this power by baptism are willing to be equipped for the mission of Christ. They are also willing to reassess their methods in terms of the personal, social and political spheres of human living today. Seminars on evangelisation are continuous with the ongoing conversion demanded by God speaking through the prophets.
PEOPLE CENTRED MISSIONARY
 Groups of people vary in size, location, character and the extent to which they welcome the faith or oppose it. But what they all have in common is the pres-ence of the missionary among them, with the why and what he is trying to do. We find ourselves serving people  whose backgrounds and concerns vary enormously, yet  wonder whether the needs of human beings, as distinct from their temporal preoccupation, ever really change. Surely today, as in the past, human beings are in search of the transcendent, want to be affirmed, need self-understanding, yearn to discover meaning in life, require healing and reconciliation. In the best of worlds, people hinder and hurt one another. So there is the presence of the evangeliser.
 Mission and witness derive from a life that takes baptism seriously. Baptism introduced us into the  life of faith that we treasure above all other goods. We love our faith and love our fellow humans. What better way of expressing our love for them than by giving them our most precious possession, the Christian faith ? It is love that makes for missionary zeal. Bereft of every other talent, this one talent  no one can claim he or she does not have. The missionary heart of Jesus was set on his Father and his kingdom. Being one of us, knowing our pains and joys, Jesus reveals our deepest possibilities. Christ did not exhaust the potentialities of human nature, taken discretely. This would have been impossible in one historical lifetime. For instance, he was not a great painter or philosopher or statesman or a great husband, though we must admit he was an excellent teacher, combining in that activity a great amount of true art and poetry. But the point is that Jesus con-centrated in himself all the power and energy that human nature is capable of for activating any of the evocations that a man or woman may choose, and he concen-trated it to a degree that no one could muster, a degree so high as to make it fit to be used by God. This power was the power of his self-giving love at the service of the Word. Thus, in preference to all other possibilities, Jesus chose the essential and most distinctively human potentiality of all, the one that has the most radical claim on all men and women: self-surrendering love. Jesus was a person who tested life and was tested by it, searching out life’s meaning by listening carefully to what makes life really valuable, and he lived and died trusting that life and death are not bad jokes.
 Our discipleship is not without moral, institutional and political problems. Since we are wounded by sin, our capacity for commitment is limited. Yet, the value of discipleship is that it inspires a vision and provides a context for analysis and choice. A missionary is nothing if he does not personify Christ. Only a missionary who copies Christ faithfully in himself can reproduce his image in others. An apostle’s life is a tale of friendship with the Lord in order to be capable of ac-quiescing in a “missionary tension” in the martyrial sense of the example of Therese of Lisieux and Francis Xavier. Without this contemplative and apostolic tension of intimate communion with Christ that leads to the foot of the Cross, a missionary cannot proclaim him in a credible way. Witnessing to Christ is not a piece of mimicry, but a challenge to live our human adventure as authentically as he did.