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 torture, 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 transformed, 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 mediation. 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 phenomena of mission. (“Go and
tell.....” “Go out into the whole
world...”) Easter proclaims and promises the exodus from the world of sin and
misery to one of “justice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit”
(Rom 4, 17). It is the summons 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 situations: 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 anyone 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 understood: “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 presence 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 concentrated 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 concentrated 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 acquiescing 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.
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