Sent out by Jesus
It’s a happy co-incidence that the week after we launched our ‘Back to Church Sunday’ initiative, Luke 10:1-20 is our gospel reading for today. I swear that I had nothing to do with it; sometimes these things just seem to happen at the right time! Today’s passage, you see, is about Jesus sending out seventy of his followers on a missionary journey to share his message and heal the sick. These seventy were not the inner circle, ‘the Twelve’; they were a wider group, who may or may not have had the same sort of intimate contact with him that the Twelve enjoyed. But he had a message that he wanted to communicate to the world, and he had a sense that the time was short; conflict with the authorities had already begun, and he could already see the shadow of a cross looming over his future. So he sent out this group to prepare the way for him in all the towns and villages he was planning to visit.
Nowadays, as I’ve often said, we Anglicans tend not to be too comfortable with the thought of being sent out to share the Christian message with people who are not Christians. It smacks of the idea that there is only one true religion, and that doesn’t sit easily with our Canadian ethos of multiculturalism and respect. And so we tend to say things like, ‘Some people talk about their faith; I just live mine out, and let people draw their own conclusions’.
It sounds very spiritual and respectful, and it has a grain of truth about it: of course we’re called to live our faith out, and if we don’t put it into practice – if we don’t live lives that remind people of Jesus, in other words – the chances are that we won’t get very far in trying to talk to people about the gospel message. But we should not draw from this the conclusion that we don’t need to talk about our faith at all. After all, the early Christians didn’t just invite the world around them to watch while they silently lived out the teachings of Jesus! If they had done, we’d probably be painting ourselves blue with woad and worshipping oak trees today! No, at the beginning of the gospels Jesus went into Galilee with a message to proclaim; he proclaimed it and invited people to become his followers. At the end of the gospels, he sent those followers out into all the world to share the message with others, and in between those two bookends he was teaching them how to live it out and how to share it. Mission – sharing the love of Christ, not just in actions but also in words – was an integral part of Christian discipleship, right from the beginning.
Now as we read this gospel passage today, some of the things we find in it don’t apply so readily to our situation. Jesus was sending out seventy mission volunteers on a project that would require them to leave their homes and families for a while and give their whole time to the work of sharing the gospel. And the setting was urgent, because the cross was looming and Jesus wanted to reach as many people as possible before he went to his death. Our situation is also urgent, but for a different reason – none of us knows the day of our death, and, as Jesus says in the gospels, this night our life may be required of us. But most of us are not contemplating leaving our homes and families and going on a short term evangelism trip; our witness is taking place in the context of our normal everyday lives, at work, amongst our friends and families, in the coffee shops we frequent and so on.
So there are some differences between our situation and that of these early disciples. But this doesn’t mean the passage has nothing to say to us. I want to point out to you very briefly four connections we can make between the message of this gospel reading and our own call to be witnesses for Christ today.
Read the rest here.
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