Michael McCabe SMA views missionary activity as a manifestation of God’s purpose for his creation and an active involvement in the transformation of the world on the model of Christ’s resurrection.
It can be readily agreed that the Church’s mission is a participation in God’s mission. But what is God’s mission? Is it to save souls, or to establish the Church (as were taught for centuries) or to transform the world (as many would argue today)? We can say that it includes all of these objectives. However, its core is to be found in the familiar biblical symbol, “the reign of God”. This was clearly the cause for which Christ lived and died and rose again. Hardly anything is more certain about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth than that he proclaimed the reign of God. The synoptic gospels introduce Jesus’ public ministry with the concise phrase: “The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent. Believe the Good News” (Mk. 1:14-15, Mt. 4:17, Lk. 4:43). The incoming reign of God was not only the central theme of Jesus’ teaching; it was the event which shaped all his actions – his table-fellowship with sinners and outcasts, his healings and exorcisms, his forgiveness of sins. God’s reign, as lived and proclaimed by Jesus, meant good news for the poor, healing for the sick, and liberation for the enslaved and oppressed:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord Lk.4:18-19
God’s revolutionary reign
While Jesus was no zealot, God’s reign, as manifested in his ministry, implied nothing less than a radical change in the existing social and political order. Jesus’ words and actions represented a consistent challenge to the attitudes, practices and structures that tended arbitrarily to restrict or exclude potential members of the Israelite community. Jesus sought out those on the periphery, those who were marginal to the Jewish establishment: the poor, the blind, the lepers, the hungry, those who weep, the sinners, the tax collectors, those possessed by demons, the persecuted, the captives, those who are weary and heavy-laden, the rabble who know nothing of the law, the little ones, the least, the lost sheep of the house of Israel, even the prostitutes. Jesus’ evangelical practice represented a complete reversal of the value system that marked the society of his time.
The afflictions of the poor, in Jesus’ time as much as today, were in large measure caused by repression, discrimination and exploitation by the rich and powerful, the upholders of the status quo. In his ministry Jesus focused quite deliberately on those who had been pushed aside: the sick who were segregated on cultic grounds; tax-collectors who were excluded on political and religious grounds; prostitutes and public sinners who were excluded on moral grounds. In his compassionate outreach to these outcasts, Jesus concretely embodied God’s reign as good news for the poor; God’s reign would mean the end of their misery and the introduction of a new order of social relationships based on the principle of inclusion. No one is excluded from the love of God “who causes his sun to rise on bad as well as God, and sends down rain to fall on the upright and the wicked alike” (Mt. 4:45). What amazes one again and again is the inclusiveness of Jesus’ mission. It embraces both poor and rich, both the oppressed and oppressor, both the sinner and the devout. His mission is one of dissolving alienation and breaking down walls of hostility, of crossing boundaries between individuals and groups.
Jesus’ mission, however, did not meet with universal acceptance. On the contrary, it met with fear, suspicion, hostility and rejection on the part of the Jewish political and religious leaders of his time. Finally, it led Jesus to Calvary where he prayed for forgiveness for those whose fear had led them to destroy him. If the Cross can be said to represent Christ’s supreme witness to God’s reign, it is his resurrection from the dead which is the foundation and guarantee of its victory over the power of evil, and hence the ground of Christian mission. the disciples of Jesus met him again on Easter Sunday morning and caught a glimpse of a new world where the promise of God’s reign would be realised. The world as they knew it was passing away and a new creation was about to be born. All the relevance and urgency of the early church’s mission was derived from this certain hope.
Mission in the light of God’s reign
In the writings of St Paul, mission is viewed from the perspective of God’s universal reign in Christ. It is mission that paves the way and prepares humanity for the final stage of that reign, when not only humanity but the entire order of creation as well will be liberated and transformed on the model of Christ’s resurrection. For Paul, mission means announcing the Lordship of Christ over all reality and inviting people to respond to it. It means proclaiming that new state of affairs that God has begun in Christ and that will reach its climax in the celebration of God’s final glory.
But proclamation is not enough. God’s final victorious reign is not a justification for ethical passivity. We cannot just sit back and wait for it to happen.
The very assurance of God’s final victory over sin and evil invites and sustains our active participation in the liberation of humanity and the transformation of the world in the here and now. In Paul’s theology of mission, we find a firm foundation for a courageous protest against the oppressive structures of Sin and Death and a wholehearted commitment to the promotion of justice, peace and the integrity of creation. In the light of God’s coming victorious reign, Christians are called upon and empowered to challenge oppressive structures and establish signs of God’s new world in the actual world in which they now live.
Paul’s radical vision of mission from the perspective of God’s final reign was eventually to become diluted under the spell of Platonism. In the words of David Bosch, “the expectation of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ was spiritualised away. Emphasis was laid instead on the spiritual journey of the individual believer and on a post-mortem afterlife rather than one a future resurrection from the dead. The church was increasingly identified with the kingdom of God; it became the dispenser of the sacraments and the place where, through the sacraments, souls were won for Christ.” (Transforming Mission, p. 141). Mission eventually became the extension of the Church as it existed rather than the proclamation and promotion of a new creation patterned on the resurrection of Christ and of which the Church was called to be a sacramental sign.
This article first appeared in IMU Report (Aug-Oct 2001), a publication of Irish Missionary Union.
