When I first joined the Jesuits before the Second Vatican Council, the most stirring event of the Year was the Mission Farewell. Young Jesuits appointed to the Indian Mission, dressed in their white missionary robes, were blessed and farewelled in a full church.
Relatives, friends of the Jesuits and parishioners gathered in a ceremony both moving and triumphal. It represented the strong, faith-filled Australian Church sending brave, mostly young men to bring the Gospel to needy, non-Christian India. The young missionaries, who were expected never to return to Australia, went to build the Church and to spread the precious gift of faith.
That memory is poignant now at a time when Indian priests are sent from India to serve Catholics in Australia, and the Catholic and other churches in Australia are in institutional decline. We now receive gifts. It seems at first sight that we may no longer be a missionary Church.
Yet Pope Francis would have disagreed. His image of mission was not one in which priests were sent from a strong to a weak Church to bring the gift of faith to those who did not possess it. He rather imagined Catholics, accompanied by the priests of their parishes, moving out from behind the walls of their church into the world of people on the edge of the Church and outside it to share the Good News. They would do this sometimes by words but more often by the example of their lives. Dressed in ordinary clothes, the whole Church, not simply priests, was on mission. Ordinary human beings born in God’s image shared the Good News with other ordinary human beings also born in God’s image.
IN THE CHURCH’S DNA
Mission, of course, is in the DNA of the Church. Its history is full of people sending and being sent with instructions. In the Bible the story of the world begins with God calling Adam and Eve into being, and giving them the mission of living in the world created for them. The early stories are also stories of promise and calling. The central story of the Old Testament tells how God rescues the chosen people from slavery in Egypt and guides them into the promised land. To carry that through, God calls Moses, to whom is given the mission to lead the people and to spell out what their faith, worship and way of life were to be. In the centuries that followed, God also sent prophets with the mission of calling the people to live faithfully and of comforting them.
At the heart of Christian faith is the story of God as a Father sending a Son into the world with the mission of persuading them to repent and to hear his word. In his mission, Jesus calls disciples to spread his promise of hope and life and to accept persecution and death as the path to eternal life with God. After rising from the dead, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to be with the disciples as they go out on their mission of inspiring people from other cultures to receive the Gospel.
All this sending and being sent shows that when Pope Francis asked us all to see ourselves as sent out on mission to spread the Gospel, he was on the money.
PREACH THROUGH ACTIONS
He also encouraged us with the reminder that we preach the Good News better and more effectively through our actions than by our words. To sit and listen to a troubled person on a tram may share the message of the Gospel more powerfully than would preaching a sermon on the Prodigal Son.
Some theologians trace the mission of the Church back to the inner life of the Trinity. They remind us that the life of God is not inactive but is a constant movement in which the Father sends the Son, who also sends the Spirit, and both return to the Father. The inner life of the Trinity is a circular one of sending and being sent. Given this vision of God’s being which echoes John’s Gospel, it is not surprising that the same movement is echoed in the structures of Church.
The circular movement – a dance, even – is certainly echoed in the missions within the Church. They are also circular. They involve much more than a missionary going out with gifts and giving them to poor people who receive them. The missionaries who pray to Christ and speak of him to others are also changed through the meeting.
CHANGED BY ENCOUNTER
Through their relationships and conversations they find new insights into their own faith and new questions to ask of themselves. In the same way, the people with whom they share their faith will find fresh ways of seeing the world and Christ’s place within it. Both the missionaries and the people to whom they are sent will be changed by their encounter, and both may be drawn into a richer relationship with Christ.
Of course, that is also the reason why we might be frightened by Pope Francis’ urge to us to leave the security of the church wall and to go out to its margins to share the faith. We are asked to leave a secure place to go on a journey whose end we cannot see, one in which we might perhaps fear that we shall lose our faith.
Those fears are reasonable. They go with any mission. Jesus certainly shared them when foreseeing that he would be killed and when he died deserted by his friends and tormented by the apparent absence of a silent God. And yet that experience was the most important part of his mission. In it he shared our fears and reassures us in our mission.
We might think that mission is not for wimps. But then the disciples whom Jesus called were wimps. The Spirit gave them courage, and continues to encourage us.
