Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” (John 20:21)
The idea of mission is not an exclusively Christian term. Corporations have mission statements. Astronauts are given missions. In one of my favorite movies, two bluesmen set out on a “mission from God” to save their childhood orphanage. The word is a Latin one, missio, and simply means “to send.” So, when Latin translators of the New Testament set out to translate passages like the one above, the choice required very little thought: missio.
It is from this simple, probably mindless choice in translation that we get the whole concept of mission. It is simply to say that we Christians understand ourselves to be a sent people, a people on the move. The Apostles understood that if they were anything, they were men who had been sent out – to Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. (Acts 1:8) If you track the story of the Acts of the Apostles, this is exactly what happens. On the day of Pentecost, the apostles are driven by the Holy Spirit out of the room where they were staying and the Gospel is proclaimed to Jews from all over the world. At the end of Acts, Paul and his party have come to Rome in chains. How did these early missionaries think about themselves? The answer, I think, comes in the Gospel of John. On the very day Jesus is raised from the dead, he appears among the disciples and offers a very Jewish greeting: “Peace be with you.” This is not all he says. The Lord could have simply said “I am sending you,” but in addition to giving them a mission, he makes it clear how and by what power they are sent.
“As the Father has sent me.”
Another way to put this phrase could be something like “In the same way as the Father has sent me.” And how has the Lord Jesus been sent by the Father? Several things can be said about this, but let’s start with the immediate. The immediate sending, which the disciples would have been perplexed by, was this astonishing presence of their Lord among them when three days before, he had been brutally disfigured, crucified, and laid in a tomb. Friends, this is the power, the nuclear engine, behind the Church’s mission in the world, the same power which raised Jesus from the dead. The mission of the Church is fueled by the astonishing and miraculous work of the Holy Spirit. The disciples are sent, to put it simply, as a Resurrected Body into the world. This is the nature of the Church, being the body of all those who have been baptized, buried with Christ, and raised with him to eternal life. (Romans 6)
Consider another angle. Jesus is sent not only by the power of the Holy Spirit, but as God and Man in one divine person. He is not sent as an idea, or an invisible spirit, or just a human being. The eternal Word of the Father is sent in the flesh. And the apostles are sent in the same way. I heard recently of a Christian who was setting out to plant a church entirely online. While I’m sure his intentions are good, this is not mission according to the mission of Jesus. The Apostles understood that they could not just send a letter and be done with it. They had to go in person.
But, there is so much more, consider what Jesus was sent to do! To heal the sick, to drive out demons, and proclaim the Kingdom of God! In this time, people were very aware that Caesar Augustus had proclaimed his own rule with supposed miracles. Therefore they understood that for Jesus to go around proclaiming a kingdom and healing the sick was nothing less than a challenge to the status quo of the empire. While making no violent or existential threat to the empire, it is a serious challenge nonetheless, serious enough that he was crucified for the crime of insurrection. In every age, missionaries have been sent, not to overthrow governments, but to proclaim the kingdom of God while simultaneously feeing the hungry and healing the sick, often in miraculous ways.
The bigger idea that I want you to get is this: that Jesus is sending out his Church on mission as the continuation of His incarnate body on Earth. This is why Paul writes “You are the body of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 12:27) The Church is that body which proclaims the Gospel of the Kingdom and participates sacramentally in the Lord’s incarnate body. The ancient Church understood, as we do today, that the fuel for mission is the very indwelling of human life by the Holy Spirit, nourished by participation in the Eucharist, and all of this “for the life of the world.” For this reason, we can say with confidence that every Christian, no matter where they are or what they do for a living, is a missionary. The existence of so-called missionaries only reenforces the point: the particular subsists in the whole.
As the Church is sent out into the world, her aim is no different from that of her Lord: to love and save lost humanity. I can think of no better mission statement.