SCM Studyguide: Christian Mission. Stephen Spencer

      4. In Human Terms The Prophetic Mission of Christ

      The walker who is lost in the fells may draw some comfort from their map, but interpreting the abstract symbols on the paper is not always straightforward. Which hill does one set of gradients represent? What is the meaning of the shaded areas on another part of the map? What do all the tiny dots mean? The walker might well find another document of more use, the guide book. This will be an account, by someone who has walked this way, of what it is actually like from a human and practical point of view to follow this route. The guide book will say when to turn left and when to turn right and when to look up and take in the view.

      In a similar way the doctrine of the Trinity, as comprehensive as it is, can only be of limited use as a guide to mission. It is a general and abstract doctrine and cannot answer a key question: How in practical terms is the Christian community to engage in mission? How is it to serve the flow of God’s Trinitarian mission as it reaches out into the actual world with its array of specific needs?

      The Fourth Gospel begins to provide one answer to this question when it shows Jesus giving the Holy Spirit to his disciples with the decisive words ‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you’ (20.21). His followers, then, are to continue his mission, the mission that he received from his Father. They are to continue doing what he did during his own life: his ministry of teaching, healing, caring, listening and giving of all. So the Church, as the successor of the first disciples who received this commission, is to continue this work.

      The question, then, becomes this: what are the key features of Christ’s mission that should govern the mission of the Church?

      Bearing in mind that Trinitarian mission is all about participative relationship, it is to the ways that Jesus relates to those around him that we must pay attention. We shall not look for a certain kind of institutional life or legal code that must always be present to authenticate mission, but for the distinctive ways he interacted with the people he encountered.

      A good place to begin is Jesus’ Galilean ministry. This is because the first three Gospels, and especially Mark, make it clear that the Galilean period, before Jesus’ journeys further afield with his disciples, was a defining moment in his ministry, a moment in which the kingdom of God drew near. This is seen in Jesus’ comment at the last supper when he tells his disciples that after he is raised up he will go ahead of them to Galilee (Mark 14.28): According to Morna Hooker, a recent commentator on Mark, Galilee in Mark’s Gospel is ‘the centre’ of Jesus’ ministry and of discipleship, in contrast to Jerusalem, which is the place of suffering (Hooker 1991, p. 345). Also, after the resurrection the messenger in the tomb says to the women to go and tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee (16.7): Galilee is to be the place where the resurrection is witnessed, which means the Galilean ministry of healing and feeding the crowds and preaching the gospel is being resurrected with renewed vigour. The Galilean ministry is therefore paradigmatic of the whole of Christ’s missionary enterprise.

      A survey of this ministry can begin with Mark 1.14–45. This is because this passage provides a summary of how Jesus went about his preaching and healing in Galilee (Myers 1988, p. 149). In its pole position, in what is generally regarded as the first written Gospel, it becomes a keynote chapter, introducing a whole range of missionary encounters between Jesus and a variety of different people. It provides an overview of what Jesus did and said before his ministry became dominated by the growing opposition of the religious authorities.

      The first two verses (vv. 14–15), describing his entry into Galilee, are a good place to begin. They provide an initial and defining expression of his mission, acting as a summary of all that follows. It is important to spend some time analysing the nature of this entry:

      Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.’ (Mark 1.14–15)

      Jesus’ words make clear that the subject of his ministry is not to be his own rise to power or glorification; he is not launching a campaign centred on himself and his own authority. Instead he is launching a campaign about something much wider and bigger – a new reality that is beginning to break into the life of the world, namely the coming of the kingdom of God. Jesus points away from himself to this overarching reality. All that he says and does is not an end in itself but a pointer or sign to what God is doing universally. He is taking up the role of a herald, one who goes around announcing a forthcoming event. One commentator expresses all this in the following way:

      Everything that Jesus says and does is inspired from beginning to end by his personal commitment to the coming Reign of God into the world. The controlling horizon of the mission and ministry of Jesus is the Kingdom of God. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus derive their meaning from the announcement of the Kingdom of God. (Knitter 1996, p. 89)

      But he is not just announcing something. He also calls for a personal response among his listeners: they are to ‘repent and believe’. He calls on the people to change the direction of their lives, as John the Baptist had been doing, and prepare for the coming of the kingdom. So he is combining a ‘macro’ dimension, of announcing God’s will and purpose for the nation and the world, with a ‘micro’ dimension, of calling for a change of consciousness and outlook in people’s own hearts and lives.

      How can this dynamic and complex interaction be characterized as a whole? What kind of role was he expressing? Was he primarily a rabbi figure, teaching a new kind of wisdom, or a political figure, canvassing for a change in government, or a healer and exorcist, bringing healing to individual people’s lives? The figures in the Old Testament who both announced God’s forthcoming purposes for the people and called on them to respond in their hearts were, of course, the prophets. They also combined a ‘macro’ dimension, of announcing God’s will and purpose for the nation and the world, with a ‘micro’ dimension, of calling for a change of consciousness and outlook within the lives and hearts of their listeners. Walter Brueggemann’s famous definition of prophetic ministry, based on his own extensive studies of Old Testament prophecy, expresses this well:

      The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us . . . [it] serves to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness . . . [and it] serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move. (Brueggemann 2001, p. 3)

      Jesus, it seems clear from the first chapter of Mark, was taking up this type of role: his ministry was to be a prophetic one.

      Other Gospels and commentators

      Many passages from the Gospels confirm this by making clear how his contemporaries saw him as a prophet: Matt. 16.14 / Mark 8.28 / Luke 9.19; Luke 9.7. See also Mark 6.15; Matt. 21.11; Luke 7.16; 24.19. Jesus describes himself as a prophet in Mark 6.4; Luke 4.24; 13.33. The Fourth Gospel also uses this term to describe Jesus in 4.19; 6.14; 7.40; 9.17. Peter and Stephen refer to Jesus as a prophet in Acts 3.22; 7.37.

      Matthew’s Gospel summarizes Jesus’ ministry in a similar way: ‘And he went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people’ (4.23; see also 9.35). And in Matthew’s Gospel the disciples are also given, as their first priority, the task of seeking the kingdom (6.33), and proclaiming it and working for it (10.7–8).

      Luke also emphasizes the kingdom of God as central in the proclamation of Jesus (see 4.43; 8.1; 9.11). In the important opening scene of Jesus’ Galilean ministry in Nazareth, as Graham