Rescued People Rescue People: Getting Clarity on the Mission of the Disciple
January 27, 2021
Fr. John Riccardo
Last week, we looked at the mission of Jesus. We approached that topic in this way: “God became a man in order to…do what exactly?” We proposed that it’s crucial that we have clarity on this matter, if we are ever going to understand two other missions, namely, the mission of the disciple and the mission of the Church. These missions are increasingly urgent in a culture that is becoming ever more divided, violent, and despairing, despite all the calls for “unity,” “tolerance,” and “progress.”
St. John Paul II once said that the result of hearing the initial ardent proclamation of the gospel should be that a person is gradually overwhelmed and brought to a decision to entrust his life to Jesus in faith (cf. Catechesi tradendae, 25). We’ll leave for another day how many people have heard the gospel in such a way that they have been overwhelmed, let alone entrusted their entire lives to Jesus. Let’s presume for the moment that’s happened. What are we supposed to do now? What’s the mission of the disciple? Or, asked another way, “Jesus sends us out in order to...do what exactly?”
To be sure, the call to discipleship is first and foremost a call to be with Jesus, even before it is a call to do anything. For some inexplicable reason, God delights in our company. Go figure! The Creator of a universe that is 46 billion light years across, infinitely happy, and lacking in nothing, enjoys being with us. On the feast of St. Andrew, there is an antiphon in The Divine Office that reads, “The Lord loved Andrew, and cherished his friendship.” That’s true for you and me too.
Let’s turn our attention, though, to the mission. What are we sent to do? What am I supposed to be doing with my life until the Lord returns or I leave this world, whichever comes first? Until rather recently, I’ve had a hard time coming up with a clear answer to this question, which is rather humbling (humiliating?) to admit. In conversations with many others over the years, I’ve found this to be similarly true. Other than pursuing holiness and virtue, is there anything else? One of the many reasons having clarity on the mission of Jesus is that it brings clarity on our mission, too. (See “Jesus’ Mission”.)
Jesus tells us, “You are the light of the world...men [do not] light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house” (Mt 5:14-15). The Greek word Jesus uses is lychnos, and refers to a small, portable oil lamp. Who is the lamp? I am, you are. Whose is the hand that picks it up and moves it? Jesus’. What is the stand on which He places it? Wherever you are I happen to be at any given moment. And what is the house? This world in which we live.
The resurrection of Jesus was the day the re-creation of the universe began. Our mission, we might say, is to be active agents in His hands as He goes from room to room in this world that is His house, continuing this work of re-creation. God desires to use us, broken, weak, and sinful as we are, to continue the mission of Jesus. In addition to re-creation, we could just as equally choose the words transformation and healing to describe our mission. All of these things the Lord desires to do in and through us. These three words—re-creation, transformation and healing—we might call “Peace Corps” words. There are two other words that describe our mission, and these are more like “Marine Corps” words. C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, wrote, “The story of Christianity is the story of the rightful King landing, landing in disguise you might say, and calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” We could say, then, that our mission is to be leaders of the work of sabotage, or, perhaps, the second Marine Corps word, leaders of the resistance movement against “the prince of power of the air” and “ruler of this world” (cf. Eph 2:2; John 12:31; 1 Pet 5:8-9).
Now, given the heated rhetoric of the current climate, and lest this way of thinking be misunderstood in any way, our “weapons” in this “campaign of sabotage” are love, truth, goodness, beauty, justice, integrity, mercy, forgiveness, repentance, and more. And, again to be clear, the enemy in this campaign of sabotage is not some political party, or another race, or the rich, or poor, or another gender. The enemy is the enemy: the devil and his minions whose desire is to divide, degrade, and enslave this race that God created out of love and destined to share in His own life for all eternity.
A judge once heard us speaking about the mission of the disciple and shared with me his reflection on it. He said, “So, in my role, I am often faced with people who have done terrible things and I have to sentence them to long imprisonments. And,” he acknowledged, I know as an authority figure I can shape for good or bad a person’s image of God. What if I were to say to the person that the choices they’ve made have consequences and because of those they’re going to prison. However,” he continued, “I could add something like, ‘But it’s important for you to know that those choices don’t define you. They’re not who you are. You can become a great man.’ Would that be acting as an agent of re-creation,” he asked? Yes!
Whether I’m a judge, a football coach, a governor, a physician, a teacher, a pastor, even a President, our mission is to use our natural and supernatural gifts so as to try to transform and re-create everything we can, such that it is brought a little bit more into conformity with how God the Father intends it to be.
Jesus came in order to rescue us. And now He sends us in order to continue that mission. Or, as we say often in our work: rescued people rescue people. That’s the mission.