Tag: teaching

Mission in the Bible 8: The Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20)

Matthew 28:16-20

So here it is, the reading most people would have expected as the big one in this series on mission. It’s the passage often called ‘The Great Commission.’

These are the verses responsible for many Christians being called to become missionaries or evangelists. And maybe because of that, a lot of us can feel it isn’t for us. We like to lift the end of verse 20,

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age

and draw comfort from it, but the earlier stuff, we think, is for others.

But that won’t work. Jesus is addressing the same people throughout. In fact, this teaching is for all Christians. Why do I say that? Two reasons. Firstly, this is the incident that many scholars think the Apostle Paul was referring to in 1 Corinthians 15:6, when talking about the resurrection of Jesus:

After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

How many? ‘More than five hundred.’ So it wasn’t just the apostles.

My second reason comes more explicitly from the reading, and it’s found in verse 17:

When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

In among the worshippers were the doubters. Whether their faith was strong or weak, Jesus included them in the call.

And as an aside, doubt isn’t the same as unbelief. Doubt means we are still in two minds but could still land on the side of faith. Unbelief is an outright rejection of faith.

Jesus’ call, then, is for all of his followers. Not just the leaders. And not just those with a strong faith. All of us.

Our question, then, is this:  if Jesus is commissioning every Christian here, what is he asking of us?

Some would say there are four commands here: go, make disciples, baptise, and teach. However, it’s not as flat as that in the Greek, which is more like ‘Going, make disciples, baptising, teaching.’ In other words, the main command here is ‘make disciples’, and we make disciples by going, baptising, and teaching.

Hence, it’s a three-point sermon, all about how we are all called to make disciples. Make disciples by going; make disciples by baptising; make disciples by teaching.

Firstly, make disciples by going:

When Jesus tells us that making disciples will involve going, does this mean we all need to go abroad as missionaries? After all, the disciples are going to made from ‘all nations’, Jesus says.

Well, it does mean that for some Christians. Whatever the faults of the missionary movement, we should never throw out the idea that Christianity is a worldwide movement. And it also means we need to welcome missionaries here from nations where the faith is growing. They could reinvigorate us.

But most Christians aren’t called to go abroad, although we might easily be called to move somewhere else in general terms. If we accept that employers can move our jobs, why should we not think that God can call us to a new place to serve him?

Yet generally we will remain where we are. The word for most of us is what Paul tells the Corinthian Christians about their social status:

Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them. (1 Corinthians 7:24)

So how do we go? Most of us go in Christian mission by getting out of our comfortable places to show the love of God on territory where those who are not yet followers of Jesus feel at ease.

We need to ditch the idea that our mission happens on church premises. Maybe a few people will come to events and services that we host here, and perhaps the carol service is our best opportunity, but we must be realistic that fewer and fewer people feel comfortable – even safe – in a church building, and therefore it is our responsibility in the cause of the Gospel to go where they feel happy.

I suspect one of the reasons we have held onto church-based mission is that we are afraid of showing Jesus elsewhere. We end up making all sorts of excuses: a popular one I’ve heard in the Methodist church is that the groups which hire our premises are mission contacts. But they generally hire our halls as a commercial transaction: we have the facilities and a good price. By no means does it necessarily indicate spiritual openness.

Let’s see our going out into the world beyond our own private boundaries as a going with the presence of Christ to live out his way in those places where he calls us. For some, it will be a workplace. For others, it will be a social group like the U3A. Another place will be community groups that we are involved in. Many of us will go in mission in this way when we meet non-Christian relatives and friends.

In all these places Jesus calls us to live as his disciples, to radiate Christlikeness, such that our lives are an invitation or even a provocative question to others. We don’t need to harangue the people we meet, but we do need to be ready to speak about Jesus at an appropriate time.

Secondly, make disciples by baptising:

Here’s where we need to let go of all the sentimental and superstitious detritus that has clung to infant baptism. There is a place for infant baptism, because it arose in the early church when the first generation of Christians wondered about the spiritual status of their children, and they began to regard baptism rather like the way the Jewish faith sees circumcision for boys.

But all the social and superstitious accretions, like the need to be baptised as a baby if you are to have a church wedding in adulthood, or the thought that the unbaptised can’t go to heaven (which falls down the moment you think about the penitent thief on the cross) has obscured the relationship between baptism and discipleship. Baptism, says Jesus, is in the name of God, and the name of God is ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’

We are one of the Christian traditions that calls baptism a ‘sacrament’, and that’s worth thinking about. Now you hear certain definitions of sacrament as being ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ and those are fine, but why the word ‘sacrament’? It comes from the Latin ‘sacramentum’, which was the oath of allegiance that Roman soldiers took to the Emperor. The sacraments are the Christian’s oaths of allegiance. Baptism is the initial oath of allegiance, Holy Communion is the ongoing one.

And that helps us see why baptism is linked to mission. It is the initiation ceremony where someone makes their oath of allegiance to God and his kingdom. It is a radical commitment to which we are calling people. None of this ‘Make a decision for Christ and then wait for heaven’: the early church called people to confess that Jesus was Lord, the very title the Emperor claimed for himself as a sign of divinity. In other words, it was a call to repudiate the powers that be, because confessing Jesus as Lord also meant that Caesar wasn’t Lord.

If we reduce baptism to ‘wetting the baby’s head’, we miss its fundamental message: that the Christian Gospel calls people to confess that Jesus is in charge of their lives and commands their ultimate loyalty, not the idols of our day, be they politics, technology, money, sexuality, or anything else.

This is where we have to be careful in all our talk today about inclusivity, much of which we pinch from the world rather than Jesus. Yes, Jesus wants us to invite all people, but when he welcomed people, such as the ‘tax collectors and sinners’, he did so with a view to calling them to leave behind their lives of sin and follow him.[1] Baptism should remind us of this.

Thirdly, make disciples by teaching:

Our three points are actually in a chronological sequence. Our discipling begins with going in order to reach people, it continues when they make a commitment with the oath of allegiance to Jesus at baptism, and finally the follow-up is our third point: teaching.

We need to get out of our heads the idea that teaching is filling our heads with facts and no more. It’s much more. Teaching involves getting people to learn things that they then apply in life. That is certainly true here in what Jesus says:

and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (Verse 20a)

Someone who comes to faith in Christ needs to learn how to live the Christian life. In truth, we all need to learn that: to be a disciple of Jesus is to be a lifelong learner.

How does it happen? Only partly from the front on Sunday morning! I hope the sermons do some of the work of explaining what living the Christian life involves, but they are not the whole process. However much ministers should have a teaching gift, the sermon is only the start.

Small groups are a vital part of it. Bible study and fellowship groups are meant to be places where we reflect all the more on the teaching of Jesus, how we are going to put it into practice, and also to be accountable to one another about how we are living out what we have already learned. This is what Wesley did with some of his small groups in the Evangelical Revival in the eighteenth century. A church that is short on small groups, or where the small groups don’t get to grips with what it means to live as a disciple, are seriously lacking.

In one of my previous churches, we asked all the preachers to bring discussion questions based on their sermons so that the small groups could work on putting into practice. It did go a little awry in one group where an elderly man decided this was his opportunity to tear every preacher to pieces – it’s the old gag, ‘What’s the favourite Sunday dinner in a church household?’ Answer: ‘Roast preacher.’ But mostly the groups who stuck to the programme benefitted from it.

One-to-ones can help, too. Matching people together so that a more experienced Christian can nurture and mentor someone younger in the faith is valuable. I gained a lot in my early years as a Christian from the person I described as my ‘spiritual elder brother.’

I hope you can see from these examples that while the minister certainly plays a part in teaching the faith, it is an exercise for the whole church. We do not have to be theological specialists in order to help teach people how to live out the teaching of Jesus. At heart, we just need to love Jesus, want to go his way, and be willing to share our experience of that with others.

In conclusion, Jesus gives us a sequence here for our task as disciple-makers. We begin by going out of our comfort zones to live for Christ in front of the world. We call people not simply to receive the blessings of forgiveness, but to make the baptismal oath of allegiance to Jesus as Lord over all. And then we build relationships with people in the church family where we share our learning how to follow the teaching of Jesus.

It’s straightforward to describe, but we may feel nervous about putting it into practice. And I think that’s why Jesus’ final words here are

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Verse 20b)

These are not just general words of comfort, good as they are for that. These words are Jesus’ promise that he hasn’t sent us out on the challenging task of mission on our own. Where we go, he goes. And usually, he’s even gone there ahead of us. We can count on that as we seek to make more disciples.

[1] See Ian Paul, In what way does Jesus ‘welcome’ sinners?

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Rethinking Life (Mark 9:30-37) Ordinary 25 Year B

Mark 9:30-37

“How many times must I tell you?”

If you are a parent, how many times have you said that to your children?

And how many of us remember being on the receiving end of those words when we were kids?

Today’s reading is a ‘How many times?’ moment between Jesus and his disciples. It contains teaching that he gives them on more than one occasion, not just here.

And if we’re kind to the disciples, I can understand why they needed to hear this several times from Jesus. Because what he teaches them here is so contrary to what they would have picked up from the incumbent religious leaders of their day.

Yes, we are talking about teaching that needs to be repeated because it’s revolutionary and requires transformation in thinking and behaviour.

And perhaps surprisingly, even after two thousand years of Christianity, some of the things Jesus calls his disciples to rethink here are ones we keep having to rethink if we are to follow him more closely.

Firstly, says Jesus, his disciples need to rethink suffering – and specifically, his suffering as the Messiah.

He said to them, ‘The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.’ (verse 31)

We know what a revolution it was for the first disciples to consider that Israel’s Messiah would be a suffering figure, not an all-conquering, triumphant warlord in the conventional sense.

And we stand on centuries of Christian tradition about all that Jesus accomplished through his death on the Cross – the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God and one another, the defeat of death and the powers of evil, all out of his love for us. We mark that with crosses in our churches and we celebrate it at Holy Communion.

But despite that, we too lapse from the centrality of Jesus’ suffering at times. We want to settle our arguments via the ‘might is right’ route. We like to see our political opponents well and truly ‘done over’ at the ballot box. We talk of that neighbour we’re never going to forgive. In one form or another we default to that ‘might is right’ approach, ignoring the way of Jesus.

The hymn writer named in Methodist hymn books as Frances Jane van Alstyne and known in most other books as Fanny Crosby wrote a hymn called ‘Jesus, keep me near the Cross’. The first verse reads,

Jesus, keep me near the cross,
There a precious fountain;
Free to all, a healing stream,
Flows from Calv’ry’s mountain. 

But I venture to suggest that being kept near the Cross isn’t just about remembering the mercy and forgiveness we receive, it’s also about modelling the life we live. Remember what I said last week about being willing to suffer for our faith.

Secondly, says Jesus, his disciples need to rethink serving.

Now we get to the argument the Twelve were having, and which they’re embarrassed about when Jesus asks them about it, because they were arguing about who was the greatest (verses 33-34).

35 Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, ‘Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.’

‘Sitting down’ – that’s the posture of an authoritative teacher, the same way there is a special chair, the kathedra, for a bishop – a cathedral is where a bishop has his or her place of authoritative teaching. It’s like universities saying that a professor ‘holds a chair’. What Jesus is saying here is important.[1]

And it’s a direct repudiation of our fame and celebrity culture, as well as the way we are deferential to people just because they hold a certain office.

Now you might think that sort of thing doesn’t exist in the church, but not only was it very real among the disciples of Jesus it’s also alive and kicking in the Christian church today. And it’s a poison.

A controversial American pastor called Mark Driscoll came over to London a few years ago and preached at an event held at the Royal Albert Hall.

After the event, a few people were waiting outside to get Driscoll’s autograph and a photo with him.

Afterwards, as they drove away in a taxi, the colleague [who was accompanying him] expressed amazement that a pastor would get this kind of response. In reply, Driscoll says:

‘I don’t know if you have noticed or not, but I am kind of a Big Deal.’[2]

Now you may say that’s an extreme example and to some extent it is, but given how we have our Christian celebrities, and given how we think certain people of a particular rank are more important in the Church than others, I suggest to you we have a problem here and we’re not taking Jesus seriously.

Mark Driscoll never learned his lesson and his large church in Seattle imploded. We need to learn the lesson for the sake of our own spiritual health and the health of the church. Our concern needs to be with whether we are serving people rather than whether people are admiring us and looking up to us.

And that takes us to the third and final lesson Jesus has for his apostles here:

36 He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, 37 ‘Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.’

What is this about? Some people have a very sentimental answer about it being to do with either the simplicity or the innocence of children. But I have to wonder how much time such people have spent with children to think that!

No: Jesus here is calling his followers to rethink status. In first-century Palestine children had no social status whatsoever. They were under the care and authority of others with no rights of their own.[3] How do we receive that in a culture where we’re forever banging on about our rights?

This brings everything Jesus has said so far to a climax: if you’re going to model your life on the suffering of Jesus and if you’re going to be more concerned about how you serve people, then the whole human addiction to status starts to fall away.

Should we be worried about the lack of status the church and her ministers have in our society? Sure, we know that some of that is an indication of just how widely the Christian message is rejected today, and that should concern us. So is the assumption that ministers are either here to fleece the flock of their money or to abuse children – we’ve given society ammunition to shoot at us.

But the lack of status should not worry us at all. It means we can be released from the trappings of power to get on with serving people with the love of God in Jesus.

The thing is, everything we’ve talked about today is counter-cultural. But we’ve heard the opposite for so long and in so many ways it’s become part of us and it takes a lot of teaching from Jesus for the upside-down nature of his kingdom to sink into our minds and begin to transform us.

For Jesus does indeed call us to swim against the tide of our society. To live on the basis that God uses suffering for good, and to live as a servant rather than a celebrity, quietly getting on with the ways of Jesus with no worry for our status contradicts the ambitions of so many.

I’m not surprised it took a long time for some of this teaching to sink into those first disciples, and I’m not surprised if the same is true with us. But I hope what I’ve shared today contributes to that radical change of life to which Jesus calls each one of us.

God bless you all as you seek to serve him each day.

[1] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-radical-inversion-of-community-values-in-mark-9/

[2] https://gracetruth.blog/2021/09/14/i-am-kind-of-a-big-deal-insecure-pride-and-humble-confidence/

[3] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-radical-inversion-of-community-values-in-mark-9/

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The Superior Authority Of Jesus (Mark 1:21-28)

A shorter act of worship and a shorter talk too, this week. It’s just the way it worked out. This was the material I could find. (Usable material with copyright permission that didn’t cost a bomb was in short supply for this passage.) And as for the talk, well, I’d said what I wanted to say and didn’t feel any need to prolong it.

So here’s the video, and the script for the talk is below as usual.

Mark 1:21-28

You may know the famous story of the preacher who asked some children, ‘What’s furry, either red or grey in colour, and collects nuts?’

A little girl nervously answered, ‘I know the answer should be Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.’

Unlike that occasion, the answer to the biblical story we’ve just read very definitely is Jesus. For Jesus and his authority are the focus of Mark’s account here.

And Jesus demonstrates his unique authority in two ways in this narrative.

The first is the authority of his teaching:

22 The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.

What was the difference between Jesus and the teachers of the law? Well, the teachers of the law were learned men, but when they taught all their exposition of the Scriptures would be based on quoting ‘previous authorities and commentators’.

To a large extent, the modern preacher does the same. Without you knowing it, I just quoted a scholar named Ian Paul. I could also look at my shelves of Bible commentaries and turning to Mark’s Gospel, I could cite William Lane, Robert Guelich, Craig Evans, or James Edwards. Whether I quote them or not, I will have engaged with their writing while working out what to preach.

Jesus doesn’t need to do any of that. He has come from the Father. He is the Son of God. He doesn’t need to derive anything. He speaks with personal, divine authority. If he came to preach, he wouldn’t need to say, ‘Ian Paul thinks this.’ If he wrote an article, there would be no footnotes.

You get a flavour of this in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus often says, ‘You have heard it said … but I say to you …’

If you encounter the voice of God through a preacher today, it will be because the preacher has worked on faithfully and accurately relaying to you the teaching of Jesus (which may involve consulting learned sources). And there will also be the explicitly spiritual dimension. The preparation will be soaked in prayer. The Holy Spirit will sovereignly choose to light up the words of the preacher in your hearts and minds, such that you hear the voice of God, rather than the preacher.

Please pray for your preachers. We only have this secondary authority. Pray for our faithful study of the Scriptures. Pray that we will be in tune with the Holy Spirit.

And for all of us, preachers or otherwise, what we need is an authentic encounter with the voice and teaching of Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures have been preserved for us as the primary and supreme way to hear his authentic voice today.

Therefore it’s not just a case of praying for Sunday’s preacher. It’s about exercising the privilege we all have to read the Scriptures under the illumination of the Spirit and encounter Jesus, to whom they point.

The second way Jesus demonstrates his unique authority in today’s passage is in the authority of his power over evil:

23 Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out, 24 ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!’

25 ‘Be quiet!’ said Jesus sternly. ‘Come out of him!’ 26 The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.

This is a battle for power. The unclean spirit uses words that were commonly used as a rebuke: ‘What do you want with us?’ The spirit also names Jesus as ‘Jesus of Nazareth … the Holy One of God’, a reflection of the ancient belief that knowing someone’s name gave you power over them.

But it doesn’t work with Jesus. He doesn’t use spells or incantations. He doesn’t even need to pray. He acts on his own superior authority! ‘Be quiet! Come out of him!’ And that’s that. All done and dusted.

Jesus doesn’t just have words, he has deeds. And those deeds validate the content of his teaching that we thought about last week, where he proclaims that the kingdom of God is near and it’s time to repent.

It’s something that confronts us all. Very few people are demonised, but all of us face the conflict with evil and the temptation to go the wrong way.

And so this combination of authoritative teaching and authoritative deeds face us with a choice. What will we do with Jesus?

At the end of the passage we don’t hear what choice the members of the synagogue make about Jesus. We only hear about their amazement (verse 27). Who will follow Jesus and who will oppose him? We know that very soon there will be a split. Teachers of the law whose authority as we have seen is displaced by Jesus will largely oppose him. Many ordinary people will follow him.

But what about us? It’s not enough just to admire his teaching and call him a good man or even a prophet. Choosing to do nothing about him is effectively to choose against him, because we are saying we don’t want him to change us.

Why, some people even try to neutralise the influence of Jesus by saying that they worship him on Sundays in church. But that same worship is also meant to convey the word and works of God in Christ to us. We still need to choose.

Perhaps some of us listening today are also amazed by Jesus and his authority. But let’s be more than amazed. Let’s respond to him by following him.

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