Christian Mission as Eschatological Proclamation :: Matt. 9:35-10:31

I wrote this sermon on the Gospel of Matthew’s Mission Discourse for my Introduction to New Testament Interpretation class last semester.

An innacurate, unhelpful portrayal of the scene.

 

Christian Mission as Eschatological Proclamation[1]

Matthew 9:35-10:31

Jesus called his disciples to leave behind their livelihood and to follow him.  So, they went with Jesus, Matthew 4:23 tells us, as “he went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.”  This dynamic combination of preaching and healing goes hand-in-hand for Jesus’ pronouncement that “the kingdom of heaven is near” (Matt 4:17).   Undoubtedly, many people gathered near Jesus just to glimpse this man who brought ‘good news’ throughout Galilee.  Seeing the large crowds, Jesus went up on a mountainside and “began to teach them” as Matthew records (5:1-2).  “Teach them.” This is quite an understatement.

What ensued was the most revolutionary and provocative ethical oration.  “Do not resist an evil person.  If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (5:39).  “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (5:44).  Jesus presents a portrayal of an upside down world, or perhaps a right-way-up world—“blessed are the poor in spirit”; “blessed are those who mourn”; “blessed are the meek”; “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”; “blessed are the merciful”; “blessed are the peacemakers”; “blessed are those who are persecuted” (5:3-10)—and he is saying that with his work all this is starting to come true.  Jesus, however, does not dish out universal principles that, if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, would solve every problem in this country or the world.  That was Harry Truman, not Jesus.  Jesus’ teaching is a proclamation that the kingdom is near.  This is gospel:  good news, not good advice.
“Why have you started here with the Sermon on the Mount?” you may ask.  Well, because the narrative suggests that we should.[2] Both the Sermon and the mission discourse begin at the same place.  Matthew 9:35 again informs us that “Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.”  Moreover, the Sermon and the Mission discourse are the fruit of Jesus’ encounter with the masses.  In the former, there is no indication about what in particular compels Jesus to issue the Sermon.  In the latter, however, Jesus’ compassion for the crowd of people, who “were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (v. 36), impels Jesus to act decisively.  Filled with great empathy, Jesus commissions the disciples as “workers sent out into [the Lord’s] harvest field” (v. 38).

The progression has come full circle for the disciples.  They followed Jesus; they observed his demonstrations of the “good news,” of the in-breaking kingdom of heaven through miracles, and they listened with great awe at his teaching because “he taught as one who had authority” (7:28). And now, Jesus commands them to do likewise.  “Preach that ‘the kingdom of heaven is near’!” he instructs his disciples (10:7), “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons!” (10:8)  The disciples must imitate their master in all things.

The disciples move from spectators to initiators.  Fear must have gripped their hearts.  Imagine their trepidation as Jesus unfurls the contours of their mission.  They are to embody the radical shape of the Sermon.[3] Just as the sermon is an eschatological invitation to live according to an ethic shaped by the world to come, the mission discourse is a call take up an eschatological posture in light of the kingdom that is at hand in the process of converting people to Christ.

Yes, conversion.

This dirty little word strikes hard against our modern sensibilities.  It is a cacophony to the ear tuned by liberal society’s definition of pluralism.  We are right to be weary and cautious considering the church’s complicity in the colonization process.  Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, depicts the consequences of Western colonialism in Africa, namely, the unraveling of the Ibo social and cultural fabric.  Indeed, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth accuses the church of implanting foreign influences at the center of a culture and then overtaking it through the “white man’s God.”  But we must resist the perspective that assumes that one’s religious beliefs belong to an untouchable personal sphere, beyond the reach of the good news of God’s salvation.  We must deny the claim that to convert a person is an inauthentic expression by which an individual manipulates another person to think exactly like she does.  Conversion requires that a person repent of her sin and accept a new divine reality.

We would much rather champion the Sermon’s ethical instruction than preach Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection.  We find no real aversion to the Sermon’s ethical instruction, but we squirm under the command of the mission discourse to proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ.  Our culture understands social justice, not the Great Commission (28:16), because our understanding of “justice” has no correlation to God.  Our culture identifies with the effort to intervene in Iraq and African countries where many women suffer genital mutilation.  In the end, these efforts can also be classified as working for conversion.  Conversion means “to change in character, form, or function.”[4] In this case, we attempt to change the character of the value system of another person or culture.  We hope to inculcate a new reality that causes a person to discard their old sinful way of life and recognize the dignity of a woman.

So, both social justice and preaching the kingdom seek to do the same thing:  to convert a person to a new perspective, to change the character of an individual life.  Our problem with conversion, the reception of Jesus’ salvation, then, results from imbibing a cultural script that does not recognize God, and thus, makes Jesus’ imperative to preach the coming of his kingdom unintelligible.  We deem worthy converting a person to true justice, but recoil at the thought of converting a person to the true God.

The kingdom is unintelligible to an unbelieving world.  But to this end, Jesus commissions his disciples to follow in his footsteps to make visible the reality of the unseen kingdom.  They must accomplish this by structuring their mission according to a world that is not yet here.  Their lives must demonstrate eschatological expectation.  For Matthew (and Jesus), you cannot have the Sermon without the mission, nor the mission without the sermon.  Regrettably, the Church has often undertaken the mission to the exclusion of the Sermon.

As a result, the Church possesses a checkered history of heavy-handed conversion.  Our second problem with conversion stems from our cultural image of conversion.  Conversion connotes forcing a person to believe what you believe, refusing a person the freedom to choose.  Jeopardizing anyone’s freedom, by the way, is the cardinal sin in America—but that is another sermon.  Neglecting the Sermon results in obnoxious behavior and hijacked relationships, all for the sake of “the Gospel.”  Jesus imagines something very contrary to this for his disciples.  The disciples will be the ones on the receiving end of obnoxious behavior, they will be the ones persecuted and abused.  The shape of the missional work Jesus outlines in the sending discourse bears little resemblance to the kind ‘guerilla evangelism’ that pushes the ‘truth’ in someone’s face.

Nevertheless, this passage is about conversion.  But our ideas of mission and conversion are so skewed that we can’t find it in this text with our working definition.  We must allow the text to redefine our understanding of evangelism. Matthew’s text reconfigures the visage of Christian mission in three ways: (1) it is fundamentally eschatological, (2) extremely dangerous, but (3) undergirded by God’s love and the Spirit’s presence.

Eschatological expectation resounds throughout Jesus’ discourse.  First, the reference to the sheep and the shepherd in v. 36, as Davies and Allison note,[5] harkens back to Ezekiel 34: “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them.  As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness.  I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land” (vv. 11-13).  With this in mind, the passage looks forward with eschatological anticipation for Israel’s Messiah to come and shepherd her, to tend to the poor in spirit, to those who mourn, to the meek, the hungry, the merciful, and so on.

Jesus, then, reconstitutes his people in the symbolic action of sending the twelve.  They are the eschatological symbol that the messiah has come and gathered up his sheep, and that a new kingdom has dawned.  The disciples now live in this new world that is ultimate, but has not yet fully arrived.  John Howard Yoder says, “This is what we mean by eschatology: a hope that, defying present frustration, defines a present position in terms of the yet unseen goal that gives it meaning.”[6] The disciples are sent in hope, defined in the present by the end.  They must welcome poverty (10:9-10), rely on hospitality from strangers (vv. 11-12), they must bring healing (v.8) in order to proclaim that the kingdom is near.  The disciples must imitate Jesus, the inaugurator of the kingdom, in everything:  they must embody a life articulated by the Sermon and Jesus’ ministry of healing deeds.  They must engage in eschatological proclamation.

And so must we.

We have been commissioned, sent by Jesus to live among those not yet in the Good Shepherd’s fold.  We must intentionally seek out the friendship of our neighbors, to reproduce for them an experience of God’s love and forgiveness.  Proclamation of the Gospel story and witness to its reality must come together.  And our individual relationships must be a natural inroad into our church communities if we are to make palpable the nearness of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Otherwise, we have failed to be eschatological in our mission, for community and eschatology are inextricably bound up with one another.

Karl Barth puts the mission of the church wonderfully: “The community does not speak with words alone. It speaks by the very fact of its existence in the world; by its characteristic attitude to world problems; and, moreover and especially, by its silent service to all the handicapped, weak, and needy in the world. It speaks, finally, by the simple fact that it prays for the world. It does all this because this is the purpose of its summons by the Word of God. It cannot avoid doing these things, since it believes. From the very beginning the community also expresses itself in spoken words and sentences by which, according to the summons of the Word, it attempts to make its faith audible.”[7]

Our faith becomes audible when we radically embrace strangers as God did us, and when we pray to partner with the Spirit, who is already involved in every person’s life.

And if eschatology gives expression to our mission, then it invariably encounters danger.  It is perilous to forgive and pray for enemies.  It is hazardous to entrust yourself to others, both Christian and non-Christian alike.  Possessing an inverted value system, which privileges mourning over comfort, meekness over strength—just to name two of the hallmarks of living in the kingdom amidst the present reality—will lead you to take risks.  You may go live with and join a suffering community in a blighted neighborhood.  Praying to partner with the Spirit at work in a non-Christian may require a lifetime of patience while the invitation into communion with God goes unanswered.  Or you may be asked to sow seeds of the Gospel story of Jesus, even though a person does not want to hear the truth.

Though we are not told exactly why the gospel mission is dangerous, we know that the disciples were beaten, arrested, and even killed for proclaiming the arrival of the kingdom of heaven in both—and it must be both—word and deed (vv. 17-18).  Christian mission even incites family division and hatred (vv. 21-22).  Most of us have encountered this strife already at family gatherings, but I suspect we are its cause, not the gospel.  We have mastered Jesus’ imperative to “be as shrewd as snakes,” while neglecting to be “as innocent as doves” (v. 16).

The eschatological dimension of the mission discourse also holds a dark, unsettling reality for those who reject the Gospel message:  Judgment.  This is the second dirty word in our text.  Commentators W.D Davies and Dale Allison note that Jesus places the villages that reject the kingdom of God in the same category of Sodom and Gomorrah (v. 15).[8] This typology stands as a proverbial warning of God’s wrath for those who refuse his love.  Conversion, then, is a life and death matter.

But “do not fear” (v. 26 and 31).  Well, do not fear people at least.  Jesus exhorts us to fear the “One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (v. 28).  Immense comfort flows forth from the fact that the “One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” is for us. The Father loves us.  He is so involved in the happenings of our world that not even a sparrow falls to the ground apart from his will.  The Father, who has carefully numbered every hair on our heads, is for us (v. 30).  He loves and keeps us.  This means that we can entrust ourselves to him, even in unexplainable suffering.

Our trust may not manifest itself in silent resolve.  Though we may lose our voices, “the Spirit of the Father will speak through us” (v. 20).  The Spirit may prompt us to vocalize our faith through suffering and persecution.  Do we really believe that the Spirit speaks through us today?  We might if eschatology gave rise to our mission, and we encountered obstacles that brought us to the end of our own means and forced us to rely on the Spirit.

This challenge to live into the Eschaton is the crux of the matter.  For Christian mission begins where it ends: the imminent return of Jesus Christ to put right the world.  Until then, we stand on tiptoe in anticipation of this ultimate and certain hope.  Though it remains yet unseen, we have glimpsed the kingdom with the eyes of faith.   And so, we must embody the Sermon and the Mission together, which overlap and interlock because they are fundamentally eschatological.  That is, they assume that the future world has penetrated this present reality and view all of life from this vantage point.  Our evangelism, then, seeks to draw others into the already true reality of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ, and it also extends the peace of the kingdom to others:  “Freely [we] have received, freely [we] give” (10:8).  This right-way-up world proclamation is both our message and our method for conversion.

So, we pray knowing full well that God the Father loves us, that Jesus Christ died for us, and that the Spirit guides us and utters on our behalf:

Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed by your name,

Your kingdom come,

Your will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts,

As we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from the evil.

For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

Amen.

---

[1] This sermon has in mind an audience in the Northeastern region of the United States.  However, it may also work in any context feeling the weight of religious pluralism, such as our own Duke Divinity School.

[2] W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. (Edinburgh:  T&T Clark, 1991), 143.

[3] Ulrich Luz, Matthew: A Commentary. Vol. 2.  Hermeneia, Trans. Crouch, James E, (Minneapolis, 2001), 59.

[4] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conversion

[5]Davies and Allison, 158.

[6] The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 145.

[7] Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 38.

[8] Davies and Allison, 179.

The Primacy of Theological Discourse

James K. A. Smith, in Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism, describes the posture of a common theological strategy plaguing the church, the “correlationalist model.”  This approach begins with “a certain confidence in the findings of a secular discipline–whether philosophy, psychology, history, or sociology–[and then] adapts this neutral or scientific framework as a foundation and then correlates Christian theological claims with the facts disclosed by secular science.”  In an apologetic effort to make Christianity intelligible and universal to an audience, churches translate the gospel according to the rationale of scientific or “objective” truth rather than to the particularity of Christian revelation.  The correlative method also directs church practice as well.   Churches have assimilated business-growth paradigms with their definitions of success, as well as marketing strategies and their penchant for trends.

John Milbank offers a diagnosis for modern theology:

Radical orthodoxy, radical scarf.

“Once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into some oracular voice of some finite idol, such as historical scholarship, humanist psychology, or transcendental philosophy.  If theology no longer seeks to position, quality or criticize other discourses, then it is inevitable that these discourses will position theology.”

- Theology and Social Theory:  Beyond Secular Reason

Hauerwas on Evangelicals

In this very short video, Stanley Hauerwas points to a few things that evangelicals need to recover.  His thoughts are a simple articulation of what I often struggle to communicate to my evangelical friends.  I left my work with a campus ministry organization because Dietrich Bonhoeffer (and later Karl Barth) showed me that the church is not a second reality to my immediate relationship with God.  Instead, it is precisely through the church that a person knows God.  Jesus mediates between humanity and God, and the church is inexorably bound up with Jesus.

After coming to Duke and taking (only) two semesters of church history, it is clear to me that our conception of faith, and the church as well, is one that we’ve inherited  As Hauerwas says, “You don’t get to make up God.”  I’ve come to see that it is absolutely vital to the Christian faith of today that we engage with the faith of old in order to remain faithful tomorrow.  This means that we need to read Scripture in concert with the voices of past Christians, in dialogue with the wisdom of the Church.  Recognizing that we are actors in a drama that began 2000 years ago is crucial to combat myopic, and thus heretical, conceptions of God.

Confessions of a Theologian of Glory

Title page from Luther's Deudsh Catechismus, 1659

I have been reading through a book by Gerhard O. Forde, entitled “On Being a Theologian of the Cross.” Forde works his way through Martin Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, juxtaposing a “theology of glory” with a “theology of the cross,” categories which he borrows directly from Luther.  The contrast between these ways of doing theology has shed light on my past year of theological training.  It is now apparent that I am functioning as a theologian of glory (again); for subtle shifts in my thinking have already occurred so that I no longer depend on the grace of God but rely on my own capacity to be faithful and to become more faithful.  Indeed, one of the chief claims of the theologian of the cross is that, by nature, every person is a theologian of glory.  We are in bondage to operate according to Scholastic Nominalism’s proposition to “do what is in one’s self” and let God do the rest.  This maxim encapsulates humanity’s unrelenting resolve to be “the master of [our] fate[s]/ the captain of [our] soul[s].”  We are, therefore, tragically bound to the insatiable thirst for our own glory.

As a theologian of glory, I operate as though my will were in control, free to choose between good and evil.  Under the assumption of “free will,” I attempt to reason myself into a more virtuous existence, or I try to make theology and virtue attractive so that it will appeal to my free choice.  My other strategy hinges upon my effort to discipline myself, to practice virtuous habits in order to reconfigure the years of sinful behavior patterns (e.g. impatience, anger, lust).  But an optimism about the elasticity of the will–that it may be bent toward faithfulness–says Forde, is the root cause of despair.  Telling a narrative that misrepresents the reality of human nature only leads first disillusionment then malady.

The cross is an attack on sin “that reveals the real seat of sin is not in the flesh, but in our spiritual aspirations, in our ‘theology of glory’” (1).  That is, the cross seeks to unmask optimism placed in human ability.  The real locus of sin lies not in our evil works, but in the good things we do; the theologian of the cross targets the “pretension” that accompanies what we do well.  Thus, the theology of the cross is offensive, for it reveals our rejection of God precisely through our good works.  This narrative upends and shocks us, pursuing us to the end of our rope, to surrender and cling to the cross.  This story claims that hope rises out of despair, that life comes only through death.

Luther organizes the Disputation according to the logic behind the division between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross: “The question of the knowledge of God is directly related to the claim that we can, by our natural powers prepare for grace by ‘doing what is in us’…A fault in the estimation of works [Theses 1-12] is based on a false estimate of the power of will [Theses 13-18], which in turn presumes a knowledge of God’s judgment on such works [Theses 19-24]” (70).  Theses 25-28 conclude the Disputations arch from the law of God to the love of God, arguing for the sole agency of the grace of God in the life of the theologian of the cross.

I will devote some space in the blogosphere to a series of reflections outlining the Disputation’s theses as they relate to my own grappling with Luther’s (and Forde’s) assertions.  Reading the book through the first time was convicting, confusing, challenging, and I am still unsure what it means to be a theologian of the cross in light of recent Biblical scholarship, e.g. more accurate views of “the Law” in ancient Judaism and the abounding critiques of Reformation exegesis of Paul, as well as some of modern theology’s push back on Luther’s ordo salutis and his definition of faith.  Finally, I hope these posts will help me work out how a theologian of the cross faithfully proclaims the ethical components of the gospel, the Christian vocation of justice and peace.