Archive: “Go…” The Great Commission

by Charles R. Britt, Assistant Professor of Family & Child Development
Auburn University Pastor, Waverly United Methodist Church, Auburn, Alabama

What is the New Testament mandate for missions? Ask any mission-minded, Biblically-aware Christian and you are likely to have Matthew 28:19-20 quoted in reply. So powerful, attractive, and compelling has this statement of the resurrected Jesus been, in the centuries-long history of the Church, that we have come to know this passage as The Great Commission. In the list of ordinary, run-of-the-mill Biblical references it is likely to be known along with The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), The Love Chapter (I Corinthians 13), and The Prodigal Son (Luke 15).

Historically and currently, wherever there is a vital thrust in Christian world missions, Matthew 28:19-20 functions with effectiveness in at least three ways:

1. It is taken to represent the mind of the resurrected Christ as He addresses His Church in every place, in every generation.

2. It is taken as a personal address. This word of the Risen Lord is not addressed to the Church in general. It is addressed to me.

It might be difficult to find any missions leader today declaring as Robert E. Speer is said to have declared to an earlier generation, “The burden of proof is not upon the person who would go but upon the person who would stay.” In many sections of the Christian Church today, the imperative to be involved in missions is taken very personally. The great missions convocations of Inter-Varsity bear ample testimony to this.

3. The imperative is understood continuously, if not exclusively, to be an indicative pointing to the ocean – crossing, culture – crossing, racial line-crossing nature of Christian world missions. This, despite all efforts to implant other concepts of mission, is still the compelling image of world mission entertained by a high proportion of concerned Christian men and women.

It is said that the Duke of Wellington was once asked about Christian missions. His reply, with specific reference to The Great Commission was, “You have your marching orders.” I would not quarrel with this—I would affirm it.

There is much evidence from the world scene which renders the sending and being-sent aspects of Christian world missions as imperative today as ever. One illustration will suffice.

Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill (Call to Mission, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1970) speaks of the Fon, a West African people, living in the former French colony of Dahomey. These people number a million. Among them there are “a handful of Protestants and a rather large number of Roman Catholics … 600,000 people, equal in number to the population of Nevada and Wyoming together [who] not merely had never heard the gospel but were not in a position to hear if they wished” [italics added]. Bishop Neill refers to a study made in West Africa in the mid 1960s.

Missionaries? The case for their sending and their going is indisputable. This remains true despite all we now think we know of the further need to divest the expatriate missionary of every trace of cultural, spiritual, economic, political imperialism. (It is doubtful if that imperialism was ever so pronounced as some current commentators on the world Christian movement would have us believe.) The recognition of this need is at least as old as the 1659 advice given Roman Catholic missionaries by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith: ” What could be more absurd than to transport France, Spain, Italy or some other European country to China? Do not introduce all that to them, but only the faith ….”

That missionaries should be sent and that they should go, for most of us is unquestionable.

The how of their going is the real question. In search of answers to this question we may turn to The Great Commission as it appears in John 17:18, 21 and 20:21. Jesus is speaking:

As the Father has sent Me into the world, so I have sent you into the world … that the world may believe that Thou didst send me (17:18,21). Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you (20:21).

John R. W. Stott calls this “the most crucial … the most neglected because it is the most costly … ” form in which our records state our Lord’s will to call the world to Himself.

Reading these verses together, several urgently important emphases emerge:

1. Jesus’ own life’s work is a fulfillment of the sending nature of God. “The Father has sent me. …”

2. Jesus’ relationship to His disciples is that of the Sender to the sent. “I send you. …”

3. The manner of the coming of Jesus is to be the manner of the going of His disciples. “As … so. …”

It then becomes incumbent upon us to seek understanding of the manner of the coming of Jesus. Let us consider these:

1. He came in humility. The stories of His birth illustrate this. They are of a part with the Philippian description of His self-emptying. (Compare especially Luke 2:1-20 with Philippians 2:5-9.)

2. He came as a servant. The feeding and healing miracles of our Lord, linked with John’s account of the foot washing in the Upper Room, speak volumes concerning our Lord’s acceptance of the servant role as the model for His coming among us. (Compare Mark 4:21-41 with John 13:1-16.)

3. He came to restore full humanity here and now. These healing miracles recorded in the Gospels are not only evidences of the power of God expressing itself through Jesus Christ, they are also expressions of the limitless good will of God. They reveal His concern for setting human life free from that which in any way binds, inhibits, or diminishes it. Choose five acts of healing recorded in the Gospels and you’ll discover men and women set free from all manner of disabilities. They are saved in a most literal and meaningful manner.

I take it that this kind of salvation, though not the only dimension in which Christ redeems, is an integral part of the Christian mission.

4. There is an awesome more to Christian salvation of which we must speak. Christian salvation has an eternal dimension. It reaches beyond time, history, and this present life. The journey from death unto life which we make through a given faith in Christ is more than a totally earth-centered, here-and-now experience. There is the challenging reality of the ultimate and the final in hearing and receiving, or in hearing and rejecting the Gospel.

Any Christian who can speak lightly without heartbreak of the ultimate, eternal, negative destiny of men and women without Christ needs a reexamination of his or her moral foundations. We are, after all, disciples of One who wept over an unrepentant city and who spoke of the flood tides of joy which sweep through heaven when one sinner repents. The thought that some should be away from God—lost—through all eternity took Jesus to the cross. It ought to send us daily renewed into the task of Christian missions. To think that we are co-laborers with God in opening the gates of eternal life for all who hear and who believe should be reward enough.

5. Jesus came to the world.

In the New Testament “the world” is a term used both positively and negatively. In I John 2: 15 “the world” is that which is not to be loved by Christians. In John 3:16 “the world” is the object of God’s sending and giving mission through Jesus Christ.

If we look at the life of Jesus found in the Gospels we arrive at an understanding of “the world” to which He was sent as being the totality of human life. It is work and play, fear and hope, hunger and joy. It is weddings and funerals, Jewish life in a Roman-occupied land, religious questions, religious behavior, taxes, and work. “The world” is the whole teeming, toiling, sweating, laughing, crying, hungering, feasting, giving birth, dying arena of human existence. It is into the world that Christ was sent. It is into the world that we are sent.

Surely this implies caring, understanding, identifying with, serving, and seeking good for people as people, wherever they are found, in whatever circumstances they live.

This being said does not in the least imply that mere political, economic, physical liberation, or healing is the full and exclusive content of the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. Quite the opposite is true. The salvation offered in Christ is infinitely more than a reordering of the physical, economic, or political circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Consider two examples:

Here is a man who has experienced many tragedies in his life. Divorce and financial failure hit him simultaneously in the late 1960s. He lost his moral, spiritual, and social bearings. Fear, frustration, rage, anger at God, and anger at life marked him. Heavy drinking and frantic sexual activity filled his hours and days away from work. Then, through the ministry of Christian men who had themselves “been there,” he came into a new, right, and life-giving relationship with Christ. For more than five years now he has, with the grace of the Lord, been rebuilding his life and reclaiming his rightful place in the family of God and in the life of his community.

Consider a younger woman who, in the ’60s, went the hippie route, the drug scene, who fell for the evil notions of group sex, and finally became a small-time call girl in a mid-sized southern city. A chance and mutually embarrassing encounter with two high school classmates opened to her the thought that maybe, just maybe, there was something better. Again the miracle of conversion occurred and is continuing. She now finds life filled with meaning as she works with retarded children. She is at peace with herself and with her world. In a most literal sense she has experienced atonement. She is at-one with God through faith in Jesus Christ.

On the other hand we may affirm that abundant life in Jesus Christ includes the hope and possibility of salvation from this kind of dimunition of the Divine Image within us, as surely as it includes the hope and possibility of that deeper, inner reconciliation with God which is the effect of the saving work of Jesus Christ through faith and grace.

In Water Buffalo Theology Professor Koyoma has written of the enormous complexity of interpreting the Christian Gospel to men and women in the Orient. He initiated the concept of “water buffalo theology” to develop the theme that the words of the Gospel must be sounded in accents and acts clearly understandable as the very message of God Himself. We do not have to agree fully with the development of his theme to accept the validity of his basic insight. He is saying what Mable Shaw said earlier, in a highly poetic manner, as she spoke of the missionary posture. In Africa she suggests (and only because that was the continent of her own labors), that it involves “those who will kneel down in the midst of the people, and with faces almost to the ground, blow upon the embers, and heedless of the smoke and dust, blow until the flames leap up, and men and women and little children, made glad and free at home, gather round to warm their hands at the Fire of Life.”

So The Great Commission stands. Matthew 28:19-20 is unrevoked. But we read it better and we live it better in understanding that other form of The Great Commission: “As the Father has sent Me, so I send you” (John 17:18,21; 20:21).