When we hear the word “mission” in a church context, we might think that is not something we do but rather something other people — the missionaries — do.
Maybe we grew up with Maryknoll magazine and remember pictures of missioners on horseback, teaching in slums or caring for the poor in Latin America, Africa or Asia — or working with deaf people in Cambodia.
Mission is not something that’s only for others.
Jesus had a mission and felt the responsibility strongly. In Luke’s Gospel, he said: “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!”
In less dramatic language, he spelled out what that meant when in the Capernaum synagogue he read from the Isaiah scroll and told the people, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”
Notice Jesus didn’t say he was sent to establish the Catholic Church and start a new religion. He had no intention of doing away with the Jewish faith and starting a new church. He said in Matthew’s Gospel: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” He was a faithful Jew and practiced the Jewish religion. He understood the Law of Moses as the foundation of our relationship with God.
But he felt that the religious leaders of his time were not adequately teaching the God who is love and they were not emphasizing God’s love for us and our love for each other. Jesus felt his mission was to reveal both the loving God and the kingdom of God among us with a new way of life based on love — and not on fulfilling the precepts of the Mosaic Law.
The commandments of the law were not bad, but rather than emphasizing the law’s legal details, Jesus emphasized God’s immense love for us and how we must accept that love and offer it to all our sisters and brothers.
That love would be expressed by service and sacrifice. It would be shown in our words and actions of healing and forgiveness, in welcoming all as truly our brothers and sisters.
That love, that service and sacrifice, that healing and forgiveness, that welcome would be the core of Jesus’ mission and he wished us to follow him in that mission. He was sending his followers, sending us out also in mission, sharing and continuing the work he had begun.
After his resurrection, he commissioned his disciples to continue his work of loving and sharing God’s life with all. He sent those first disciples, and now through our baptism, he sends us.
Pope Francis regularly reminded us that we are missionary disciples. Jesus, those first disciples and we all share in that mission of Jesus, to make God’s love and our love known through our words and actions.
Father Charles Dittmeier is a priest of the Archdiocese of Louisville who recently retired from decades of service as a missioner, most recently serving the deaf community in Cambodia.
