One Word With Many Applications

One Word With Many Applications

The word ‘mission’ has many applications. Its remarkable versatility ranges from space travel to religious expedition, from politics to commerce, from military endeavours to following a vocation. The common denominator for all usages is travel, sometimes physical but nearly always involving the opportunity for a deepening of character, in all its aspects, for the participants. A mission director’s skill lies in correlating the readiness of the participants with the timeliness and needs of the proposed mission. God’s timing is perfect but sometimes we humans lack trust in his skill as a mission director!

Pope Francis brings a freshness of expression in describing the Church’s worldwide mission. He believes that the Church in Latin America took a decisive step toward a new future in 2007. Then, at the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, held at Aparecida in Brazil, the leaders of the Church moved far beyond the “kept” Catholicism of the past—the Catholicism that was “kept” by legal establishment or, more recently, cultural habit — and embraced a robustly Evangelical Catholicism in which, as the pope wrote, “the whole of ministry (is) in a missionary key.”

The move from “kept” Catholicism to Evangelical Catholicism is for everyone, the Pope seems convinced. “Kept” Catholicism has no future anywhere, and not just because of aggressive secularism and other corrosive cultural acids. “Kept” Catholicism has no future because it doesn’t merit a future: or, as the Pope put it to his former colleagues, “a Church that does not “go out”, sooner or later gets sick” in the hothouse atmosphere of its own self-absorption, which Francis has also called “self-referentiality.”

“It is true,” the Pope wrote the bishops of Argentina, that “something can happen” to a Church that “goes out,” just as things can happen to someone who leaves the safety of home: Accidents can happen. But “I wish to say to you frankly,” the Pope continued, “that I prefer a thousand times an injured Church than a sick Church,” a risk-taking Church to a Church palsied by self-absorption. Thus the vision toward which this pope “from the end of the earth” is calling the entire Church: all Christ, all Gospel, all mission, all the time. (Partial quote from ‘The Bishop of Rome as Christian Radical’ by George Weigel.

All this is a fitting curtain raiser to the Gospel for the 14th. Sunday of the Year 07 July – Luke 10: 1-2,17-20. Jesus refers to the seventy-two missionaries both as “labourers” and as “lambs”. Their work was to be arduous but their disposition was to remain as lambs among wolves. They should expect there to be a cost to their discipleship comparable to the costs born by Jesus Himself. Some of our contemporary Baptised have known this cost in their dying moments. It is believed that the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, shot dead at the Altar as he celebrated Mass in the chapel of the cancer hospital where he lived on 24th. March 1980 saw his murderer. He did not shout out perhaps fearing that those around him would be killed too. A scientific analysis of his clothes showed the late Archbishop had flinched and cold sweat poured out of his body. Then the killer bullet entered his body just above the heart. Archbishop Romero is not a martyr because they killed him; they (the military and their allies among the wealthy) killed him because he was a martyr. For every identified martyr there are countless, in so many countries, who remain unknown to us but are certainly known to God who will reveal them at the final judgement.

In his Journal Intime (“Private Journal”), Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881) wrote the following about the importance of simplicity that is also identified by Jesus in this Sunday’s Gospel as he tells his missioners to ‘travel light’:

“All of us are generally cumbered up with the thousand and one hindrances and duties that wind around us with their spider threads and fetter the movement of our wings. In order to simplify his duties, his business and his life, a man must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered. It is a lack of order that makes us slaves; the confusion of today discounts the freedom of tomorrow.”

Thinking along similar lines, Pope John XXIII once said, “I must strip my views of all useless foliage and concentrate on what is truth, justice and charity.”

Because we are Gentile Christians, we may not appreciate fully Jesus’ reference to shaking off the dust: (Luke 10: 11)

‘The dust of your town that clings to our feet,

even that we shake off against you.’

The Jewish custom was to ‘shake off the dust’ when they had walked in non-Jewish territory. The custom showed a reverence not only for being God’s chosen people but also for the land in which God had settled them. They were not to contaminate the holiness of this place by carrying in ‘foreign’ matter on their footwear. Those of a certain age may recall the house-rule to ‘change your shoes’ when entering from outside. Its purpose was to keep mud and dirt outside! It might have made more sense and even been appreciated had it been a reminder that a Christian household was to be treated as a holy place where Christian values and behaviour were cherished and practised. The implication being that non-Christian behaviour should not be carried inside. The ‘dust’ clinging to shoes has long been superseded by the much more alarming invasion of the TV and, more recently, the Internet. These are ‘Trojan Horses’ of our era and, as for the Greeks of old, are capable of inflicting death dealing infection to unguarded souls. It is so easy to presume that in your home you are safe!

Jesus “sent (his seventy-two others) ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit”. This missionary venture in the style of John the Baptist has its equal in our day. The missionaries range from Papal Nuncios to Members of the worldwide family of ‘L’Arche’, from the Lay Communities that have grown out of Vatican Council ll to the longer established missionary Orders of male and female religious, from VMM to the Neo Catechumenate. Should some of these be unfamiliar to you, then you have a worthwhile task for your computer!

As you board the bus or train or drive or walk to work or centre of learning just remember that you, too, are being sent out, perhaps alone, perhaps as part of a family team. Your Mission Director is the same one who sent out the seventy-two those centuries ago.

He is praying for your apostolate today trusting that you will be aware of and dedicated to your mission!