The Church is a Mission

SUNDAY | OCTOBER 19th
WORLD MISSIONS SUNDAY

"MISSIONARIES OF HOPE AMONG ALL PEOPLES"

COLUMBUS OR DARKNESS

I was going to entitle this first section, “The Church Has No Mission,” but it would have been too obvious that I was trying to get your attention. Still it’s true that the Church does not “have” a mission. Rather, the Church is a mission. Even the word “Mass” comes from the Latin “Misa,” which means mission.

The original Latin dismissal at the conclusion of Sunday Liturgy, “Ite, missa est,” means both “Go, Christ has been sent,” as well as, “Go, you are sent.” It speaks to how Christ has been sent from the Father, and is now being sent into the world to live His mission in us.

This isn’t easy for us to accept these days, because we are constantly being indoctrinated by the dictatorship of relativism, which holds that any proposal of Christianity is a violation of autonomy, a forceful imposition. If this were correct, we should agree that it should stop.

But this is not only untrue; it is actually a hinderance to the freedom of humanity, since it is Christ who sets us free. So, while Columbus Day sends our cancel culture into its annual tizzy to demonize the past, people today are left groping in the dark for purpose.

FREEDOM IN THE TENSION

Incidentally, when writing letters to the Spanish courts about the indigenous peoples he and his men were encountering, Columbus began many of his letters with “In the name of the Holy Trinity,” which raises the ire of our generation, but was meant to place his judgments in the tension between evangelization and control.

But while some may hold that 16th century imperialism is responsible for the creation of this tension, we do well to go back to its real origin, the Man on the cross.

What do you see when you look at Christ crucified? Do you see failure? A man being killed? You could hardly be faulted for that. But if we were to look deeper into its meaning, we can begin to see something more. There is a man hanging between the tension of his relationship with God and his relationship with this world.

It may sound obvious, but I’m not sure it is. The cruelty of that form of capital punishment, for one thing, distracts us from grasping this, because we are a people who find it hard to go beyond what we “feel” about something. So too the contemptuous political character of the crucifixion can reduce our reading of it.

But we shouldn’t complicate it: Christ was rejected by this world - and is still rejected today - because He is a mission from the Father. And humanity, whether we like to admit this or not, is like an abused animal in a cage, suspicious and initially hostile toward the person who has come to adopt us.

CHRIST: YES OR NO

You might remember a couple of weeks ago our saying that faith isn’t a “quantity” or an “amount” thing; rather, it is a “yes” or “no” thing in a given circumstance. I think that applies here as well to the word “mission.”

Being Christian doesn’t mean we “have a mission,” as if Jesus came to give us a job to do, and that holy people have a lot of mission while we schleps have only a little. No. Being Christian means belonging to Christ who is a mission. And we either belong to Him or we don’t. It’s not an “amount” thing. It’s a “yes” or “no” thing.

This is why it’s hard to be Christian today; it’s not about our beliefs - the world doesn’t care what we believe. But we dare to say that God wants something for us, which is gravely offensive to this culture. +