The mission goes ever on and on

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 28: 16-20) focuses our minds on the sending of the apostles during the last chapter of the gospel of St Matthew. There stood the eleven in a wavering state of mind, some adoring Jesus, some doubting Him, and all of them surely wondering what was coming next.

What came next was in some ways only a continuation of what had come before, but it was also a transformation of it. Now, the Lord hands on His mission to His chosen ones, sending them out as He too had been sent, bearing His task, labouring in His name and for the glory of His Father. The dynamic of the mission comes from the outpouring of grace and holiness that Jesus wins for us in His death and resurrection and which the Holy Spirit communicates to us through the ministry of the Church, through His personal gifts, and through His own presence.   

Notice the two sides of this mission: Go… baptising them … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. These orders – the last ones Jesus gives the Apostles - place the tasks of sanctification and teaching at the heart of the mission. Note the nuance also: all that I have commanded; not half of it, not a best-bits version, not a bowdlerised copy with the tough bits omitted, not tailored for the shifting fashions and sensitivities of the age which will be something else by the end of next week. The teaching is to be given in season and out o season, for our desperate humanity needs not only consolation but conversion. The woundedness and needs of the human heart are much the same from age to age, no matter the prevailing winds, no matter how many castles in the air are built by our pride and our self-indulgence, not matter how delusional we become about new ages and year zeros. Below the changing currents at our surface lie the same rip tides that always bedevil us, quite literally at times: we are always damaged goods. Fashion chasing is for fools, not for followers of the Lord.

We see also in these two tasks an order and a logic: sanctification and then teaching. In time, the Church will come to say: Lex orandi lex credendi - the law of prayer is the law of belief. Because in point of fact, while truth perfects our minds, we can never truly understand the mysteries that Jesus has revealed to us. We do not need to fabricate mystery: God’s revelation is all a mystery of love and transcendence that surpasses our human capacities; of love, because God is good and total love is the response to total goodness, and of transcendence, because God is holy and we are the creatures who, along with the angels, were given the capacity to be conscious of what it is to honour freely their creator. At the same time, because it is possible for us to be misled by our own lights, the Church also reverses the law stated above and says: Lex credendi lex orandi – the law of belief is the law of prayer. Even the greatest mystics submitted their insights in prayer to the Church for she is the custodian of Revelation and faith.

If all this seems a tall order, Jesus gives the apostles one last consolation in this gospel: that even though He leaves them bodily, He is with them always until the end of the age. With them and with us in His sacred words of course; but because our total sanctification is His goal, sanctification meaning radical union with Him, He is with them and us pre-eminently in His Eucharistic presence the mystery of which will unfold over the centuries. He is with them and with us lastly in the Spirit which He sends into the world from the Father to remind us of all things and grant a deeper appreciation of them.

The procession of goodness, therefore, goes on, beginning with the persons of the Blessed Trinity, in essence one, through the hands of the ministers of Christ commissioned to share His gospel, through the action of the Spirit, and through all those who make themselves docile instruments of the purposes of Providence in this world.

In the end, to be apostolic is to become a willing channel of the great fount of gifts that pours out of the communion of the Blessed Trinity and breaks forth in this world from the rock which is Christ, who is admitted to this world by Mary’s great yes and who is handed on in the willing yeses of the faithful disciples. The apostolate that we in COLW aspire to is nothing other than to do our part to facilitate this flow of His goodness into the world, through the Church, through the hands of Mary, channelled through our poor minds and hearts and – please God – into the ears and hearts of our neighbours, families, and friends. We only need to let ourselves be the voices, hands, and feet that the Master sends forth into the world.

What a mission, what a hope! How little we have done and how much remains to be undertaken. But listen again to His last word to us: behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.