Citizen Columns
Question
Does your faith group have missionaries? What is their role in modern society?
Answer
One of the favourite stories in the New Testament is the parable of the Good Samaritan. The reviled Samaritan becomes the hero because he notices, stops and cares for a stranger who has was beaten up, robbed and left for dead in the wilderness. Several religious people “passed by on the other side” and refused to get involved. Maybe they were too busy. Or superstitious about being defiled by touching a dead body. Or maybe they thought it was his divinely ordained fate. Or perhaps they were afraid of more lurking bandits and hurried ahead to avoid being robbed themselves.
Early Christian teachers interpreted the Samaritan as Jesus, and saw this as a story about the mission of God. For all its beauties and joys, life is all too brutish and short. People are beaten up and dying in so many ways. And the message of the New Testament is that God couldn’t stand it anymore.
God couldn’t wave a magic wand to make it better, since that would take away the glorious but also terrible freedom at the heart of what it means to be human. But he himself could enter into the world’s misery, fears, and death and by sharing them, heal them. This is the meaning Christians see in Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. And everyone who accepts this gospel is called to be a missionary to others, in the same spirit. From the beginning this has been the unchanging Christian message at the heart of its mission.
Sadly, Christians have often perverted this “good news” and made it odious, sometimes through violence and coercion, but more often through ignorance and disrespect. Yet as long as there is still grief, sadness, loneliness, fear, sickness and death, there is a place for Christian mission in the modern world. And we will continue to have missionaries who in word and deed continue God’s mission to his world.
With love in the risen Christ,
Fr John
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