Sent Together into the World
At CTK, our series through the Gospel of John has us in Jesus’s high priestly prayer in John 17. The continuing of Jesus’s mission by his disciples was to be done in and through the community of the church. The church is not an afterthought to God’s mission or a nice addition to be had once God’s work takes root. Rather, it is in and through the church that God makes disciples.
In Jesus’s prayer, we are reminded again of the central role of local bodies of believers in living out God’s mission by declaring and displaying the gospel. Jesus begins by praying for his Father’s help as he prepares to endure the cross, and then he turns to pray for his disciples. He does not pray for them as isolated individuals but as a people (17:6). God’s work is about purifying “for himself a people for his own possession” (Titus 2:14). God’s redeeming work is done in the plural: “And you shall be my people, and I will be your God” (Jeremiah 30:22).
As Jesus prays for his followers, he also commissions them: “As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). In doing so, he does not send them out as isolated individuals but as a people. In commenting on this passage, long-time missionary Lesslie Newbigin highlights the importance of the church in God’s mission. He notes that when Jesus ascends to the Father, “He does not leave behind an ideal or a program. He leaves behind a community.” In short, he indicates, “The work of Jesus is the communication of the name of God to a community.”
Such a community is not a creature of its own making. Rather, Newbigin explains, “It exists because God has called its members out of the world by his own action and given them to Jesus. They are those whom God had chosen ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph 1:4).” This community, the church, is a creation of God’s grace and love.
And it is this community that Jesus sends into the world to carry on his work. “The name of Jesus,” Newbigin avers, “is not to be represented in the world by a series of doctrines, moral ideals, principles, or programs. It is to be represented by a community—with all its misunderstandings, sins, and betrayals—believes and knows that Jesus is the apostle of God and that his words are the word of God.”
It is in such a community, in such a church, that Jesus says he will be glorified (17:22-23). Again, Newbigin remarks, “In the last phrase—‘I am glorified in them’—we are reminded that it is in those (persons) who have been given by the Father to Jesus that the glory of God is shown forth and Jesus is honored. They are the first fruit and sign of the new creation in which all things in heaven and earth will be brought into a unity with Jesus as their head (Eph 1:10; cf. Col 1:18-20).
In highlighting the importance of the church in God’s mission, Newbigin also challenges many of the ways we as a church have sought to live. The church is sent as Jesus was sent into the world, and so, Newbigin indicates, “The way Jesus goes, the way the disciples must follow, is the way of the cross.”
In Christ Jesus, the church will be at once in but not of the world. It is sent into the world and must remain distinct. Newbigin unpacks the importance of this otherworldliness:
“When the Church is kept in the holy name of God it has a final commitment which is outside the comprehension of the world. Without this radical otherworldliness the Church has no serious business with the world. Archimedes said: "Give me a point outside the world for a fulcrum and I will move the world with a lever." If the Church does not rest on a point outside the world it has no leverage with the world. All its tugging and straining is but a minor disturbance within the life of the world, and therefore it is still under the power of the evil one. The Church is marked off from the world by the fact that it has received and must witness to the word of God which is the truth and which thereby calls in question all the so-called axioms, absolutes, and self-evident propositions which are the stock-in-trade of the world's life. It has to bear witness to the weakness and folly of a crucified messiah as the power and wisdom by which the world exists, is sustained, and will be judged. To accept this means to accept the overturning of the accepted wisdom of the world. It is therefore not a human possibility; it is a gift of God, a miracle, a new birth from above. Between the Church and the world, therefore, lies the boundary line which is called "conversion," and if the Church seeks a relation with the world which ignores this, it falls into the power of the evil one. Jesus prays—and this is the unceasing prayer of the glorified Christ (Heb. 7:25)—that they may be kept as the absolute possession of the holy Father in the truth which is his word spoken in the Son. He prays the prayer which they must daily pray: "Deliver us from the evil one."
The church as expressed in each local body of believers will carry on in Jesus’s mission of declaring and displaying the gospel as it is able, by God’s grace, to retain this distinct, otherworldly character. Such a path for the church is the way of the cross. Only as the church embodies the life and death of Christ will we continue in his work:
The Church is sent into the world to challenge the false pretensions of the prince of the world, not in any power or wisdom or greatness of its own. It is sent in the power of his consecration. Its victory is the paradoxical victory of the cross.It is sent "bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in the body" (II Cor. 4:10).The mission of the Church is effected only through its participation in the passion of Jesus as he challenges and masters the power of the evil one. And, conversely, there is no participation in Christ without participation in this passion and this conflict.
God’s people are sent into the world to continue in Jesus’s mission by living in the way of the cross in order to point people to Christ, his cross, and his resurrection.
