Genesis 18.1-15 & Matthew 9.35-10.8
In the New Testament Abraham and Sarah become examples of true faithfulness. Like Jesus’ twelve disciples they gave up everything in order to obey God's call. God made huge promises to them - but they were mostly promises for future generations yet to come, not for them personally: a promised land and innumerable descendants. And crucially God didn't explain how these promises were going to come true, given that - as the years passed - Sarah remained childless and eventually reached the menopause, or at least the peri-menopause. They had left home, family and the comforts of civilization behind, and travelled into the wilderness, all on a promise of delayed gratification. No wonder that Sarah laughed when one of the strangers repeated the promise that she and Abraham would still have a child together.
As Keir Starmer has discovered, people are more impatient now. They don't want a promise of good times in five years or ten years from now. They don't want delayed gratification. They want it all, and they want it now.
For the first disciples the promise was even more attenuated. When Jesus called them to leave behind home and family the only thing he promised them in return was that their mission to the world would bear fruit. The new nation of Israel wouldn't be made up of the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, it would be made up of new disciples who would respond, from all over the world, to the call to follow Jesus
Abraham and Sarah may have been in the wilderness, but other people already lived there. Essentially God was promising to take the land away from those people to make space for a new nation.
Many people now believe that it was wrong for Christians to go out and make disciples in faraway corners of the world. They think it was disrespectful towards the local inhabitants, and their own cultures and religions, to turn up in their countries and proclaim the gospel to them. And of course Christian missionaries got uncomfortably mixed up with empire building. But by and large the missionaries themselves did not go to get rich or to carve out new territory, but to try to help the people they encountered.
Like Israel, the United States was created by pushing the existing inhabitants to the margins. A recent book about the experience of women in the Wild West of America includes the story of two missionaries who went with their husbands, at the invitation of an indigenous American tribe, to set up a mission station. Unfortunately both of the husbands very soon died, but the women persevered on their own even though they really were far out in the wilderness. Letters to and from home took two years to arrive.
The two missionaries organised things like a school and a clinic, and ran Bible study groups - that kind of thing. But they also helped other settlers who were passing through or setting up farmsteads nearby. This wasn't what the tribal elders had been expecting. They had hoped especially for powerful medicine to protect their people from the new illnesses which the settlers brought with them. And, as more and more settlers began pouring into the area, some of the members of the tribe regretted inviting the missionaries to come in the first place. One day a few hot heads broke into their home and murdered them.
That was an unusual and very sad ending to one missionary story, but it’s a reminder that when Jesus' disciples went, like Abraham and Sarah, into the wilderness in response to God's call they were sometimes putting everything on the line, including their lives. For every missionary who was killed by indigenous people, countless others perished from disease.
If we're going to carry on being disciples we have to do it not to swell the congregation, nor to ensure the survival of the Church, nor to keep the gospel flame burning, but simply because that's what God calls us to do. That is the mark of true faithfulness.
Someone has written, ‘We don't need to be perfect before we can be useful to God. We don't need to have all the answers. We just need to offer compassion. And we do need to be willing: to notice other people's pain, to respond with love, and to allow our faith to become practical.
Abraham and Sarah went out in hope of future greatness, but Jesus’ disciples go out not hoping for any personal reward, only to try to advance God's Kingdom by word and deed.
Often the terms apostle and disciple are used interchangeably, especially when referring to the twelve men whom Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us Jesus chose to be his first missionaries. However, Luke diverges slightly from the others. For him The Twelve are just the first wave of missionaries and he links Jesus’ challenge to go out and bring in the harvest with the call of seventy missionaries. Are they apostles too? Strictly speaking they ought to be because the word ‘apostle’ simply means ‘a messenger’ or ‘someone sent out with instructions’, whereas a disciple is an ‘apprentice’, or someone who ‘follows’ or ‘learns’ from their teacher.
Clearly The Twelve, and Jesus’ other followers, started out as his apprentices or students, but at some point on their journey he commissioned many of them to become messengers too. This applies, for example, to Mary Magdalene and even to people who never met Jesus during his earthly ministry. Paul was fiercely determined to insist that he too was an apostle. In fact he liked to think of himself as ‘the last of the apostles’. And that idea has stuck. If you weren’t commissioned directly by Jesus to do something you can’t style yourself an ‘apostle’, but we’re all ‘disciples’.
The term ‘apostle’ seems then to be a good description of what all disciples are eventually called to be. We have all received the good news ‘for free’ and we should all be prepared to ‘give for free’. The harvest is still plentiful; the labourers are still few. And Jesus still has compassion on the crowds of people in our towns, cities and countryside. Luke is surely right to see this as a challenge extended to other disciples, and not just to a special handful. Our call is to bring God's compassion and spiritual healing - Matthew calls it ‘a cure’ - to those in need in our village and the wider world today.
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