Conclusion: Ongoing Imperative for World Mission

From Gospel Translations

Granted the interests and character of our honoree John Woodbridge, granted the focus of the essays in this Festschrift, and granted the title assigned me—“The Ongoing Imperative for World Mission”—I should relieve your suspense and tell you right away that I’m for world mission. I hope that doesn’t come as too big a surprise.^[1]

Yet what shall I do with this title? To show something of the sweep of possible discussions the title might call forth, I shall begin by outlining some of the roads I might have traveled in this address, but chose to resist resolutely, before pursuing another way.

The Roads Not Traveled

I shall offer an apostolic number of such roads. Granted “the ongoing imperative for world mission,” we might have usefully surveyed:

(1) An array of “Great Commission” texts.^[2] We might have begun with Matthew 28:16–20. Here we observe that the controlling verb is “make disciples,” not “make decisions” or “entertain the sheep.” The three supporting participles, all carrying some imperatival force from the context, require us to go, baptize, and teach the disciples everything Jesus has commanded—which sounds as if there might be some further propositional and imperatival content, and not just the biblical storyline. The form of the Great Commission in Luke 24:46–49 is cast as fulfillment and prediction—fulfillment, in that Jesus Christ’s passion and resurrection were predicted in Scripture, and prediction, for in consequence of Jesus’ death and resurrection, “repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”^[3] The disciples are witnesses of these things, and Jesus further promises “to send what my Father has promised”—doubtless a reference to the Holy Spirit—so that these believers will be “clothed with power from on high.” Similar themes are developed in Acts 1, with the geographical extension of the ministry of the witnesses spelled out rather more clearly: “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). John’s form of the Great Commission (John 20:19–23) is prefaced by Jesus’ appearance to the disciples in a closed and locked room and His greeting “Peace be with you.” Doubtless this is meant to be more than a casual Shalom; it is meant to be evocative of a huge theological structure. For John’s Gospel has made clear that the person who does not obey the Son stands under the abiding wrath of God (John 3:36), while in His death and resurrection the Son fulfills His role as the ultimate sin-bearing “Lamb of God” (1:29, 34). The peace that Jesus promised His followers just a few days earlier, on the night He was betrayed—“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives” (14:27)—is anchored in His own death and resurrection. And now, risen from the grave, Jesus tells the ten disciples gathered in the room, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (20:21). Some have bled the dramatic parallelism in this commission for more than it can carry,^[4] yet the power of this standard of sacrifice and service will never be matched by even the most heroic missionary. And once again, the commission is tied to the gift of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins.

Of course, the theme of the Great Commission extends beyond these specific texts. For instance, we cannot forget the instructions of the Spirit to commission Paul and Barnabas for the work of the first missionary journey; nor can we forget the apostle’s self-understanding — he is an ambassador of the Great King, conveying His message, “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20). But although such texts clamor for attention, for our purposes they must remain a road not traveled.

(2) The biblical theology of “Great Commission” texts. Very often Christians have studied the Great Commission texts in isolation from the books or corpora in which they are embedded, and thus unwittingly denuded them of some of their power. To take but one example—before reading Matthew 28, we are expected to read Matthew 1–27. The very first verse announces the ancestry of Jesus through David back to Abraham. Abraham figures elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel. In Matthew 3, John the Baptist tells us that God is able to “raise up children for Abraham” out of the stones themselves. Apparently genetics does not control the locus of the people of God, despite the covenant with Israel. A little later, Jesus Himself tells us that “many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 8:11). We are not far from anticipating the theology of the apostle Paul, who says that the real children of Abraham are those who share Abraham’s faith (e.g., Rom 4). The genealogy of Jesus, in Matthew 1, draws attention, among other things, to the non-Hebrews, including Ruth, a Moabitess who, according to the law, should have been excluded from Israel. The name of Jesus is carefully parsed for us—it is nothing other than the Greek form of Joshua, which means “Yahweh saves”—and so Jesus comes to save His people from their sins (Matt 1:21). Coming as it does in the opening lines of the book, this explanation provides a grid for the rest of this first Gospel. This is the book which shows us how Jesus comes to save His people from their sins—by His teaching, by the inauguration of the kingdom, by His death and resurrection, by His consummating return. Small wonder there is a trainee mission (Matt 10) to prepare His disciples for the work of outreach they will have to undertake, in both Jewish and Gentile contexts (and thus cross-culturally), after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. The eschatological discourse reminds us that “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matt 24:14). Much more could be said, but you get the idea—the Great Commission is not simply tacked on at the end of the Gospel of Matthew. Rather, it brings to a climax one of the themes that drives through the entire book. Similar things could be said, with various emphases, of every book and corpus in the New Testament, anchoring our Great Commission texts to the very structure of the new covenant. And of course, precisely because such themes have been marvelously probed in recent years by, on the one hand, Andreas Köstenberger and Peter O’Brien,^[5] and, on the other, by Eckhard Schnabel,^[6] little needs to be said about them here.

(3) The still larger biblical storyline. Rather myopically, I have limited myself so far to New Testament texts. Yet the New Testament documents nestle within an entire canonical framework. The first responsibility of sentient creatures, not least of God’s image-bearers, is to recognize their creatureliness, with all that creatureliness entails. Failure to do so is the beginning of idolatry, and therefore of condemnation and death. The most spectacular evidence of God’s grace is His pursuit of rebels. Despite the amount of space devoted to God’s choice of Israel and to all of the history that flows from this choice, Paul is entirely right to point out that the history of Israel is itself nestled within the still larger history of humanity’s creation and fall. That is why we need a New Adam Christology, as much as, say, a high priestly Christology; and that is why we must recognize that the promise to Abraham that through his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed is not done away by the Mosaic covenant. It would be enriching to tease out the countless Old Testament anticipations of the cultural and racial open-endedness of the people of God in the last times—texts such as Isaiah 19:23–25: “In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth. The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.’” But these massive biblical structures of thought and expectation I must reluctantly set aside—though I will briefly return to this specific passage a little later.

References

1. ↑ As this paper was presented at a banquet honoring Dr John D. Woodbridge, and not as one of the technical papers of the conference, I have decided to preserve the slightly chatty nature of the presentation, and to keep footnotes to a minimum.
2. ↑ Most recently, see the competent survey by Robert L. Plummer, “The Great Commission in the New Testament,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 9.4 (2005): 4–11.
3. ↑ Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, TODAY’S NEW INTERNATIONAL INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. TNIV ®. Copyright© 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
4. ↑ See the careful treatment by Andreas J. Köstenberger, The Missions of Jesus and the Disciples According to the Fourth Gospel: With Implications for the Fourth Gospel’s Purpose and the Mission of the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998).
5. ↑ Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: A Biblical Theology of Mission (NSNSBT 11; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001).
6. ↑ Early Christian Mission. Vol. 1: Jesus and the Twelve. Vol. 2: Paul and the Early Church (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004).