I’m exploring this topic in the light of (a) mission in terms of purpose; (b) mission as commitment to an individual radiation of the spirit of Jesus; and (c) mission as inclusive of the social dimension of the Gospel.

Mission in terms of purpose

In many areas of life, having a common mission generates a sense of togetherness and team spirit, for example, among the staff of a school, or the employees of a small company. The mission motivates the team and facilitates the achievement of its goals – getting good academic results or marketing a product.

The more the mission is defined so that team-members can “own” it, as we say today, the more vibrant the resulting team spirit and the more effective the team’s operation.
The Church, however, is not a community founded on team spirit or like-mindedness. It sole “foundation”, as the famous hymn has it, is “Jesus Christ, her Lord.” To which we may add, sharing in his body and blood, and possessing his indwelling Spirit. 

The Church is about millions of different kinds of persons transcending their differences to become a Christic community. This is why a Mass with a hundred thousand people – as we had here when the Pope came some years ago – or a Mass in St Peter’s Square, can be so moving. It is not because people intimately know one another, but because they know that across the boundaries of place, language, and origin, they share a common history of sin and grace, and a common hope.

We should not forget that an “intimate style” is the hallmark today of superficial – even insincere – public relations. The clerk who calls you “honey” or “sweetheart” has no real interest in being close to you. It’s all in the name of business. By way of contrast, very deep commitments are often expressed in an “impersonal” way.

The fireman who risks his life for a child may never see the child again. A woman entrusting herself to the care of a surgeon may know nothing of his personal life. And Jesus’ own most famous parable of the kind of love demanded of Christians speaks not of an intimate encounter, but of a stranger meeting the need of another stranger and then going on his way.

Another way to approach this is to note that Jesus did not spend much time talking about what we today call “family values”. On one significant occasion, he deliberately placed the ties of faith and discipleship above the ties of blood (Luke 8:19-21). This was not so much to denigrate the family as to indicate the sort of priorities the Kingdom entails.

The Kingdom is not about human nurture – which is the family’s principal purpose – but about a vision for humanity and the world. In the light of this purpose, the mission of the Church is to exist and promote itself as a “sacrament of humanity”.

Mission as individual commitment to radiating the spirit of Jesus

The German philosopher Nietzsche once remarked: “Christians talk about salvation, but do they look like people who are saved?” This seems to imply that there is such a thing as a “saved look,” which, of course, makes no sense. But that’s not what Nietzsche meant. What he meant was that there should be some correspondence between the experience of salvation and one’s outlook.

When the great prophets of Israel are called, there’s an interesting initiation ritual. They are asked to physically eat the scroll of the Word. “Son of Man,” Yahweh said to Ezekiel, “feed on this scroll which I am giving you and eat your fill” (Ezekiel 3: 2.). The idea is that the prophet should digest the word and turn it into his own flesh so that people will be able to read (see, and hear) the word of God in a living body rather than on dead parchment.

Mission as bringing God to others is not a matter of handing somebody a Bible but of transubstantiation, i.e., we have to digest something, turn it physically into our own body so that it becomes part of what we are.  We become the living testimony of what we preach.

Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, once suggested that human beings create their own faces. For Sartre, we are born without a face, at least without one that says very much. A baby’s face has little in terms of individuality, and parents’ protests to the contrary, all babies look alike. You learn little about character, though you learn something more about genes.

At about 40 a person has the essential lines of a face. At that age, we look different from everyone else in the world (even if we have an identical twin). From age 40 onwards, faces manifest individuality, character, and other qualities beyond genetic endowment.

What’s important about Sartre’s view is the component elements of who we are. Until 40 genetic endowment is dominant. Thereafter we look like what we believe in. Mission as individual radiation means that our faces should do our testifying and our witnessing whether or not we speak.

Mission and social justice

We have seen throughout this series that Jesus meant the Eucharist to generate and shape a particular kind of community. This is why St John placed the washing of the feet front and centre on the night Jesus died.

Within recent times, since the Synod of Bishops meeting in 1971, the Church has officially included social justice as a constitutive dimension of its mission to proclaim the Gospel.
But what is “social justice”? The following well-known parable has proved quite helpful:

Once there was a town built just beyond the bend of a large river. One day some of the children for the town were playing beside the river when they noticed three bodies floating in the water. They ran for help and the townsfolk quickly pulled the bodies out of the water.

One body was dead, so they buried it. One was alive, but quite ill, so they put that person into the hospital. The third turned out to be a healthy child, who they then placed with a family who cared for it and took it to school.

From that day on, every day a number of bodies came floating down the river and, every day, the good people of the town would pull them out and tend to them, taking the sick to hospital, placing the children with families, and burying those who were dead.

This went on for years; each day brought its quota of bodies, and the townsfolk not only came to expect the number of bodies each day but also worked at developing more elaborate systems for picking them out of the river and tending to them.

Some of the townsfolk became quite generous in tending to these bodies and a few extraordinary ones even gave up their jobs so that they could end to this concern full-time. And the town itself felt a certain healthy pride in its generosity.

However, during all these years and despite all that generosity and effort, nobody thought to go up river, beyond the bend that hid from their sight what was above them, and find out why, daily, those bodies came floating down.

What the parable highlights in a rather simple way is the difference between private charity and social justice. Private charity responds to the homeless, wounded, and dead bodies, but it does not of itself try to get at the reasons why they are there. Social justice tries to go up the river and change reasons that create the homeless, wounded and dead bodies.

Social justice tries to look at the systems (political, economic, social, cultural, religious) within which people live so as to transform those structural elements that account for the fact some are unduly deprived in a variety of ways, while others are unduly privileged.

Why has social justice today become so important to mission, when in the past saintly persons and nearly all-spiritual writers almost entirely neglected it? To this question, Pedro Arrupe, the late Superior General of the Jesuits, replied: “Today we know more.”

That is, we are less sociologically naïve; we understand better how systems affect people, both for the better and for the worse. Today, therefore, we routinely incorporate this understanding into our reflection on what the Church is sent to do.