ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

CHRIST THE KING, 2005
EVENSONG & BENEDICTION
ALL SAINTS, MARGARET STREET

Fr Alan Moses

On this last Sunday of the Christian Year, the Feast of Christ the King, we have heard the conclusion of the Gospel according to St. Matthew This passage is the climax of Matthew’s Gospel; it sums up the whole of what he is saying to us about the identity of Jesus Christ and his commission to his followers.

So we find the climax of the revelation of Jesus’ character and identity in the rest of the gospel. He has supreme authority in all creation; he is the king in God’s coming kingdom. He is presented as divine, alongside the Father and the Spirit. The Gospel had introduced him as “Emmanuel - God with us”. Where two of his disciples were gathered in his name, there he would be with them - a claim reserved in Scripture for God’s own presence.

This statement of divine authority is followed by the commission to his followers; the climax of the responsibilities of the Church. - those verses which are often called “The Great Commission”; seen as the charter of the Church’s missionary activity.

The crux of Jesus’ commission based on his universal sovereignty is to disciple the nations.

The Greek has one command - “Make disciples”
spelled out it in three words:
• going
• teaching
• baptising

Jewish teachers would make disciples by teaching those who volunteered to follow them. These would in turn become teachers themselves with their own disciples. But Jesus recruited his disciples directly. He taught them to make disciples only for him.

Jesus had earlier limited the scope of the disciples’ mission: “Go only to the house of Israel”. Now he revokes that limitation:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”

The commission of the Church to ‘make disciples of all the nations’ involves of necessity crossing boundaries of culture, race, nationality. It is universal because of the universal sovereignty of the risen Christ. This had been hinted at from the beginning of the gospel:
• in the genealogy,
• in the coming of the Magi,
• in the Roman centurion and the Canaanite woman seen as models of faith.
• Jesus ministers in Galilee of the Gentiles,
• he compares Nineveh and Sheba, and even Sodom favourably with Israel. God can raise up children of Abraham even from the stones.
• Nations are to be judged by their response to the Gospel which must be preached to all nations before the kingdom comes.

Having gone out, the disciples are to baptise; to incorporate new followers of Jesus, those who hear his word spoken through them, into the life of the Church, into discipleship; and more than that, into the very life of God the Holy Trinity.
Baptism is not simply a human demonstration of allegiance; it is the divinely initiated incorporation into a new life; a means of grace.

This new life involves being taught “to obey everything that I have commanded you”. Faith for Matthew is not simply a matter of rational assent to the truth of what Jesus says, or emotional acceptance of him as friend and guide. It is obedience to what he teaches us. This obedience can only be carried out with his grace; the grace that he has promised through his continuing presence with his church.

We should not get too hung up on the order of these things. For some converts, the teaching comes, at least in part, before they receive the Sacrament of Baptism. But even for such as these there can be no sense in which that teaching can ever be seen as complete in this life. For others, those like me and many of you, baptised as infants, the teaching comes later. What is important in both patterns is that the Church takes seriously its mission to teach, to make disciples and that we as Christians take seriously our calling to be disciples and to disciple others.

We see all this reflected in what we do tonight at this service. We have listened to the teaching of Jesus in that reading from the Gospel. Week by week, at the Eucharist and in the Divine Office, we hear the words of Scripture read and expounded; the law and prophets and writings of the Old Testament which point to Jesus and find their fulfilment in him. The Scriptures of the New Testament which spell out that fulfilment.

After the readings and our response in the Canticles, in the words of Scripture, we make our profession of faith in the Apostles Creed: the baptismal profession of faith in the Western Church.

Then here at All Saints, we have the service of Benediction; that service which centres on the sacramental presence of Christ with his Church: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Jesus is not some absent and remote God but one who is with us.

The Church has often neglected this universal command to mission or lacked confidence in its ability to carry it out. Nowadays, in our multicultural society, it often seems embarrassed by it. So there is hope for us then in two details of this passage which we might pass over. The first is that it is the eleven disciples who go to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them by the message of the angels and the women. Luke shows us, in the Acts of the Apostles, the perfect number 12 being restored by the divine choice of Matthias to replace Judas.

Matthew shows us the Church with its perfection still marred by betrayal. It is that imperfect Church which is commissioned. Jesus uses the materials available to him; he uses us, the congregation of All Saints, flawed and fearful as we are.

Matthew tells us that even as they worshipped him “some doubted”. The Greek may mean that all of them had some doubt. Which one of us does not recognise that our Christian discipleship is lived between obedient faith and fearful doubt? Yet we too are commissioned. When we look at the world around us, when we hear statistics of Church decline, we ask how we can carry out this task assigned to us; this job we did not ask for.

But it can hardly have been any different for those first disciples faced with the power of imperial Rome, for St. Paul and his companions crossing over into Europe, for Augustine and his companions coming to Britain, for those British and Irish monks who evangelised much of northern Europe, for the missionaries who set out to the Americas and Africa and Asia.

We can admit that some of this missionary activity was insensitive and colonialist; that there are lessons to be learned about how we go about it. But we can learn too that those missionaries found in their relationship with Christ the courage to speak of him to those to whom they were sent. If we do not find that courage in our relationship with him when we have our baptismal and Eucharistic participation in the divine life, what does it say about us?

Bishop Lesslie Newbiggin:

“Whatever may or may not have been the sins of our missionary predecessors… the commission to disciple all the nations stands at the centre of the Church’s mandate , and a church that forgets this, or marginalizes it, forfeits the right to the titles ‘catholic’ and ‘apostolic’ …The truth is that the Gospel escapes domestication, retains its proper strangeness , its power to question us, only when we are faithful to its universal, supranational, supra-cultural nature…The contemporary embarrassment about the missionary movement …is not, as we like to think, evidence that we have become more humble. It is, I fear, much more clearly evidence of a shift in belief. It is evidence that we are less ready to affirm the uniqueness, the centrality, the decisiveness of Jesus Christ as universal Lord and Saviour, the Way by following whom the world it to find its true goal, the Truth by which every other claim to truth is tested, the Life in whom life alone , in its fullness is to be found.”