Isaiah 66, 10-14; Galatians 6, 14-18; Luke 10, 1-12.17-20.

There is an extremely rich biblical imagery in today’s readings that should help us broaden our understanding of mission and Church in the face of a very significant adaptive challenge. Isaiah speaks prophetically of peace in terms both spiritual and political. Luke speaks of the 72 going from city to city, something which, of course, did not happen factually at the time of Jesus but which is being presented as the foundational experience of the early Church.

Luke is affirming here that it was the entire Church, not simply the 12 apostles, that was commissioned and in mission mode. Speaking of a rich harvest but few labourers at such an early stage, Luke is surely not referring to shortage of vocations as we would translate it today.

For too long we’ve narrowed ministry to that of the ordained priest, almost excluding all other forms of ministries and gifts that enrich the community. The community revolved round the figure of the priest seen as the sole service provider. But it is the community, the entire Church, that is missionary. When mission is the password, then we reach out to the rich harvest. The more we envisage the Church from an exclusively hierarchical perspective, the more inward-looking we become.

There are issues today the Church is struggling hard to come to terms with and that concern precisely its way of fulfilling its mission and the type of ministry needed. But unless we go back to the broad biblical perspective on both mission and ministry, we would continue going round and round in circles without grasping what being church for the world really means.

The Second Vatican Council already 50 years ago laid down the foundations for an overhaul of the Church’s understanding of itself and of its mission to the world. Leonardo Boff, one of the leading theologians of liberation, was right when he spoke of the need for the church to re-invent itself.

‘Re-invent’ means going beyond a theology and practice that had distanced themselves from the biblical imagination. Jesus, commissioning the disciples to bring his peace to towns and villages and primarily to people’s hearts, warned that he was sending them “like lambs among wolves”. We all know what a lamb and a wolf stand for, particularly in biblical imagery.

Jesus is not simply labeling people as lambs or as wolves. Rather, he is saying there are ‘wolves’ in life and also in the Church that may be destructive in word and deed, that may be power corrupt and greedy, that eventually distort the gospel message. The power Jesus is giving his disciples is not wolf power but lamb power, that same power with which he laid down his life for many and which gave him authority over Satan’s power.

Alan Hirsch, a South-African missiologist and author, in his book The Forgotten Ways writes that there are primal forces that lie latent in every true believer and that if recovered could unleash remarkable energies and propel Christianity well into our times. It is precisely in view of these energies that Isaiah sings his praises about the new vision of Jerusalem as city of peace.

Even Paul writes of the peace and mercy that mark a new beginning when it does not matter if a person is circumcised or not. Jesus makes this tangible when, sending out the appointed seventy-two disciples, he empowered them against anything that could hurt them and block their way into the city.

The power Jesus transmits to his disciples is the good energy that the world today needs to win the lure of social depression. Robert J. Wicks, in his book Living a Gentle, Passionate Life, writes that “it is not the amount of darkness in the world that will ultimately determine how we live. It is how we stand in this darkness that will matter”.

When the Church is true to its real calling, then she will undoubtedly be the catalyst for transformational change first in people’s hearts, then in helping to give back politics its soul.