The Great Sending, Chapter 29

Reverand Dr. Jon Diefenthaler

According to “A Theological Statement of Mission” prepared in 1991 by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations: “Mission begins in the heart of God and expresses his great love for the world. It is the Lord’s gracious initiative and ongoing activity to save a world incapable of saving itself.”

This groundbreaking document goes on to assert that the chief agent whom God chose to carry out this mission to our fallen world is his Son, Jesus Christ. Through him, God entered our world “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). Through his suffering and death on the cross, Jesus endured the wrath of God on our behalf, atoned for all our sins, and crushed the head of Satan (2 Corinthians 5:16-21). The grave from which God raised his Son delivers us from the curse of death and gives us the hope of new life, both now and in the world to come (1 Corinthians 15:55-57).

Acts 1 describes the moment that Jesus handed off this same mission to his disciples and to all of us who have subsequently become his followers. God’s mission is now our mission as the body of Christ in today’s world. The author of Acts is the same Saint Luke who wrote the Gospel that bears his name, and it forms the second volume of his work. In Acts 1:1, Luke in fact tells us: “in my former book… I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven.” The word “began” implies that the mission of God to save our fallen world, which his Son, continues, and that Jesus is now entrusting that mission to the disciples whom he has instructed and equipped to become his apostles.

In addition, Luke tells us that Jesus substantiated this same mission “hand-off” with the “many convincing proofs that he was alive.” Jesus himself had provided these proofs during the forty days following his resurrection, and by assuring them of their empowerment with the impending outpouring the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. “You will be my witnesses,” he said to them. After this, Luke informs us in Acts 1:9, “he was taken up before their eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.”

While Jesus has ascended and is seated at the right hand of the Father, he has not left the world to its own devices. You and I are the “body of Christ,” the ones who carry forward what he “began to do and to teach.” Jesus is in fact still with us as he promised in Matthew 28:20, present in the witness that is given to us through Word and sacrament ministries and through the witness to his life, death, and resurrection that we give to our world through what we do and teach.

Through his brief reference to it in Acts 1, Saint Luke appears to link Jesus’s ascension with his annunciation in the first chapter of his Gospel. At both of these moments, angels served as God’s messengers. In Luke 1, the beginning of God’s saving mission with the birth of his Son is announced to Mary; and Acts 1, its conclusion is foretold, as the “two men dressed in white” informed the disciple onlookers that Jesus “will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

The mission of God that our Lord has assigned to us as his church is indeed time-sensitive. Earlier in the text, Jesus admonished the disciples, who asked if the moment had come for him “to restore the kingdom of Israel.” He said, “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.”

In any case, the work of carrying out the mission of God in our world is always urgent, requiring not simply churchgoers but 24/7 followers of Jesus. Speculation about the conclusion of the mission is a fool’s errand. The better course for us is one described in Acts 5:42: “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, [the apostles] never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ.”

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