Your mission, should you choose to accept it... These words are familiar to many of us. The television series Mission: Impossible has instantly recognizable music to a great number of people in North America, and the movies of a few years ago introduced my generation to this concept.
So it’s somewhat intriguing to see the mission which Jesus gave His disciples that first Ascension Day. While His instructions certainly would not self-destruct in five seconds, yet His mission must have seemed a mission which was impossible to the disciples gathered there that day. The mission, whether they chose to accept it or not, was to stay in the city and wait for the Holy Spirit.
Stay in the city and wait? After all the wonders that they had seen? After seeing their Lord risen from the dead? Stay in the city and wait? But they had to go back to Galilee and spread the good news to the people of Capernaum and Nazareth, to Magdala and Chorazin, to Tyre and Sidon! How could they stay in the city and wait when they had just been clued in on how Jesus’ life and teachings all tied together with the whole of Scriptures? Mission: Impossible!
There have been many occasions when this sort of thing has played out in the life of the church. But most specifically, we have all been called to a Mission: Impossible of a similar order. And that is to wait for our Lord’s return patiently and joyfully. As the angels told the disciples who had just seen Jesus go, in Acts 1:11, “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven.” Jesus is gone from our sight, and now we wait His return.
Ask a young couple anticipating their wedding day how hard it is to wait for that day to arrive. I remember back when Kelly and I were dating, how hard it was to wait for our wedding day. After all, she was very far away, and I wanted her to be here with me. The waiting seemed much, much longer than it was, because she was such a long distance away, and couldn’t be seen regularly, but could only be heard. Our only contact was by words–letters, emails, phone calls.
And this is not a bad analogy. The Scriptures call the Church corporately the bride of Christ, and so, as a group, we are waiting for our groom to come and marry us, as it were. Like a soon-to-be spouse, like a fiancé/e, we are eagerly anticipating the day, looking forward to what’s on the horizon with great excitement, but not a little fear and trepidation, as well, with only His Word to tide us over. True, He gives us His Word by means—through the Scriptures, in Baptism, in the Lord’s Supper, but at the end of the day it all boils down to hanging onto His Word. We can’t see Him face to face, only hear Him, receive Him through His Word. After all, the groom has been gone an awful long time. Is He coming back soon? Will He do what He promised?
Waiting, waiting, waiting. If there ever were a Mission Impossible, this is it. No wonder that various groups which call themselves Christian have taken to setting dates for their Groom’s return, have taken to setting days and hours which Jesus said even He didn’t know. No wonder that people string together Jesus’ promises in such a way as to make it seem we can rush His return if only we work hard enough at it. The thrust behind many missionary agencies is to make sure the Gospel gets out to every tribe, language, and people group not for their salvation so much as to hurry the Lord’s return, since “the Gospel must be preached to all nations first.” Some of the pro-Israel feeling in the North American Christian culture comes from a religious movement called Zionism, which believes that the temple in Jerusalem needs to be rebuilt and a red heifer sacrificed on the altar in order for Jesus to come back. They apparently ignore the whole book of Hebrews which talks about Jesus as the final sacrifice for sins and instead look for some way to speed things along.
Waiting is not something which we are good at. We want our jam today instead of being promised jam tomorrow, as one of my English professors at university would always say. We can’t handle the Alice-in-Wonderland-like feeling of a reality which is just beyond our grasp, a new life which we can’t touch, a hope which is yet unrealized. We want it now. We went God to follow our schedules and our plans. And, if not, we at least want God to give us a fully detailed itinerary so we can get ready in time for Jesus’ coming. After all, this having to watch and wait and live lives of repentance is frustrating. Wouldn’t it be nicer if God cut you a little slack and gave you a heads up on what was coming next? It would make waiting easier if you knew just when you were waiting for.
This, my friends, is sin–plainly and simply. It’s the sin of pride, of wanting our own way rather than God’s will. Regardless of how we clothe it, it’s that basic sin to which Adam and Eve succumbed so long ago, that little sin that every single person on the planet tumbles into every now and again–that most grievous sin of putting ourselves in the place of God. For we are not immune to sin, even though we have been freed from its condemning power by Christ. We too need the continuing preaching of repentance and forgiveness of sins.
Imagine how hard it must have been for those disciples to wait in Jerusalem. And yet they didn’t sit around moping about how hard it was to wait. They didn’t make up new rules they had to follow to ensure that Jesus would come back sooner. They didn’t do anything of that sort. Instead, they spent their time in the temple courts, praising God.
What a response to their mission impossible! Instead of worrying if God would send the promised Holy Spirit to them, they simply went to the temple, the place where God could be worshipped, and spent their waiting time there, praising God.
Perhaps a brief word of definition might be of some service here. What we call praise in the 21st century, singing hymns about how wonderful God is to God, is not exactly what the Bible means when it says, “praise”. In the Old Testament, praise was not something one could or would do on one’s own. Praise was telling about the wonders and works of God to others, so that they too would rejoice in and trust in God.
And like the disciples waiting for the Holy Spirit so that they could undertake the second phase of their mission impossible, we who have already been given the Holy Spirit and await the third phase, the return of our King Jesus in glory to judge both the living and the dead, we are called also to lives of praise.
But this praise is not a disconnected thing from the rest of the life of faith. This praise comes only and completely through the commission which the disciples were given that Ascension Day, that commission which they would undertake on the first Pentecost. Praise flows from repentance and forgiveness of sins. Praise flows from this Jesus who suffered for us and rose from the dead on the third day. Praise comes from the Law being applied so that we see our sins and then the Good News of Jesus being applied so that we realize how great our Saviour is. Praise is ultimately not something we do, but rather the Spirit of God working through us to communicate to the ends of the earth what a great and gracious God we have.
And we can trust that our Groom is returning, for He has promised that He will. Jesus promised to His disciples that He would send His Spirit to them, and at Pentecost, as we will celebrate next week, the church was born in the glory of that revealing. We can trust that our Groom is doing what is best for us because even before He left, He prayed for us that we would be one.
Maybe living the life of praise is something which is hard for you. Perhaps the thought of talking to your neighbours and friends about what Jesus has done for you makes you uncomfortable. Perhaps the old, old story of Jesus and His love is something which you’ve heard so many times that it doesn’t have the same thrill as it did when you were a child, hearing about the wonders of God’s love for the first time, really having it sink in and grab hold. Waiting is a hard thing, and it is easy to become jaded as we wait and wait and wait.
But remember again who it is who promises to return at the end–who it is who gives us His own body and blood in the Lord's Supper. He has left us this meal precisely to help rekindle the joy and the passion within us by giving us a physical, experiential way in which He forgives us. We experience His forgiveness in a real and tangible way, which we take in our hands, which we drink with our mouths. Mysterious as it is, this is the very truth of Scripture. This is not some symbolic meal, some mere recognition of the church as the body of Christ. Jesus’ own body and blood are here. So it is, taking part in Him, we recognize again that our God has made the only satisfactory sacrifice for our sins in Jesus, to forgive us, to renew us, to give us lives which serve Him. We hear again our calling, in our Mission Impossible, to wait on the Lord’s returning and live that praise, to live that joy, to share it with all those we know.
Mission Impossible? With men, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible. (Matthew 19:26)
For our mission is to wait on the Lord’s returning, in the same way as He left–to wait, living lives of praise, to wait, repentantly, sins forgiven, knowing that our Groom has not forgotten us, knowing that He does care, that He does help us wait, that He does forgive us those times we grow impatient with Him or with others. Waiting is hard, but God is gracious. Thanks be to Him for His eternal grace! Amen.
Last updated May 2008 by the webmaster.