Contemplation and Mission

Extract

The Church is both called and sent by God: called to sanctity and to salvation, and sent to preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16, 15), healing the sick and driving out demons (Matt. 10, 8). It is only where action and contemplation have become secularized (or, for that matter, sacralized—it comes to the same thing), that any contradiction appears; that is to say, it is only because we try to apprehend and to practise prayer or good works without seeing how they proceed from the mission of Jesus Christ, that the hoary problem of reconciling and balancing the two arises.

‘You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.’ ‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you . . . Receive the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 1,8; John 20, 2If). In their different ways, each of the evangelists (even the unexpanded Mark) concludes with some kind of experience of the risen, exalted Lord, coupled with a command to go and tell people, to bear witness, whether by word or by example. Luke’s Pentecost story is but the most dramatic version of this.

Now, as I have suggested, for those who did not live with Jesus on earth, baptism is the appointed way into the whole event of Calvary to Pentecost. In baptism we die with Christ and rise with him, receiving the Spirit that we may live no longer for sin and self, but for God. Of itself, this obviously does not entail any formally apostolic mission; but it certainly includes some kind of obligation to bear witness. ‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, and to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit ... for just as the body is one and has many members, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body’ (I Cor. 12, 7ff). Tertullian is quite in line with this when he exhorts the newly-baptized, as they emerge from the font, to pray for an ‘apportioning of charisms’.