What is the Missional Church (Part 2)

What is the Missional Church? (Part 2)
The End of the Gospels: Mark

In Part 1 of this series I claimed that the problem in North American Christianity is that the church is “missing.” I might say “missing in action” except that the church has never really been in the action. That is, the church as we have known it has seldom if ever truly functioned as a missional community whose very reason for being is to live out God’s mission as sign, foretaste, and instrument of God’s kingdom. So I will stick with simply “missing.”

The end is often a good place to begin to attain clarity on something. In our case, it’s the end of the four gospels we need to look to help us gain clarity on why what is today called “missional” church is the church Jesus envisioned.

We’ll begin today with the gospel of Mark because it is quite likely the earliest account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection we have. Subsequent posts will follow on the other three gospels.

Each gospel narrates the story of Jesus’ resurrection and his mandate to his people to carry on with his work. Though each of them does this differently, they all leave the end of the story open, inviting the reader’s own decision to commit and follow the resurrected One. In the different ways the evangelists tell this same story we can develop a profile of the community living by the power of Jesus’ resurrection.

Mark’s gospel ending is found in 16:1-8. It’s rather an enigma. The two additional endings later copyists added to make Mark’s story more like the others confirms its strangeness. These readings are usually found in the footnotes in your Bible. Mark apparently intends to end his story at v.8: “So (the women) went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone.” Strange indeed!

No angels at the tomb (only a strange “young man), no appearances of Jesus to the disciples, no overt commissioning story, no passing on the wonderful news of Jesus’ resurrection by the women (who heretofore in Mark have been exemplars of faith in contrast to the male disciples) – just an unbelieving response (terror, amazement, fear) to the astonishing reality they encountered at the empty tomb. What’s Mark trying to tell us? What kind of people ought we to be in response to this story?

Now the women eventually did tell the disciples their story. Otherwise, how did it get out? Yet within Mark’s story even the faithful female disciples quail in the presence of God’s astounding resurrection power. And Mark leaves each of us with them at the empty tomb. With them we have heard the young man announce this glorious news and that the disciples should hasten to Galilee for that is where Jesus is and where he will meet them. And with them we are challenged to the outrageous risk of embracing this outlandish claim! Their example reminds us how difficult such faith is.

What does it mean to embrace the call of the resurrected Jesus to join him in Galilee? Galilee is the place of ministry for Jesus. The first half of Mark, the active ministry of Jesus, takes place there. After the passive ministry of his passion, crucifixion, and resurrection in the second half of the story, we start again in Galilee. Jesus’ active ministry of preaching, teaching, healing, exorcising, and evangelizing continues anew and his followers are called to join him. To rejoin Jesus in ministry in Galilee is to do so with a deepened sense that such following is cruciform (cross-shaped) all the way down. For Jesus lived such a cruciform following after God and by raising him from the dead God has validated and vindicated such a life. Now it is inescapable that “bearing the cross” and living fully in the risk and vulnerability that entails is the way of discipleship. There’s no triumphalism here! No other way to be faithful. No wonder the women drew back (at least initially). What about us?

Mark’s ending then reveals the non-negotiable mode of following the risen Christ in missional discipleship. The church of Jesus will be a radical, risk-taking community that makes itself available to and liable for the care and well-being of others, especially the last, the least, and the lost. The way of the cross, then, is inescapable for the missional church. To embrace this call means joining the risen Jesus again in Galilee. To embrace this call is the crucible for an authentic church. Indeed, it is the only way to know the truth of the resurrection. Karl Barth puts it succinctly: “The community is as such a missionary (what I am calling “missional”) community, or she is not the Christian community.” By posing this challenge at the end of his story, Mark pointedly and powerfully directs us to the “end” for which God created and redeemed us: to incarnate the cross of divine love in suffering servanthood as the way to the renewed and fulfilled creation which God has promised.

Perhaps we could say that the missional profile emerging from Mark’s gospel is this: If you want to know, you’ve got to go!

“The relationship between the obedience of God's people and the triumph of God's cause, is not one of cause and effect, but one of cross and resurrection.” John H. Yoder