Sent By the Father 1
A book we used as a devotional in my Jesus the Missionary class was Sent by the Father: Meditations on the Fourth Gospel by Jose Comblin. I'll definitely share more than a few things from this little book, because it is packed with goodness. Comblin's thesis is that the book of John reveals Jesus completely as The One Sent. This aspect of Jesus is continuing today, he is being sent by the Father over and over, all around the world and we are to join this mission.Comblin offers a caution, however, against the things that keep us from being sent ourselves. Many times we cannot hear his voice, as we have become self-referential. Comblin asserts that, "To hear God it is necessary to leave off listening to yourself and to abide in a pure hope, in a pure listening, to be disposed to receive something new. Jesus' rebuke to the Jews could not have outraged them more: 'You never heard his voice, or saw his form. ... His word has found no home in you' [John 5:37]" (Comblin 1979:7).
He moves from Jesus' rebuke to the Jewish community of his day, to a rebuke directed toward us today: "The church itself was transformed into Christendom; it treated the word of God as its property and tried to encase the kingdom of God in its own institutions. Christians, believing that they had in themselves the face of God, consequently thought that to be faithful to themselves was to be faithful to God. The church concluded that its service to God was to perpetuate and magnify itself. It did not know God. It ceased knowing him at the moment it ceased listening and learning and began, instead, repeating to itself the words of God that it had already heard" (Comblin 1979:7-8).
I don't know how you just read that, but I felt very convicted hearing those words the first time (and now, too). Have we become too self-referential? Are we too worried about the survival of the church as an institution that we fail to hear God calling us into the world? I think about Revelation 3, when Jesus is speaking about doors. He says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock..." in verse 20. Jesus is being sent. We have shut ourselves in, and he is "out there" amongst the people, eating with them.
Comblin's thesis implies that as Jesus was and is sent, so are we to be sent by the Father. It may be that we're sent across the street or across the world, but make no mistake; we are being sent. Tomorrow, I'll contrast this with the method we usually choose today in churches to bring people to the Lord, but talk to me today. What do you think?
posted by Wayj @ 8:21 AM
7 Comments:
being away from everything comfortable and familiar, i experience this as true. i need God's voice, not just what we already have available. solitude is something i've neglected for a long time, but now i feel it necessary to keep me centered on him. i have to learn how to listen to a voice i've rarely if ever heard.
I think that's essential. It's funny that introverts like you and me are still learning how to really practice solitude. There's always that part of me that needs to hear certain lessons over and over, but God is always on the move. It was hard to move out here to CA, but I had to come out here to see that He really is working everywhere and with all kinds of people. It was me being blind to it, though, not because He didn't try to show that to me many times before.
Yeah, I do want to add a little "both/and" to what you're saying, though, Ashley. I think you're right in the constant sending, but it can't negate the fact that Jesus did come at a specirfic moment in time and there's much we need to learn from his life in the incarnation. There's "incarnational," the word we use to describe the nature of the kind of community we need to embody and then there's the Incarnation, the one-time event from Christmas to Pentecost. So we have to keep the holistic view always in mind.
i see it as the active voice/presence/spirit of God in our lives continuously explaining the things we have already heard... each time revealing more and more of Himself... each time refining and shaping every part of our being. i can't speak for everyone in the church (which is a habit i am trying to break), but i believe that the rapid pace of my life keeps me from the people, places, and things He uses to shape me like solitude, prayer, true community, etc. it is easier to mindlessly repeat what i already know than to stop and listen for the still small voice. repeating those things makes me feel better for a while, like morphine to a soldier who is in reality, bleeding to death on the battlefield.
(sorry to be so serious)
Lebraix, I'd like to hear more about your conversation with your friend. What do you see as the difference between "church" and "the church" and all that? I'm not sure I can go all the way with your friend's thesis, but I'd like to hear more about what you two talked about!
Josh, I think you are right in that we never really leave the fundamentals. I look back at journals (when I'm dedicated enough to keep them) and am sometimes embarrassed to read the things I've "learned" that I still don't get. There is a nuance to what Comblin is saying, though, and I think that will be my next post...
(you're brilliant! be as serious as you want!)
I think you're on the right track, Lebraix. I don't knonw that I would ever say the church is exclusively for believers. First, believers are the church, not the building. Second, if a building is just for the believers, then we might as well be a masonic lodge and not a church. I do agree with the thought that the church service be focused on believers (while being very welcoming of the stranger) but again it has to be the community of believers feeling like they want to meet and worship together, not a "build it and they will come" mentality.
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