I have taken three services of Holy Communion today,
sitting with these two texts at each of them:
You have not
come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and
gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made
the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them…Indeed, so terrifying
was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’ But you have come to
Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to
innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn
who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of
the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and
to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Hebrews 12:18-19, 21-24
He called the
twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the
unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a
staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not
to put on two tunics. He said to them, ‘Wherever you enter a house, stay there
until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to
hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony
against them.’ So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They
cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.
Mark 6:7-13
There is a long thread running through the Old
Testament: the story of the God who descended from the heavens to Mount Horeb
in the Sinai peninsula to rescue a people from slavery in Egypt; who then
journeyed with them through the wilderness for a generation and after that as
they established themselves as a nation in a land of their own; before
ascending on Mount Zion, a hill in Jerusalem where David made a resting place
for the tabernacle—symbol of God’s presence—and his son Solomon built the
temple.
The writers of the New Testament saw this thread as
prefiguring Jesus, who descended from heaven in the incarnation, camped out
with us (in the words of the Prologue to John’s Gospel) for a generation, and
ascended to the Father. Writing to Christian converts living among the Jewish
diaspora, the writer to ‘the Hebrews’ reminds them where they are in this
story. They are not at Mount Horeb, but at Mount Zion. They did not encounter
Jesus while he walked about among us, but after his ascension. And that is
where we are, too.
We have, at it were, entered the story at the end of
Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus says, ‘All authority on earth and in heaven has
been given to me: go, therefore, and disciple nations…’
How do we do that? In the same way as Jesus’ first
disciples. He sent them to enter into a village; to live with a family for a
season, inviting them into life in its fullness; and then to move on, to repeat
the descend-dwell-ascend pattern again and again.
The third of the services I took today was for the
Mother’s Union. Across much of the world, the Mothers’ Union is a force to be
reckoned with for good, equipping women to go into communities and live alongside
families helping them to build patterns of living that promote stability in
contexts of poverty, gender-based violence, living with HIV or mental illness;
caring for prisoners and befriending the elderly. In this way, communities are caught-up
in the ascension, in the life-giving rule of Christ over the nations.
Just before I took the first of the three services,
I heard the news that Michael Green had died yesterday. Michael was an Anglican
vicar and theological educator, a passionate evangelist who specialised in
university missions, the author of over fifty books. He was also my godfather. As
a dear friend of my parents, he came into my life before I was born, has
encouraged me on my faith journey, and has now gone ahead to be with the
ascended Lord Jesus face-to-face. But he was no stranger to that pattern:
coming in to peoples’ lives and introducing them to Jesus for the first time in
student missions; or investing in generations of women and men in training for
ministry, in their time at theological college.
We have come to Mount Zion. We enter, stay, and we leave,
called onward, ever onward. This is our story. May we live it, to the full.
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