Consequently the call to follow Jesus meant a radical break with the past. Those who followed Jesus left everything. That sometimes included family85 and jobs.86 But His promise was that they would receive a new family in return.87 The community (ekklesia) that comprised the disciples became that new family.88
Interestingly not all of Jesus’ disciples left their homes. For instance, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus (who were among Jesus’ closest friends) stayed in Bethany and made their home His home.89 Jesus also appeared to have different circles among His disciples. Peter, James, and John enjoyed a more intimate relationship with Jesus.90 John seems to have been the closest to Him. Even though Peter is always named first among the Twelve,91 Jesus was tough on him. The breaking of God is proportionate to the quality of ministry one will have later in life. This principle emerges in bold relief in the way Jesus trained Peter.
Despite the fact that Peter was repeatedly exposed and failed his Lord many times, he was the object of Jesus’ unending love. Even after he denied Jesus three times,92 Jesus never mentioned the tragedy after His resurrection. Instead, Jesus gave Peter the opportunity to express his love for Him the same number of times that he denied Him. Then He commissioned him to feed His sheep.93 On the day of Pentecost the same man who denied his Lord three times preached the gospel and opened the door of salvation to thousands of Jews. And as he preached, the other disciples stood faithfully by his side.94
In times of failure keep two words in mind: Remember Peter. 95
JESUS’ NEW FAMILY
Jesus regarded His followers as His own family.96 In His resurrection they would become His kinfolk in a very real sense. Jesus, in His resurrected state, would impart His divine life to His followers, and “the only begotten Son” would become “the firstborn among many brethren.”97 And He would not be ashamed to call them “brethren,”98 a term used often throughout the Second Testament to include females. After His resurrection Jesus specifically called His disciples “brethren.”99 Even so, while Jesus was on the cross, He anticipated the birth of His new family (and healed a rift between His disciples and His family) by introducing John and His mother as “son” and “mother.”100
In short, the Twelve were the embryonic expression of the church.101 For that reason the family is the dominating metaphor used for the church all throughout the Second Testament.102 Family language is peppered throughout the Epistles. Jesus was creating not only a new Israel but a new family, the bond of which was shared divine life instead of blood ties. This brings us back to God’s eternal purpose, which is to obtain a bride for the Son, a house for the Father, a body for the Son, and a family for the Father.103
Jesus’ choice of the Twelve was an integral part of His mission. The Twelve constituted the future Israel, the recreated people of God, the foundation stones of the ekklesia that Jesus came to build. And the Twelve, along with His other disciples—the women—would carry on His work and fulfill His mission statement.
CHAPTER 9
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Jesus’ Mission Statement
For this purpose the Son of God was manifested,
that He might destroy the works of the devil.
—THE APOSTLE JOHN 1
JESUS TAUGHT HIS DISCIPLES HOW TO TAKE THEIR WORK HOME with them. Even more, Jesus made it clear that life comes with a take-home final.2 There can be no dividing line between what we do for a living and whom we live to serve. There can be no distinction between our Monday-to-Friday work lives and our “Sunday selves.” That is because Jesus claims to be “at home” with us wherever we go and whomever we encounter3—so much so, in fact, that divine judgment will be based on how we respond to the presence of Jesus in our midst.
At the resplendent moment, Christ the King will portray His lofty perch of lordship and the throne of glory from which He will judge all the nations of the world. At that very glorious moment, Jesus dethroned Himself. The emperor wore a purple robe. The only time Jesus wore a purple robe was when others put one on Him, as the soldiers did when they stripped Him naked, twisted a crown of thorns into His head, and draped the kingly purple robe over Him to mock Him before leading Him up the hill.4 There they would crucify this “king” on a cross on which was posted a message from Pilate: “JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS.”5 Christ the King reigns from a cross.
Our “take-home final” is one we take throughout our whole lives, and it is this: to find Christ the King in “the least ones.” Not the easy ones, but the queasy ones. Not the established religious leaders, whom Jesus called “whitewashed tombs,”6 but the ne’er-do-wells, the ones Jesus Himself hung out with: the misfits, the outcasts, the unclean, the disgraced, the disabled, the failures, the ostracized, the enemy. It would have been impossible for Jesus to imagine a Jewish Israeli going through life without knowing, let alone befriending, a Palestinian. For Jesus there were sheep and goats,7 but no category of “other.” Even the goats were not an “other,” but part of one another.
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Jesus left us with a commandment and a commission—to love him with everything we’ve got and to obey him with everything we’ve got.
—BILL HULL 8
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Some people don’t start life at ground zero, or plus with plush, but at minus four or minus five. These are the people with whom Jesus spent the most time. We have a Messiah who, from the very beginning, befriended the weak and wretched of humanity—manger-born, stable-mansioned refugees on the run—and expects us to do the same. This essential feature of the Jesus story, the identification with the rejected and broken, was for Nietzsche the fatal flaw in Christianity.9
Jesus’ “take-home final” revolutionizes the world’s understanding of success and failure, big and small, good and bad. Smallness and bigness have nothing to do with numbers or size. The biggest love the world has ever seen was wrapped in the tiniest bundle of flesh, and tied with a red ribbon of sacrificial giving.
Our “take-home exam” is based on Jesus’ challenge to us. Jesus gave His apostles their mission statement in what were among some of His last words: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”10 Or in Mark’s rendering, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.”11
JESUS’ ONE-MINUTE MISSION STATEMENT
But while Jesus gave His apostles a mission statement, He had His own mission statement as well. It was not John 3:16; rather, it came from the prophet Isaiah, a passage Jesus selected for His inaugural message. Jesus made His mission statement into His first “sermon.”
Jesus’ first message was not the so-called Sermon on the Mount but the one He delivered in His hometown, when He went to the Nazareth synagogue on the Sabbath and opened up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61, and read these words:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”12
That was it. Those last eight words may have been the shortest message Jesus ever preached.
But Jesus was a master of the One-Minute Message. In poetic form, He could have delivered the Sermon on the Mount in less than a minute. In poetic form, the Lord’s Prayer can be recited in Hebrew in less than a minute, and almost every parable takes only a minute to tell. Jesus’ One-Minute Messages were in marked contrast to the standard prayer practices of His day. First, prayer was conducted most often at set
times in the day: morning, afternoon, and evening, usually at 9:00 a.m., noon, and 3:00 p.m. Second, the pious would stand, rather than kneel or bow, for prayer. Third, seldom would prayer be spontaneous. Rather, the pious would recite collections of prayer, most often from what was called the Amidah (Hebrew for “standing”), or in more ancient lingo, the Shemoneh Esrei (Hebrew for “eight plus ten”). Finally, praying would be timed and situated so the supplicant could be seen and heard praying long prayers in public places.
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And each morning and evening they stood before the LORD to sing songs of thanks and praise to him.
—EZRA 13
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Jesus broke the rigid pattern and advocated praying in private, encouraged spontaneous prayers from the heart, and advocated short, simple prayers, like the minute appeal Elijah prayed before the fire fell, thereby mocking the babbling entreaties of the 850 prophets of Canaanite gods. Like the first Adam, the Second Adam chose to pray before daybreak14 and late in the day.15 But beyond all of that, Jesus modeled for us the highest form of prayer of all: fellowship. Jesus was in constant fellowship with His Father throughout all His waking moments—a fellowship into which He has called us as well. It was something deep, internal, and very real. For Jesus, prayer was walking the garden with the Father in the dew of the day. In fact, the phrase “speaking out of the whirlwind” in Hebrew is similar to “hearing God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.”16
Jesus spent His entire life living His One-Minute Mission Statement, and taking His Father’s “take-home final.”
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them.17
When John the Baptist sent two disciples to ask Jesus, “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?”18 Jesus answered them by referring to His mission statement: “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them.”19 In other words, Jesus was saying, “Am I fulfilling My mission or not?”
Whether you call it the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew) or “the Sermon on the Plain” (Luke), this greatest sermon ever preached was a masterpiece of Jesus’ mission statement. Jesus turned conventional Jewish spirituality on its head as He outlined the holy attitudes that are blessed, and then followed them up with the holy actions He honors and rewards: “Be perfect”; “Love your enemies”; “Don’t worry about tomorrow.” The law of Moses, a set of rules and regulations, a covenant “cut” with the blood of a lamb, would now be written in the heart and cut with the blood of the Lamb of God: “I will put my law in their minds,” Jeremiah prophesied, “and write it on their hearts.”21 What Jesus preached on the hill where He gave the Sermon on the Mount, He practiced on the hill called Golgotha. God’s reign is no longer found in a legal code etched in stone but in a love code of living etched in a new heart. It’s a change from within that moves outward:
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A disciple, who is not inwardly the same as outwardly, will not be allowed to enter the House of Study.
—RABBI GAMALIEL 20
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For a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush.22
Without new hearts there can be no new world.
JESUS’ MISSION STATEMENT IS OUR TAKE-HOME FINAL
Jesus has come, and that changes everything. With one definitive act on an old, rugged tree, Jesus turned His personal mission statement into our take-home final. Like all take-home finals, there is no time limit. We have all of life and our resources to draw upon. We can edit and redo our responses throughout our lifetimes. We are to “take home” this final wherever our “home” may be, whatever circumstances we may be living in. But we are always to take this mission, this message of Christ’s presence in “the least ones,” home with us.
Instead of the Torah Ten (the Ten Commandments), Jesus had what one might call His Heaven Seven—seven actions the world can’t live without:
1. Feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty.
2. Welcome the stranger.
3. Clothe the naked.
4. Visit the prisoner.
5. Care for the sick.
6. Befriend sinners.
7. Side with the weak and least.
This is what it means to inherit the kingdom. We act out the Heaven Seven in a meal (the Lord’s Supper) because food connects us through our sensory and spiritual selves to unite us into a group. At the same time, it sets us apart from others and gives us a unique identity. For Jesus, the very thing that sets His followers apart is what unites them as a group: “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to Me.”23
Assume a Jesus identity—and do it with others as part of the kingdom community.
What we will say next is, for us, the missing ingredient to many exhortations to follow the Sermon on the Mount and obey the teachings of Jesus. That missing ingredient is the fact that we simply cannot.
The Sermon on the Mount should not be viewed as a new law or rule to obey by grit, by gut, or by gumption. Instead, it is first and foremost a description of the character and nature of Jesus Christ. Consider it a biographical sketch of the Lord Himself. That said, only Jesus can fulfill it. Look carefully at all the demands of that sermon and try living them without fail for a year. We’re confident that, after failing miserably, you’ll agree with us. Only Jesus can live out what He taught, and He does so in and through His people. This brings us back to the issue of living by the indwelling life of Christ.
As we stressed in our book Jesus Manifesto, Jesus said, “I can do nothing without My Father,” and then He turned around and said to His disciples, “Without Me you can do nothing.”24 Jesus lived by the indwelling life of His Father, and Christ has come into every believer through the Holy Spirit to live out His indwelling life in us. When this happens, the characteristics of the Sermon on the Mount become visible in a local community of believers—the community of the King.
The Sermon on the Mount wasn’t given to an individual. It was given to Jesus’ disciples as a whole. As such, it can only be fulfilled in a local ekklesia. The local ekklesia is the community of the kingdom. None of us can pull it off on our own. The same is true for the Lord’s mission statement in Luke 4; this is a joint endeavor. Jesus is on the earth today but not as an individual. He is here as a collective body, the ekklesia. The church is Christ on the earth, carrying out His mission. It is something corporate, not individualistic; embodied in face-to-face, shared-life communities, though it certainly has individual dimensions.
That said, in the course of our lives, as we progress through our “take-home final” on the Heaven Seven, we should see Christ more and more clearly in the lives of those we encounter everywhere, every day, every way. Christ is King because His presence permeates every part and parcel of our lives. Christ is no King if His reign is only for a few hours on Sunday morning. Jesus’ reign is not observing formalities and performing functions. Jesus’ reign is about taking things personally.
Jesus encouraged His disciples to do more than take the big picture. We are instructed to take everything and everyone personally. Jesus takes personally every action we have taken throughout our lives. Every time we drop a dollar in someone’s cup. Every bit of clothing we donate to a shelter. Every drop of human kindness we extend to those thirsty for a meaningful life. Every extension of ourselves beyond
ourselves, beyond our comfort zone, beyond our definition of safe and secure.
We enthrone Christ the King by personalizing and personating Jesus in the world. When we personate Jesus in and to the world, we become part of the Jesus story, a fifth gospel, a third testament. The strength of the church is not the strength of its institutions but the authenticity of its witness.
Jesus not only takes things personally but also takes us person by person. Jesus does not judge according to the big picture, the long view, the undifferentiated median, or the massified middle. Jesus insists, with the consequence of judgment, that we take life as we encounter it, that we take people as we experience them, that we meet the needs of others as they come to us—day by day, person by person, moment by moment. Our person-to-person experiences are the take-home final for our lives.
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If Jesus made the kingdom of God the center of his message and the center of his endeavor, the greatest need of man, as I see it, is to rediscover the kingdom of God.
—E. STANLEY JONES 25
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Every day, every moment, every person is a test of Christ’s kingship. Will we discern His presence in the “least ones” and be a Jesus for them? “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.”26 It is the heart of Jesus’ gift to us of a world-changing faith.
THE MISSION STATEMENT—PAST AND PRESENT
The Gospels, in essence, are the story of how God has come to reign through Jesus Christ on earth as He reigns in heaven. When He spoke, He spoke as if He was in charge. When He rose again from the dead and ascended, His disciples acted as though He really was in charge . . . still.
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