[This is the fifth in a series of six posts on the importance of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. To catch up, here is the Introduction, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4.]
What does the Holy Spirit do? He empowers us for mission.
On the night he was betrayed, Jesus was communing with his Father. After washing his disciple’s feet, and teaching them for the last time, he lifted his eyes to his Father, and close to the center of his prayer we read these words:
“As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (Jn 17:18).
Just a few chapters earlier, Jesus is talking to his disciples:
“But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning” (15:26).
Here, at the end of John’s Gospel, there is a lot of sending, proceeding from, and bearing witness. There is, in other words, a lot of the language of mission. And here is what we learn: mission is not something extra to the purposes of God in the world—a sort of tacked on, extraneous freebie that we can take or leave. No, mission is intrinsic to the character of God; it comes from the heart of God himself. It's worth stopping for a moment and pondering this. It's not merely that God cares about his world, and so we should too. It's that God, in his very being, is an outward-going God. This is no naval-gazing deity; the Father is eternally going outward in (begetting) the Son and the Spirit.[1] The triune God is (eternally) a sending, proceeding, missional God.
And just as the Father has opened himself to the world in the Son, so now the Son opens himself to the world in his disciples. Because it is in the very nature of the Father, Son, and Spirit to be ‘turned outward’ (toward each other), it is entirely natural that the triune God would be similarly ‘turned outward’ toward the world in mission. The Father sends the Son; the Son sends the church. The sending of the church, then, is a reflection (or an imaging) of the sending of the Son. That’s John 17.
But now the important part: Jesus doesn’t send the disciples alone. No, critically, the Son also sends the Spirit, who himself proceeds from the Father. The Spirit testifies to the truth of the Son, and following his lead, so do we. This is the ‘shape’ of mission. We do not go off on our own, ‘taking back’ the world (or culture) for Christ. We participate in the already-begun mission of God. As Chris Wright puts it, "It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world but that God has a church for his mission in the world."[2] The Father sends the Son; the Son sends the Spirit and his Spirit-empowered people. We (with the Spirit) bear witness to Jesus; we testify to the truth of the Spirit’s testimony. The Spirit warms people’s hearts, and turns them toward himself, and we reply with an emphatic, “Yes! We agree! Look to Jesus! Submit to the Spirit!”
What, then, can we say? Our mission is not, actually, our own. We can neither redeem the world nor build the kingdom (but oh, how popular this activist language is today). All of our best efforts, and best intentions, end up looking hopelessly like Babel—reaching, reaching, reaching up. And then Pentecost happened, and God reached down. How marvelous that the mission is not our own! God is on mission, and we are his Spirit-empowered people.
[1] The implications of this are tremendous, particularly in the face of a world that increasingly sees God as a sort of macro-version of the despotic dictators of the 20th (and 21st) centuries. Hardly! The Christian God is no selfish, self-absorbed deity; he is who he is in love for the other. The implications of this only get more staggering when we remember that we are made in the image of this outward-going God. What news!
[2] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 62.