Bible reading: John 20:19-27.

“Do as I say, not as I do”: that’s a phrase we’ve all heard, and probably used ourselves. It is of course a light-hearted acknowledgement that we’re all hypocrites, that none of us live up to the standards we set for ourselves or (more importantly) ask of others.

The first recorded instance of this phrase came in a book called “Table Talk”, written about 350 years ago by John Selden. I’d never heard of him so I decided to find out. I discovered that Selden was a scholarly man from West Sussex who lived in the late 1500s and early 1600s. He was a historian with particular interests in the British constitution and ancient Jewish law, he was a Member of Parliament for Lancaster, he took part in the Westminster Assembly which produced its famous Confession of the Protestant faith, he was appointed to be Keeper of the Records at the Tower of London, he assembled a notable library which was donated to Oxford University after his death, and he was chosen to be the Master of Trinity Hall, one of the colleges of Cambridge University – a position which he turned down. The poet John Milton called Selden “the chief of learned men reputed in this land”.

As a keen Christian, Selden had quite a lot to say about preachers. He wrote, “Nothing is more mistaken than that speech ‘Preach the Gospel’; for ’tis not to make long harangues, as they do now-a-days but to tell the news of Christ’s coming into the world”. He also stated, “Preaching by the spirit, as they call it, is most esteemed by the common people, because they cannot abide art or learning, which they have not been bred up in … They say to the preachers, ‘You come with your school-learning: here’s such a one who has the spirit’.” Hmm …! And Selden was dead against people who insisted that they needed to hear two sermons on a Sunday because their souls, just like their bodies, required two good meals: “I may as well argue, I ought to have two noses because I have two eyes, or two mouths because I have two ears. What have meals and sermons to do one with another?”

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed Selden’s pithy comments! For they are the context in which he used the phrase I started with: “Preachers say, ‘Do as I say, not as I do. But if the physician had the same disease upon him that I have, and he should bid me do one thing, and he do quite another, could I believe him?’” I think he’s got a point!

Jesus would never have said, “Do as I say, not as I do”! For he didn’t merely say, “Follow me” (which I think implies rather more than just putting our feet in his footprints); he also encouraged people to check that were no discrepancies between what he said and what he did. Jesus was keenly aware that God had sent him to be his incarnation or representative on earth, a task which meant perfect obedience to his Father. And, before he left the world, Jesus gave his disciples their marching orders: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you”. God the Father sent Jesus into the world; in precisely the same way, it seems, Jesus sends his disciples. The Canadian theologian Michael Goheen dresses this up in fancier language: “The ‘as’ in this text tells us that the mission of Jesus to Israel is to serve as a paradigm for the mission of his followers to the nations”. Jesus is our model, not just for day-to-day behaviour but for mission. Indeed, God’s mission ought to be (but rarely is) the primary aim in our lives.

As Jesus told his disciples that they were being sent as he had been, he was picking up a theme of obedient submission to his Father which threads itself throughout John’s gospel. For instance, in ch.4 Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work”; and in ch.5 he says, “I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me”. The pattern continues in ch.6: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me”; in ch.7: “‘My teaching is not mine but his who sent me”; and in ch.8: “I declare to the world what I have heard from the one who sent me”. Jesus is very aware that God has sent him to represent him on earth by his words and actions.

As the Passion nears, a new slant on this theme emerges: Jesus begins to talk about sending the disciples into the world to represent himself and, by proxy, God. In his great prayer for unity in ch.17 he says to the Father: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world … so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me”. And he takes this up in today’s reading: we may have only moved on a few days, but we’ve passed both the darkness of Good Friday and the glory of Easter Day. It’s now that Jesus charges the disciples to go into the world, just as he had been sent into it by the Father. The words are quieter and less vivid than the so-called “Great Commission” we find in Matthew’s Gospel, but they are just as authoritative.

I have laboured this point; that’s because I want to show you how Jesus’ saw his sending of the disciples to minister in the world as nothing less than the continuation of his own ministry. He came as his Father’s envoy or representative; and he’s asking his disciples, then and always, to continue in a similar vein – remember how, many years later, Paul wrote, “We are ambassadors for Christ, God is speaking to you through us”. What we have here isn’t a high-powered command, instead it’s the natural assumption which says, “Of course this is the way that things will be”. Jesus puts what’s been called a “mission imperative” at the heart of our faith. Mission isn’t a “bolt-on extra” for enthusiastic believers; it is fundamental to our faith. As John Stott wrote, “Mission’ is an activity of God which arises out of the very nature of God. The living God of the Bible is a sending God, which is what ‘mission’ means. He sent the prophets to Israel. He sent his Son into the world. His Son sent out the apostles, the seventy and the Church”.

Last week I mentioned a detail in the original Greek text of our Bible passage which gave us an insight we might not have thought of. I’m going to do the same today, and (bear with me!) it comes from the fact that ancient Greek verbs work in a subtly different way to English ones. In particular they make a distinction between an act which is once-and-for-all and finished, and one which started in the past but continues on into the present. Our verse contains the second of these versions for, when Jesus said that he had been “sent” by the Father he didn’t not mean that he’d been given his instructions and told to “get on with it”. Rather, there was a sense in which his “being sent” was an ongoing process which lasted for the entire time that he was on earth. He “was” sent initially (that’s the Christmas story) but he continued to “be sent” over the years; his commission was ongoing, he had to maintain contact with his Father and keep on obeying him.

The same is apparently true with Jesus’ sending of his disciples. He was not giving them a one-off order which they had to memorise and obey: again there was a sense in which their “sentness” was a daily process. And, by inference, the same is true for us: we aren’t like soldiers who open a set of sealed orders, discover what we have to do, and then begin our task without further ado; we are in fact aware of being constantly sent, prodded or recommissioned (whichever you prefer!) by Jesus. Christ gives – and never rescinds – his command to carry out the job for which God has sent, and is still sending, us.

But what is this task? I haven’t told you yet; but it’s one which Jesus outlined at the beginning of his ministry when he went to the Nazareth synagogue and read a passage from Isaiah: to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives and sight for the blind, to set free the oppressed and to announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his people. He gave further details at the end of his ministry when he told his followers to make disciples of all people, baptizing and teaching. And he gave a catch-all – if highly challenging – definition of his ministry when he said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served; he came to serve and to give his life to redeem many people”. Christians have often argued over whether our mission is to proclaim Jesus’ message or whether it is practical service to the community. Evangelicals have often stressed the former, more liberal Christians have stressed the latter. But Jesus taught and showed us that these two types of service are complementary: “holistic mission” must surely be the name of the game. And that’s something in which we all, with our different gifts, should be engaging.

This task of effectively being “little Jesuses” in the world is both an awesome privilege and a huge responsibility! How on earth can we go about it? Indeed, how dare we even try? Fortunately it’s not a task that we have to carry out alone as, in the rest of this verse, Jesus tells us about the tools or the help he offers us to do his work. But that’s all for this morning; our thinking is “To Be Continued” in Episode 2 – which, God willing, will be next Sunday. Can you stand the suspense?