John 11:21-27; 14:12
Teaching, training apprentices, rebuking religious leaders. Healings, exorcisms, turning water into wine, calming a storm, feeding a crowd with five loaves and two fish. And then the biggest of all: raising a widow’s son from death to life, and then raising Lazarus from the dead. Jesus was one of the most unusual, noteworthy and controversial rabbis of his time.
Think of everything you know about the life of Jesus from the four Gospels, and then hear these words: “Truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do. And he will do even greater works than these.” (Jn 14:12). The life of an apprentice of Jesus is to be with Jesus, to become like him, and then to do as he did.
The earliest account of the history of the church is that of Luke, who prefaces the second volume of his history with these words: “I wrote the first narrative, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day he was taken up, after he had given instructions through the Holy Spirit to the Apostles he had chosen” (Ac 1:1-2).
It’s reasonable to suggest that this second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, chronicles the things that Jesus continued to do and teach after he was taken up. And that helps to clarify the meaning of Jesus’s words in John 14:12. As I read those words, I imagine millions of followers of Jesus, apprentices of Jesus, empowered by the Spirit of Jesus, doing “even greater works,” continuing the mission of God, to the ends of the earth, until Jesus returns.
But that begs the question: How can we possibly do all those things that Jesus did? You and I are not God! It seems impossible, unhinged, scandalous.
And yet, the key to Jesus’s power and authority was the Holy Spirit, who indwells all of those who follow Jesus. At the start of his ministry, Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…” (Lk 4:14, 18f). That was the key to his success in pursuing the mission of God.
The founding document of the Uniting Church in Australia, the Basis of Union, bears witness to this theological truth. It states that,
Through human witness in word and action, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ reaches out to command people’s attention and awaken faith; he calls people into the fellowship of his sufferings, to be the disciples of a crucified Lord (section 4, my emphasis).
Author and preacher John Mark Comer puts it like this: “Jesus did not leave us dependent on our natural abilities, talents, and energies (or lack thereof). He gave us his Spirit to empower us with his capacities.”[1]
A careful study of the four Gospels shows that the ministry and mission of Jesus can be summed up as:
- making space for the gospel – practicing hospitality
- preaching the gospel – sharing the good news
- demonstrating the gospel – in word and deed
Let’s take a look at each of these.
1. Making space for the gospel
Hospitality was central to the mission of Jesus. Luke especially highlights this. Think of Jesus’s desire to have a meal with Zacchaeus, the outcast tax collector (Lk 19:5-7), or the words of Jesus in Luke 7:34, “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners’.”
New Testament scholar Robert J. Karris suggests that “in Luke’s Gospel Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.”[2]
Hospitality is not the same as entertainment. Anthropologist Mary Douglas described meals as “boundary markers.”[3] We often define who is “in” and who is “out” by who we share our meals with. Meals bring people together, but they also keep people apart. Think class, race, vocation, age, religion. Not so Jesus. He practiced what writer Rosaria Butterfield calls “radically ordinary hospitality.”[4]
It’s not hard. Anyone can do radically ordinary hospitality. We all eat meals. All you need is food and beverage, a table, and a guest list of at least one other person you would not invite to dinner merely for entertainment, or because you can expect a return invitation.
The mission of Jesus was to seek and save the lost (Lk 19:10). His primary method was hospitality (Lk 7:34). Catholic priest and theologian Henri Nouwen writes,
In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found … It is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.[5]
2. Preaching the Gospel
Outside the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, near the statues of the little dog and the British monarch, you’ll sometimes see a street preacher warning of hell fire and quoting proof texts to passers-by. Or perhaps you’ve seen the worst of televised American pop religion, with preachers and performers channelling Billy Graham’s evangelism style, or Benny Hinn’s interpretation of church-as-circus.
One of the most innovative forms of evangelism I’ve seen was a bicycle strategically chained to a post in Federation Square, Melbourne, with evangelistic Bible verses written on a metal sheet affixed to the frame.
What’s worse is never sharing the good news at all.
Each of us believes and gives voice to “messages about where our hope lies, where human history is going, what the dangers are, where salvation is to be found, where we can find community, and how to live a good life and become a good person.”[6] Jesus has something to say about each one of those universal themes. As John Mark Comer writes,
The gospel is that Jesus is the ultimate power in the universe and that life with him is now available to all. Through his birth, life, teachings, miracles, death, resurrection, ascension, and gift of the Spirit, Jesus has saved, is saving, and will save all creation. And through apprenticeship to Jesus, we can enter into this kingdom and into the inner life of God himself. We can receive and give and share in Love Loving. We can be a part of a community that Jesus is, ever so slowly, forming into a radiant new society of peace and justice that one day will co-govern all creation with the Creator, in an eternity of ever-unfolding creativity and growth and joy. And anyone can be a part of this story.[7]
Comer invites us to pursue five “best practices for preaching the gospel in our secular culture”:
- offer hospitality
- find where God is already working and join him there
- bear witness (Ac 1:8; share your experience of Jesus at work in your life)
- “do the stuff” – do what Jesus did, in the power of the Spirit
- live a beautiful life, one that commends the gospel (1 Pet 2:12)[8]
3. Demonstrating the gospel
“The Hebrew prophets likened the coming kingdom of God to a feast where all God’s people, Jew and Gentile alike, would gather at the table with Abraham in a new community of peace and justice. Jesus embodied this biblical vision, one meal at a time.”[9] This is the in-breaking kingdom of God. Jesus invites us to “come and see,” “come and die,” and “come and rise,” joining him in mission.
All of the dramatic Jesus stories in the Gospels are signs of this in-breaking kingdom of God. It’s not meant to be weird and rare and extraordinary – it’s meant to be normal everyday reality. The great twentieth-century theologian Jürgen Moltmann writes:
When Jesus expels demons and heals the sick, he is driving out of creation the powers of destruction, and is healing and restoring created beings who are hurt and sick. The lordship of God to which the healings witness, restores creation to health. Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only true “natural” thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.[10]
The first apprentices of Jesus practiced four kinds of sign demonstrating the in-breaking of God’s kingdom in their world. Jesus calls each of us to follow those same practices:
- healing (see Mt 4:24; Jas 5:16)
- deliverance (see 1 Jn 3:8; Ac 8:5-8; 16:16-18; 19:11-20)
- prophecy (see Jn 4:18; 9:3; cf 1 Cor 12:12-14)
- justice (see Lk 4:18f; Ac 2:42; Rom 12:17-21; Gal 3:28; 1 Tim 6:17-19)
It can be scary, risky, thankless. But we “do as Jesus did,” in the power of the Spirit, trusting our faithful God, and making decisions every day that align with the mission God has for us.
In his book, Promoting the Gospel, Australian historian and apologist John Dickson speaks of “the salvific mindset” as:
an outlook on life that cares deeply for the salvation of others … Reaching out to your friends is a broad task. It is not a specialised optional extra of the Christian life like attending an evangelism course, going on an outreach trip or reading a Christian book on promoting the gospel … Promoting the gospel involves just about every dimension of our existence: our social life … our prayers, our use of money, our behaviour, our conversations, and even our regular church meetings.[11]
Jesus invites all of us to order our lives so that it becomes more and more natural to make space for the gospel, preach the gospel, and demonstrate the gospel in word and deed. As Comer says, “Every person we meet is a God opportunity – to love and serve. Every day is full of possible miracles. Every moment is pregnant with possibilities, if only we open our eyes.”[12]
The last three verses of the Gospel of Matthew are precisely what you would expect a first-century Jewish rabbi to tell his apprentices at the end of their training:
Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. (Mt 28:18-20a).
Now it’s our turn. “Come, and see! Come and die! Come and rise!”
“And remember,” says Jesus, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt 28:20b).
Sermon 798 copyright © 2025 Rod Benson. Preached at North Rocks Community Church, Sydney, Australia, on Sunday 9 March 2025. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Christian Standard Bible (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020).
References
[1] John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did (Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook Press, 2024), 127.
[2] Robert J. Karris, Eating Your Way Through Luke’s Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 14.
[3] Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge, 2010), quoted in Comer, Practicing the Way, 129.
[4] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key (Wheaton: Crossway, 2018), 11.
[5] Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (New York: Image, 1986), 66. Nouwen describes the second of these “movements” as a move from hostility to hospitality.
[6] Comer, Practicing the Way, 136.
[7] Comer, Practicing the Way, 136f.
[8] Comer, Practicing the Way, 138-143.
[9] Comer, Practicing the Way, 143f.
[10] Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 98f.
[11] John Dickson, Promoting the Gospel: A Practical Guide to the Biblical Art of Sharing Your Faith (Sydney: Blue Bottle Books, 2005), 51f.
[12] Comer, Practicing the Way, 149.
Image source: Immigrant’s Table
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