Christ's Commission to His Apostles.
Introduction. These words present four objects: Work, Workmen, a Field for Work, and the Divine Master of the workmen.
I. Work. The work is preaching the Gospel. The power of speech is a wondrous faculty of man, lifting him above all speechless creatures, and placing him near to that God by whose word the heavens were made, and who created all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. Speech is reason's younger brother, and "a most kingly prerogative of man." It is a conduit through which a man's thoughts, and purposes, and feelings, flow out to his fellows. It is a window through which you may see into another's spirit. It is a key by which you may unlock the door of another's heart. It is a hammer by which you may break the purposes and the resolutions of others; and a fire by which you may ignite the passions of one man or of many; and by which you may consume the wood, hay, and stubble, of false notions and of erroneous opinions.
II. Look at the Workmen. Eleven are specially addressed. Judas is not here. Where is he? But who are these? They are all the children of Abraham concerning the flesh, and have been brought up under the various religious institutions of the Holy Land. This was, to some extent, education for their work, especially for their work among their own people. They had been taken from the least refined of the provinces of the Holy Land, and from the people whom the southerners despised for their illiterateness and coarseness; from the district, however, in which Jesus Christ had Himself been brought up. This gave them sympathy with the common people, if not influence over them. They were men of ordinary secular occupations; several were fishermen, one was a tax-gatherer. There was not a priest among them, not a scribe, not a ruler. The acceptableness of their work and their success would be entirely independent of riches, or of high rank, or of elevated position, in any respect.
III. Look at the Sphere of their Toil. The dispensations of Divine mercy had for centuries been chiefly, if not entirely, confined to one people and to one land. God's priests ministered exclusively to the people in this land. God's prophets spoke almost entirely to the people in this land. But now preachers of a glorious Gospel are to leave this people and this land, and are to go into all the world. They are to begin their work in Jerusalem, and are to heap coals of fire upon the heads of the enemies of their Master, but Jerusalem is not to detain them. They are to labour in Judæa, and Samaria, and Galilee; but they may not tarry for life there, they are to go to the uttermost parts of the earth. The world is the sphere of these workmen's work. The world without the limitations of country, or of climate; the world without the distinctions of barbarism, and civilisation, and bondage, and freedom; the world irrespective of the boundaries of the world's kingdoms; the world as they saw it, Egypt, and the Isles of the Sea, and Greece, and Rome; the world as Jesus saw it, with America in His eye, although yet undiscovered; as He saw it from north to south, and from east to west.
IV. The Master of the Workmen. He who saith, "Go," came into the world. He who saith, "Go ye," Himself came; came not by deputy or proxy, but Himself came. He is the manifestation of the love of God; the Christ who died for the ungodly; the Jesus who was born to save, and whom God hath exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour. He who saith, "Go unto the world to every creature," is the propitiation for the sins of the world.
S. Martin, Rain upon the Mown Grass.
The Church of the Future.
If the Gospel is to be universal; if, in other words, Christ's ideas of human nature and human duty, and Divine nature and activity, are to become universal; it is because they have in them an adaptation to every stage and development of humanity, as to manner and customs from the lowest dawn of intelligence clear through to the time when we shall have scoured the heavens, and shall have understood the liturgy of every star, and when we shall know around and around the horizon everything that is within its bounds.
Consider what the realm of the Gospel is.
I. It is universal, universal in respect to time, universal in respect to place, and universal in respect to conditions. That which constitutes the marrow of the Gospel fits itself to human nature and human want everywhere and always. It declares (1) that all men are imperfect by ignorance, by infirmity, by weakness, and by voluntary wrong; (2) it assumes the universal adaptability of men to increment, to development, or increased knowledge; (3) it declares that God is a being setting Himself forth, in so far as a disclosure is made of His Nature, as the sun is set forth. The sun is to the world the centre of all life. God is the Sun; or, to take away the figurative construction of it, God is the Father.
II. The simplicity of the Gospel is only such in appearance. It has taken hold of the great root-facts of human existence, human nature, and human destiny. It emphasizes them. It does not organise a church. Christ never organised a Church, nor did He ever leave a plan on which the Apostles should organise a Church. Why should He have done so? The moment you bring men together with a common purpose it is a part of their very nature and competency to develop an organisation according to their want. Give to men a sense of their superiority; let them feel the swell of possible manhood; let them come under the consciousness of God's presence and love; let the same feeling be developed in them that God has toward them and the social principle will make its own terms and gatherings. So as fast as men need this or that mode of worship they can supply it for themselves. There is no need of supplying it for them. The vast baggage which religion has brought down through the ages has been one of the great hindrances to the spread of the Gospel, and it will be one of the great hindrances to the spread of the Gospel to the end of time. Until you can take away sanctity from churches, from ordinances, from man-made creeds, and from every external observance, you have the Gospel in chains: it is not free; it is in bondage.
H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 25.
References: Mark 16:15. C. Girdlestone, Twenty Sermons,3rd series, pp. 303, 317; Preacher's Monthly,vol. vii., p. 285; A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve,p. 536. Mark 16:15; Mark 16:16. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. x., No. 573; vol. xv., No. 900; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iv., p. 225.Mark 16:15-20. H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man,p. 391.