What is the Mission of the 12 Apostles?
What if the angel Gabriel showed up at the foot of your bed in the middle of the night and said, “I’ve got a surprise for you. Tonight, you can come with me into any scene from the scriptures you want to.” Where would you go? For me, hands down, I’m telling Gabriel “floor it my angelic friend to Pentecost!”
We read in the Acts of the Apostles, that after the resurrection, the apostles were told by Jesus not to depart from Jerusalem. He said to them wait “for the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak; for John baptized with water, but in a few days, you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Now the apostles had seen countless miracles at the hands of Jesus, and even at their own when Jesus had sent them out on previous missions. Even so, everything was about to change for the Apostles, and everyone among the 120 who were in the upper room at Pentecost.
For on the day of Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit clothed the disciples with the power that Jesus told them they would receive. A power that emboldened them like never before and set their hearts on fire, in order to set the world on fire with his love. The same fire, through the same Holy Spirit, burns in disciples who are hungry to pursue the Great Commission Jesus gave the Church in Matthew 28, go and make disciples of all nations.
If Gabriel were to take me to Pentecost tonight, I would imagine that once back home, after experiencing the glorious power of the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost, I would have a fresh desire to live in that power! I’d probably become aware as well of how often I didn’t live open to the power of the Holy Spirit and how often I ignored the promptings of the Holy Spirit to evangelize. In my opinion, there’s typically two reasons we don’t follow through in such moments. First: the Spirit actually stops our well-intended impulse to evangelize for a divine reason unknown to us. Second: we quench the Spirit’s invitation. Which keeps us from living life in the Spirit to the fullest, with our hearts wide-open to letting heaven crash into earth through the power of the Gospel proclaimed authentically in love. To think that the Holy Spirit doesn’t want our lives to be ablaze with His presence is a theology and spirituality that is lacking a receptivity to what Jesus said to his disciples: you will be clothed with power!
The mission of the 12 apostles was mammoth! As they watched Jesus ascend into heaven with “Go and make disciples of all nations” still ringing in their ears, perhaps they were thinking, ‘I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but I trust in the Lord.’ When Pentecost finally came, tongues of fire appeared over the heads of those in the upper room and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. “Filled with the Holy Spirit” — think about that for a moment, “filled!” That’s our life in Christ if we want it! So let’s absolutely abandon today any habits of ours that dampen our enthusiasm and hunger for life filled with the Holy Spirit. For that is what our life in Christ is meant to be.
The apostles proclaimed the Gospel overflowing with God’s power and love, they were unable to contain it! They took it to the streets with words from heaven on their lips. They are the best witnesses to us of how to live with the zeal of the Holy Spirit filling us with love for God and for our neighbor. For God has first loved us and when we fill our hearts with the treasure of this love, we can’t keep it to ourselves…we get hungry to share it…to evangelize.
The 12 apostles also had help in their mission of evangelization. Of course, there were many others with them on the Day of Pentecost, including the Blessed Mother! Yet we also remember names like Apollos, Lydia, Prisca and Aquila, Barnabas, Silas, and Paul himself — along with many others — who played key roles in the mission of the Church in her earliest days. These figures, some of whom were ordained clergy and others who were not, were known in the early church as “apostles” and “prophets.” The hierarchy — literally sacred order — of the Church, doesn’t exclude anybody from mission. Rather, it empowers every member for mission!
The mission of the 12 Apostles remains in the Church to this day. We read in the Catechism that, “the whole Church is apostolic, in that she remains, through the successors of St. Peter and the other apostles, in communion of faith and life with her origin: and in that she is sent out into the whole world.” So while the Church is apostolic in that she is built on the foundation of the apostles and continues to be guided by the successors of the apostles, we can be confident that the Lord truly calls each of us to the joy of Holy Spirit-inspired evangelization. Their mission is our mission because Jesus has given the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations to the entire Church.