A Theological Culture for Ministry Education TCTS Commencement Address 2017 Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’
Mark 10.28-31
Baptism and the ‘unfolding discovery of an unexpected vocation.’ ‘Look we have left everything to follow you.’ This verse and those that immediately follow in St Mark’s gospel, are a fitting backdrop to an address reflecting on ministry education and formation. The statement and Jesus response seems to imply that maybe there was an unspoken underlying question: ‘What more do you want of me?’ This is probably our natural response when we, like the disciples, think we are simply being asked to add something more to what we want to be doing. But actually, what Jesus is inviting here in this brief section from Mark’s gospel is not an invitation to do a bit here and there for God, as if to help him out. If this was the case, then naturally we would end up bemoaning and begrudging our time: ‘What more do you want of us?’ However, Jesus wants our life, that is to put all we are and all we do consciously within God’s presence, into the hands of the enabling God, and to see transformation for the better. Even the good things we do, people we love, relationships we cherish, into these these hands, for blessing to mysteriously arise. So this is an invitation, we might say, to ‘let go and let God!’ In relation to discipleship or our shaping as Christians this is more about re-birth, new creation, becoming new persons and the journey following is not about giving spare bits of time here and there but openness to God; it's about allowing transformation, becoming new persons and having our character formed by Christ. This is why we refer to baptism, that experience, remembered or not, but still a reality in which God met us in Christ. Baptism is an action that reminds us about and enables our ‘letting go and letting God.’ If we don't live into that kind of baptism then of course we are going to be bemoaning that Christ is asking more of us on top of everything else we do; an add-on rather that a lifelived.
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