Laborers Needed

"The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few."  So says Jesus as he sends out followers to proclaim the nearness of God's coming reign.  When "The Seventy" are sent out, Jesus instructs them to tell both those who welcome them and those who don't that "The kingdom of God has come near."  And I wonder if the Church, in its preoccupation with salvation, hasn't badly neglected Jesus' command to proclaim the kingdom with the result being that laborers for this kingdom remain in woefully short supply.

When I speak of a preoccupation with salvation, I don't mean that Jesus doesn't offer such.  But too often salvation has been understood to mean nothing more that a status with regard to life after death.  And I have no doubt that this is a gross distortion of the biblical notion of salvation.  Salvation is more than a promise of something in the future.  It is a present quality of life.  As the Apostle Paul writes, we become "a new creation" in Christ.  Salvation is something lived out now.

I have become increasingly convinced in recent years that much of the Church's malaise is related to its neglecting Jesus' core message of the kingdom.  Faith became divorced from much of life, concerned with little but status.  In the worst forms of this, life on earth and creation itself become of no importance at all.  All that matters is "the life to come."

Fortunately, this is changing.  Increasingly churches are recovering the good news that the kingdom has come near, and that we are called to show this approaching new day to the world.  But many more need to hear Jesus anew on this.  As in Jesus' day, laborers for the kingdom are still hard to come by.

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