On the mission

The Church grows and Saul and Barnabas are dispatched on a missionary journey throughout the cities around the Mediterranean in the text from the Acts of the Apostles in the Roman Catholic Lectionary today. The environment in which the Holy Spirit moved the Apostles to visit the synagogues of the region was one of commercial movement of people throughout the region. The Jewish Diaspora of this time meant that synagogues had been established throughout the territory of the Roman Empire. We are expected to be missionaries for Christ within the environment the Spirit presents to us. This is most likely to be within the realm of the possible and not necessarily a leap into activities completely foreign to our experience. Our 21^st century view of the missionary journey of Paul may assume a pioneering predisposition of these people. Paul was born in Tarsus, studied in Jerusalem, travelled to Damascus and resided in Antioch. The movement of Jews through the territory was typical. The view from our time of the Gospel of John sees a work which FriarJude Winkler comments is highly dualistic. Our struggle with dualism comes from lives which exist in the tension between liberal and conservative, new age and fundamentalism, rich and poor, and like the Gospel, good and evil. We may understand the Gospel of John as a strong assertion of the choice we need to make between darkness and light, salvation and condemnation, God and the way of the world. Our environment and experience is that we are Christians under construction. We make our direction the one prompted by the Spirit toward Jesus and set off like Paul and Barnabas to do Christianity and as we move we come closer to Jesus.