Mission Irony

This Sunday at my parents’ church, in honor of Missions, a parishioner whom I’ll call “R” told about his recent trip to the local Veterans Affairs hospital to “minister” in the waiting room.

He’s a large man, physically imposing yet soft spoken, who experienced a high-impact conversion a number of years ago and has been tearfully grateful ever since.

At the hospital, his Gideon New Testament in his back pocket, R chose the middle of five vacant seats, and waited. Soon there entered a tall man with long hair, piercings every which way, Vietnam badges patched all over, and grubby. R said a quick prayer assuring God that this man wasn’t the one he was supposed to talk to.

“He talked too loud,” said R. “Everyone in the whole place could hear him. And guess where he came to sit–right beside me. He looked at me and he said, ‘How are you serving God today?'”

Since my theoretical qualm with missionaryism is that evangelizers don’t necessarily hold any more divine truth than the evangelized, this story was a refreshing burst of irony, an irony that I see as meaningfully parallel to that of the biblical stories of the woman at the well and the Bethesda healing.

In the woman at the well story in John 4, Jesus asks a religious and cultural underdog for a life-giving drink; she proclaims that he is a prophet. Truth wells from the invalidated? How ironic.

The irony in John 5 falls into the form of sarcasm. Jesus heals an invalid and instructs him to carry away his mat. The healed man protests to the accusing established religious authorities that he was only breaking the Sabbath’s anti-work rule because his healer had told him to carry the mat. Later, Jesus and the man meet up again, and I can just hear Jesus virtually spitting out the words of verse 14 in contempt: “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

In my dad’s version of the Bible, by this verse’s word “sin” is scrawled, “What does this imply?” I’ve always heard that maybe the man was paralyzed because of sin, or he was healed but still sinful. Hearing Jesus speak this sentence contemptuously puts “sin” into a different light that condemns religious establishment as so skewed that its own truth and exclusivity shuts out real truth and freedom. Through his sarcasm Jesus is saying, “Yeah, right, you’re such a sinner. Whatever. Don’t cross those sinless people ever again, or they’ll do worse than scold you, in order to prop up their self-made, righteous authority!”

Could the healed man taste biting sarcasm?

In some way I think this is not unconnected to Peter’s Acts 10 vision of the sheet descending from heaven. About to be confronted with Gentile contact, Peter was instructed not to write off the unclean, for it just may be clean. While this challenges us today to reconsider that which many in the church have labeled unclean (homosexuality, perhaps?), it also calls for missionaries to be open to divine activity outside of entities routinely considered divine.

In other words, it tells us to welcome the irony.