We just had Easter Sunday, but I’m going to ask you to think 40 days into the future from that event – to the moment of Ascension. In that moment, recorded in Acts 1, we hear Jesus tell His disciples that they will receive power from the Holy Spirit and that they will be “My witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the Earth.”
You can imagine the oddity of this statement as Jesus is lifted up in the air by the power of God to a vantage point like that of the International Space Station. If we were to film this moment from the perspective of Christ, it would bring reveal something of what He was telling His disciples. “Go to the ends of the earth…” He says, and as the camera view gets higher and higher, we begin to see the roundness of the earth revealed. As it gets even higher still, we see the irony of His statement and command — that the earth has no ends.
So when Christ tells those disciples on the Mount of Olivet that they should go to the “ends of the earth,” it’s clear that the command isn’t just for them. Going to “the ends of the earth” with the Gospel is not a task that is ever finished – not by them, not by us. As soon as you think it is, we go around the curve once more and find the Gospel proclamation needed on “new” soil where we have already been.
This is the case in our world today. I remember a time when I was younger and it was popular to puzzle over this command of Christ when it seemed like the Gospel had reached to at least almost all of the indigenous peoples of the world. But God’s command isn’t just for indigenous peoples in some far away land – it is for us and for our neighbors. Even if we arrived on a day when we could say that every person on the earth had heard the Gospel, we would find that 385,000 babies had been born that day who needed to hear the good news of Jesus.
When Christ tells us to go to the ends of the earth, He does it with a bit of a wink and a smile, knowing that this means our work is never done until He comes back. This going to the ends of the earth will be our sermon series for the Easter season as we consider what it means for us to be on this never-ending quest that Christ sends us on. So let us see together what is around this next corner of our going to the “ends of the earth” with the life saving Gospel of His Resurrection and what that means for us.