I realised something the other day that I think is rather
cool that got me thinking about the first evangelists. The first evangelists were
Moses and the prophets, who prophesied the coming of Messiah, the Spirit giving
them prophetic insight into a coming Messiah, Son of Man, Servant and Son of
God. Then, immediately before Jesus Messiah appeared on the scene, there is
John, the locust and honey eating, camel wearing, wilderness wandering preacher
and baptiser, sent by God to prepare the way for the Messiah, fulfilling Isaiah
40 and Malachi 3, 4. Then there is the Great Evangelist, Jesus himself, who
came preaching the āgospel of the Kingdomā calling people to repent and believe
the good news. Then there were those he selected, a motley crew of fishermen,
tax-collectors, zealots and more, and the 72, sent to preach the King and
Kingdom.
We see the first followers at work in Johnās Gospel. First,
in John 1 John the Baptist who effectively instructed Andrew and another disciple
to leave him and follow Jesus, that Jesus would increase and he decrease. Then
there is Andrew and Philip telling Peter and Nathanael the good news and
inviting them to JesusāJesus did the rest (that is evangelism in a nutshell).
Recently it dawned on me that, in Johnās account, the first mass
evangelist is not one of the āformalā āauthorisedā followers of Jesus (12
or 72); rather, and remarkably, it is a woman; and not any woman, but a
Samaritan adulterous who led most of her town to Jesus (John 4). (Remember that
Samaritans were despised). Amazingly, she is the first mass evangelist of
the messianic era saved. Not to mention that the first mass conversions is a
town of Samaritans!
Reading Luke the other day, I realised something equally fantastic.
In the Synoptic Gospels, the first person sent to preach is not one of the
12 or the 72, but the horrendously demonised man of Mark 5 fameānicknamed Legion
because he was infested with demons (a legion was around 6,000 soldiers at the
time). He was a fiercely powerful and totally uncontrollable man who
wandered naked and ranting and raving in the tombs in the region of the Gerasenesāa
seriously messed up human! Scholars arenāt quite sure of the region, but we
know it is east of the Jordan and so was a Gentile area. This is confirmed in that
they were pig-farmers. So, āLegionā was a violent, uncontrollable Gentile.
Jesus delivered him of the legion of demons, puzzling everyone ever since by
sending the demons into a herd of pigs so that they plunged into the lake and
drowned. The people of the town were decidedly unimpressed, failing to care
that āLegionā was delivered, and worried about the economic impact of Jesusā
action.
Then Jesus sent the man to tell what the Lord had done for
him in the region of the Decapolis, a set of ten cities in the region including
Damascus. In the Synoptics and especially Mark, this is an unusual move in that
Jesus usually told recipients of his ministry to keep his Messianic status
quietālikely to make sure that people didnāt get too excited about his being messiah
and seek to incite a revolution. Anyway, the thing that is so amazing is the
first Synoptic evangelist, sent out before the Twelve, is a once violent
demonised Gentile madman! Not only is he sent out, but he is sent to non-Jews
to preach, indicating that from the beginning Jesus was going to call Gentiles into
mission to preach to their own people.
What stands out is that the two mass-evangelists in John
(the Samaritan woman) and āLegionā is that they are not the sort of people you
might expect, nor are their recipients what you would expect. Both have
horrendous pasts. Neither is a Jew. One is a woman, and an adulterous to boot. One
is a demonised madman. We know now years later, that these are the sort of
people God calls! Later, a woman once infested with seven demons will be the
first evangelist of the resurrection, the evangelist to the evangelistsāMary
Magdalene.
This is typical Jesus. He was not bound by cultural
boundaries, by limits on who should or should not be ordained on the basis of
gender or their past, by peopleās past sinfulness, by social expectations, by
their ethnicity, he called whom he chose. Like God the Father who called the
murderer Moses, and who saw into the heart of David and called him to be King, Jesus
looks for the willing and open heart, sets people free, and sends them to serve
him. I am one of those people, once lost in sin. I think Jesus is fantastic!
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