Jet aircraft revolutionised travel. Journeys which took weeks by sea, and days by noisy and uncomfortable piston-engined planes, can now be taken swiftly, smoothly and – yes – cheaply by jet. We think little (although we should, because of the environmental impact of air travel) about boarding a jet airliner as we journey for business, go off on our holidays, visit our families in distant lands or follow our favourite sports. Indeed, boarding an aircraft with whirling propellers (which may in fact also be jet-powered) feels like taking a step into the past. Jet planes are an amazing technical achievement, yet we take them for granted.

The first jet-powered flights took place about 80 years ago but the early engines were unreliable, fuel thirsty, and feeble: the very first practical one, Frank Whittle’s W1 of 1943, produced just a few hundred pounds of thrust or “oomph”. Nevertheless, that was sufficient to power its little research plane at nearly 400 mph – as fast as a fighter of the day. Just 7 years later the Olympus engine, developed for bombers, was giving a thrust of 10,000 lbs, or nearly 5 tons. Development continued apace; the engines fitted to Concorde each produced 15 tons of thrust, while the vastly more efficient ones on Boeing Dreamliners give over 35 tons. But all of this fades into insignificance if we think of the rocket motors installed in NASA’s new Super-Heavy Lifter. These each develop over 1400 tons of thrust and are the most powerful motors ever built.

That word “thrust” is probably not one that many of us knew half a century ago, certainly not as a measure of power: we were much more familiar with good old-fashioned horsepower! But it’s an excellent word which, to me, reeks of power and impetus and force. When something is being thrust forward, the force behind seems almost impossible to resist.

We obviously don’t associate Jesus with jet engines or aircraft; yet he once used a word which could very well be translated into English as “thrust”, with all those implications of energy, vigour and power. The context in which he used this word was one of mission. For, we are told, he gazed upon the teeming multitudes of Israel and realised that they were directionless and spiritually bereft, dismally let down by leaders who were busy following their own personal agendas, desperate for a sense of hope and purpose. Jesus’ heart went out to those people – indeed he almost felt sickened by their plight – so he turned to the disciples and said some familiar words: “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few; pray that God will send out reapers into the harvest”. And that word “send”, although it may not come over in our English Bibles, is in fact a word of immense strength even passion.

Let me try to explain this with a couple of pictures. If I decide to “send” a parcel to my son, there may be an element of urgency if I want it to get to its destination before his birthday the next day. But, basically, I am making a matter-of-fact business transaction with the people behind the Post Office counter: I pay my money and they get the parcel delivered. There is nothing more to my “sending” than that.

Let’s raise the stakes a little and think of a child in a school who has committed a serious misdemeanour. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? – they get sent to see the Headteacher. There’s far more of an element of compulsion there: the child won’t be looking forward to their talking-to but has no choice in the matter. “Sending” here means “being pushed in the right direction”.

Taking things further still, let’s imagine an Army unit made up, not of volunteer soldiers, but of conscripts. When the time comes for the troops to go to the Front Line – and possibly face death – they must obey their orders. They are being “sent” into battle; refusal to comply could well mean court-martial, prison or even a firing squad.

Of course there’s no way that I’d liken Jesus to a military leader, more interested in strategic objectives than in his soldiers’ wellbeing. Nor do I want to think of him as a hard taskmaster whose orders must be obeyed implicitly and without thought: although he may command his disciples, those commands always involve love. Nevertheless, I want to emphasise that the word which Jesus uses here, telling the disciples to pray for God to “send out” workers to bring in the harvest, is an exceedingly strong one in its original Greek. I’ve already hinted that it could well be translated “thrust out”, but even that isn’t good enough. The full idea is of asking God to “push” or “boot out” people into his work of mission; the word’s literal meaning is to “throw out”.

So why did Jesus use this word? It clearly wasn’t because he thought his disciples were rubbish; quite the opposite, he desperately wanted them to be involved in his work. Well, I think that he spoke like this for two possible reasons. One came from his assessment of the people he’d been observing: he regarded their predicament as serious, he was aware of their spiritual destitution and need, his emotions told him that they were about to ‘go under’ and that folk must be found to minister to them without delay. In this sense – though his switch from the “leaderless sheep” metaphor to one of “ripe corn” seems bizarre and I wonder if Matthew was combining two traditions of what Jesus said – Jesus was behaving like a farmer who sees his wheat field ready and is in a panic as he phones up the combine harvester people: “Look, I must have the machine tomorrow or else my harvest will spoil. There’s absolutely no time to lose”. Although Jesus was not panicking, there was an intensity about his words which stemmed directly from the situation he could see before him. And he took immediate action: he gathered his disciples, he told them that they had divine authority to drive out evil spirits and heal sickness, and he “sent them to the lost sheep of Israel”. It sounds like a “dry run” of the “Great Commission” which we talked about last week.

So Jesus used forceful language because he felt that “something had to be done” and quickly; but I think he also used it because he knows that God’s people can be unwilling to get involved in mission. I suspect, in fact, that the word “mission” fills us with dread, and I think I know why that is: it means moving out of the safety of the Christian community, it disturbs the routine of comfortable church life, it suggests that we must mix with people who we’d usually pass by, it could mean us literally getting our hands dirty, and it implies that we must talk to others about faith, which we usually think of as a private matter. Many Christians say, “That’s the Minister’s job” – without realising that the Minister finds doing mission just as hard as everyone else, even with a clerical collar acting as a spiritual passport that opens the doors of conversation! Most of us need a good shove into doing God’s work, and Jesus knows it.

Now, Jesus spoke of the people he saw as “a crop ready for harvest” – which is a phrase I don’t much like as it sounds a bit patronising and impersonal. However it may well have been entirely appropriate for his land and his day – we all know how people chased after him wherever he went, seeking healing and wholeness and hanging on to every word of his preaching. However modern Britain, even with its many desperate needs which, I have to say, some politicians seem to dismiss but which churches, among others, may feel impelled to meet, is surely not ripe for a spiritual harvest. We know that most people have little time for God – indeed, many are quick to criticise religion, claiming that it is divisive, abusive and responsible for many of our world’s ills. So, if we’re talking about “mission” in the narrow sense of evangelism rather than social care, we might say that there’s little point in us taking the Gospel message to folk around us, as we know it will almost certainly be politely ignored or even angrily rejected. Our words won’t be seed that falls on good ground but seed that falls on unyielding concrete paths. So we’d contradict Jesus’ words and say that there’s no need to rush into reaping God’s harvest, as we know that the yield will be sparse or non-existent.

But we mustn’t excuse ourselves from our responsibility. If Jesus could get worked up and sickened by the needs of the ‘sheep without a shepherd’ who were crying out for help, and if we can watch the television news and become angry or distressed, shouldn’t we be even more exercised and energised by the spiritual apathy and indifference which we so often see around us? The danger for the modern Church isn’t that we become over-enthusiastic about mission, to the exclusion of all else, but that we become indifferent and say to ourselves, “It doesn’t matter” or “It’s not my job”. We are rightly concerned for the physical needs of the poor, the homeless, the unemployed and the abused although – and I point the finger at myself here – it’s far easier to talk about them than to actually get involved in a practical way; we are also rightly worried about peoples’ emotional and mental health, especially since Covid. But do their spiritual needs stir and trouble us in the same way? Perhaps not.

I think that most churches have lost the sense of divine compulsion which so spurred our forebears to get involved in mission of every kind, both in Britain (think of William Booth’s shocking book about “Darkest England”) and further afield (those missionary tales of derring-do we may have enjoyed as children). Perhaps we’ve lost our urgency because, by and large, most people’s standard of living is much better than it was a hundred years ago; the cramped rookeries and cellars of our cities and the hovels that passed for country cottages have been replaced by social housing and medical care for everyone on the NHS. Even though our public services are now crumbling and we’ve become aware of some very real needs in recent years, we may still feel that the State can (and indeed should) relieve us from much of the responsibility of caring.

More significantly still, today’s Christians are no longer driven by the fear of divine punishment and hellfire which were so often the impulse for churches to engage in mission; as one evangelist said, “Some live within the sound of church or chapel bell, but I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell”. If we genuinely believe, as the hymn says, that souls are dying and passing into night, then we will move heaven and earth to try and save them. Perhaps, in our honourable desire to understand God as loving and kind to everyone, we’ve lost the stimulus which makes us warn people of the consequences of not following him.

You may think that I have drifted away from the word “thrust” I was talking about at the beginning of this message. But I haven’t, for our English word “mission” comes from a Latin root which means “being sent” (just as “apostle” comes from a Greek word with much the same meaning). As Christians who take God seriously, we must realise that our God is a missionary God who only sends us out to his world after first sending his own Son into it. If we feel that doing mission is difficult, disruptive or uncomfortable, we should reflect on what it meant for Jesus to obey his Father’s commission, leaving the glories of heaven to live (and die) in this mucky, painful world. God’s mission can cost.

Mission is absolutely central to the life and existence of God’s Church. This local church – like every church – always runs the risk of forgetting about it, of becoming self-centred and concentrating its efforts in the pleasurable activities that go on within this building. Of course that’s a harsh and ill-informed judgement on what we do; nevertheless it’s all too easy to think that people will come flocking to us to hear the Gospel message when, in fact, our responsibility is to take it out to them. We can never be complacent; although the work of mission is indeed God’s, it will only take place to the extent that his people obey his command and allow themselves to be thrust into his harvest-field. For our God is both a Master who sends and a Saviour who loves to gather in.