Good morning! I’d like to begin by asking a question – not a rhetorical question, but one to which I hope you can give me some real answers. And to give you time to think of how you are going to respond I’d like to tell you a story.

So first the question, and then the story.

What is the difference between a journey and a mission? Don’t answer me yet! But I hope you’ll have some answers for me later on: How is a mission different from a journey?

The story I want to tell you is one of Graham Greene’s. It comes somewhere in the middle of his delightful comic novel ‘Travels with My Aunt’. That’s a book I read very many years ago and this particular story is one that has always stayed with me.  

An unmarried butcher becomes very very rich. He has worked extremely hard all his life and when he finally retires it occurs to him that the secret of a long and happy life is travel. As he has no attachments, he decides that he’s going to set out on a journey around the world – just himself and his manservant.

He starts off in France, then moves on to Italy. However he only gets as far as Venice when disaster strikes. He has a stroke and remains paralysed. It looks as though his travel plans are at an end. However, he doesn’t give up; instead, he buys himself a huge ramshackle villa in the Veneto and moves in. This villa has exactly 52 bedrooms, and at the end of each week his manservant packs up his things and moves the still wealthy but now immobilised traveller to a different room – and thereafter he continues to journey whilst never leaving this one house.

So what has this story, the story of Graham Greene’s wealthy but paralysed traveller, to do with today’s gospel reading? At least two things, I would suggest: first, they are both stories about journeys within journeys; and secondly, they are both stories about journeys that don’t seem to go anywhere. That are oddly directionless.

First, then, journeys within journeys. The wealthy butcher wanted to travel the world: instead he is confined to a single palazzo and continues to travel within its confines. Last week we heard how Jesus begins his journey towards Jerusalem. Chapter 9 verse 51 reads ‘when the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.’ We will be accompanying Jesus on this journey, Sunday by Sunday, over the coming weeks. This week, however, we have another journey, the story of the Seventy Others who Jesus sends out ahead of him. We’ll say more about them in a minute. For now I want to look at Jesus’s own journey to Jerusalem. He doesn’t get there for another ten chapters – until chapter 19 verse 28, actually, which in our lectionary comes somewhere in early November – these 10 chapters, which we will be listening to all through the summer and through much of the autumn, make up the longest section of Luke’s gospel. Sometimes, though, it is such a meandering journey, so full of digressions, of meals and table talk, of teaching, and parables, that it’s easy to forget that we are on a journey at all.

Yet later in this same chapter, which we will hear in only a fortnight’s time, Jesus visits Mary and Martha; and they live in Bethany, which is just a few miles outside Jerusalem; but immediately after that he is back in Galilee again, and so it goes on. If you plot Jesus’s journey on a map, it’s hard to see it as a journey towards Jerusalem at all. Like the butcher’s journey from week to week through his villa, the journey to Jerusalem looks peculiarly directionless. But if this journey is not geographical, what kind of journey is it? Incidentally, the journey towards Jerusalem section of Luke’s gospel, from chapter 9 to 19, consists almost entirely of material which is either unique to this gospel, or which is shared only with Matthew. So in a sense, what we have is an narrative device for organising his material, rather than a real journey. Perhaps its purpose is to prepare the disciples, and ourselves – who are also disciples – for Jerusalem, and for what will happen to Jesus when he gets there. In the meantime though, we seem to be in something of a villa in the Veneto.

Journeys, of course, make for wonderful metaphors. Incidentally, it was only when I was preparing to speak to you today that I realised how much the journey of my life resembled the story of Graham Greens’s butcher. When I was in my twenties I became an EFL teacher – a teacher of English as a foreign language – largely because I wanted to travel the world. And for a few years I did do: however, for most of the last 30 years I’ve actually only been travelling no further than the commute between Milan and Pavia!

Indeed, for all of us, there are times when life’s journey looks more like the slow progress around a ramshackle villa in the Veneto than ‘Around the World in Eighty Days.’ But that is God’s time and we must trust it. Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. You only have to look at the map to see that if they had marched up the coast they could have gone from Egypt to Canaan in a matter of months, even with all their tents and sheep, and cooking pots and children. But God’s travel plans are not our travel plans, and we must trust that the journey of our lives is in God’s hands. Indeed, we must place the journey of our lives in God’s hands.

Travel is often seen as an adventure and it can indeed give us a sense of being alive. But journeys are not always and only exciting: they can also be boring and exhausting. Some of us dream of a job that brings with it the glamour of international travel; all too often, however, such jobs entail endless queues in airports, lonely evenings in faceless hotel rooms, and no chance to see the sights as the taxi whisks us back to the departure lounge. And finally, as Jesus reminds the seventy who he sends out, journeys can be dangerous: ‘See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.’

And that brings us back to the story within the story of today’s gospel. The story of the seventy who are sent out. It also brings us to the moment when I am going to ask for your answers to my question: what is the difference between a journey and a mission?

Acknowledge answers.

So there seem to be two essential ingredients to a mission. On a mission you have something to do. A person with a mission is person with a purpose. And someone, or something gives you that sense of purpose: you can’t just start a mission on a whim.

The seventy have been sent on a mission: Jesus sends them out in pairs ‘to every town and place where Jesus himself intends to go’. Whatever house they enter, they are to bring peace to that house. What’s more, they are to remain in those houses. They are to tell everyone, even those that reject them, that the kingdom of God has come near.

However, the question is, given the wandering journey that Luke’s Jesus is on, whether the 70 are being sent to prepare the way for our Lord in the same way, when Jesus finally enters Jerusalem, in which Peter and John are sent to prepare the upper room, or whether we are to understand the sending out of the 70 in a more metaphorical fashion. The realists will point out that the 70 returned, and what’s more they return with joy and enthusiasm: ‘Lord in your name even the Demons submitted to us’. Those who favour a more metaphorical reading will point to the literary construct of Jesus’s journey itself; there is also the absence of any concrete details as to where the appointed 70 went. Then there is the number 70 itself, which in the Book of Genesis is given as the number of the nations. All of the descendants of Noah are listed in Genesis chapter 10 and we are told that ‘from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood’. Jesus is not just concerned with his own travel arrangements as he travels to Jerusalem, but he is sending out missionaries to spread his gospel to all the nations of the earth.

The solution, surely, is not an either/or, it is a both/and. As with so much of the gospel story, what happened then, and there, is to be understood as what is happening everywhere, at all time, and that includes what is happening to us, here and now.

So what of the destination of this rather meandering talk I’ve led you on today? Simply this. If you are a Christian your life is never merely a journey; we have all been sent on a mission. If you need clarification as to what your mission is look again at today’s gospel: there are your instructions. Alternatively, you could also look at the words of Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. Today we heard this: ‘So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith’. Incidentally, I would like to draw your attention to one word in Paul’s writing, a word which is central to Paul’s teaching: and that’s the word ‘faith’.

The Greek word pistis has a much wider meaning that the English word faith: pistis means both faith and faithfulness; trust and trustworthiness – it’s a two-way street, whereas the English word faith is something of a one-way street. So part of our mission is not just to trust in God but to be trustworthy servants of God. We are called both to rely on God, but also to be reliable servants of God.

And just as the 70 who were sent out return to Jesus in joy, so we return to his table week by week, to celebrate his presence with us and to receive further instruction for the mission ahead. Perhaps that reminds us of the manservant who comes at the beginning of each week to move his master to another room in the villa. Or perhaps you will think of the way John Pritchard, the former Bishop of Oxford, used to conclude Holy Communion with these words: ‘The Worship has ended. Now let the service begin.’ 

Amen.