Who's an Apostle?

Early this morning – actually very early, I was visited by a memory of a time I was asked what an apostle was.  It is interesting and perhaps revealing what memories arrive unsought in the wee hours of the morning.   That time is often referred to as the witching hour for good reason.  They often seem to be memories of events that are not high on the agenda of things that you want the world to know about.  That was not necessarily so in this case.

My response to the question was, “an apostle was someone who has seen the risen Christ.”  Now this is not what might be called the usual definition.  The word usually refers to the disciples of Jesus particularly those who were sent to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ and evangelise.  The entry in Wikipedia notes:

An apostle (/əˈpɒsəl/), in its most literal sense, is an emissary, from Greek ἀπόστολος (apóstolos), literally "one who is sent off", from the verb ἀποστέλλειν (apostéllein), "to send off".^[1] The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation; other common translations include "ambassador" and "envoy"

My answer to the question of apostleship was one that I didn’t give much thought to at the time either before or after giving it.  It was based on the apostleship of Paul who claimed that he was an apostle based on his vision of Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus which occurred after the resurrection. 

He makes this claim to being an apostle a number of times including the opening salutation in this letter to the Romans, “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,”.  The criterion for seeing the resurrected Jesus is also address in the first chapter of Acts by Peter:

So one of the men who have accompanied us throughout the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.’ (Act 1:21-22)

My early morning musings led me to wonder if this is a good definition for Christians today.  After all none of us were there during the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension.  And very few of us can claim to have has a Road to Damascus experience like Paul.  So, what can it mean to have seen the resurrected Christ in our lives today?

If we take St. Paul as a model or type of the modern Apostle, Paul had his life completely changed from a fervent persecutor of the first followers of Jesus, to someone who can be seen as responsible for establishing what became the Christian Church.  After all, Jesus Christ did not set out to found the new religion of Christianity.  Paul understood that his vision of the risen Christ was a call to metanoia - to repentance.   He followed that understanding with action and changed his whole life.  Actually, he didn’t change completely.  He was just as fervent and dedicated – you might say fanatical - after the experience as before, just in a good way.

We can see the risen Christ in our lives as a call to repentance – a call to change course in our lives when it goes off course and misses the mark.  When our lives run into roadblocks to becoming the people God created us to be, we can watch for those signs of the risen Christ who comes and set us straight – probably not in as extreme a way as in Paul’s case -- but perhaps it might just be in another way that is hard to ignore.  Above all we can put these experiences into how we live our lives as Paul did.

That will be a true blessing on your journey.