Either/Or

Extrovert/introvert, head/heart, optimist/pessimist – there are endless ways we seek to categorise ourselves and others. Many of them are thoroughly binary; you have to be one thing and NOT another, but what about 2 Bible terms? Which are you – Disciple, or Apostle?

You may well have thought these were just 2 words for the same thing but they absolutely aren’t. A disciple is one who learns (from the Latin discipulus – ‘a pupil, student, follower’); and to be a disciple implies not just that you are learning by rote from someone’s teachings but that you are learning to imitate their life and demeanour, to become like them.

An apostle, in contrast, is ‘one who is sent, an emissary, an ambassador’ (from the Greek apóstolos), someone with a mission.

This isn’t a matter of rank or ‘promotion’. A disciple doesn’t become an apostle the way a cadet becomes a soldier. In the Gospels, the disciples are sent off to spend time as apostles, out in the world, displaying Christ’s compassion to the many who need it, but they then return to being disciples, listening and learning from Jesus, and seeing his teachings brought to life in his actions.

This double job description is what all Christians inherit – we too are appointed as both disciples and apostles. We should always be wanting to learn, trying to understand more, knowing we never have all the answers but seeking to imitate Jesus better as we are sent out to serve others. Jesus doesn’t call us to be mere ‘church-goers’ but to be his messengers to those who would never enter our church buildings, ambassadors for a King who does not sit above or apart from his people, nor who appears only to his chosen courtiers, sitting safely in our ‘palaces’, but who longs to sit with people wherever they are.

Christian life should be a beautiful, continuous cycle of absorbing and giving. As disciples we seek to learn our lessons from our infinitely compassionate teacher, and from others whose words and lives together speak truly of him. Then as apostles we pass on, in turn, our messages of what we are learning about healing and forgiveness, hope and love; all of us, called to be compassionate ambassadors for our endlessly compassionate God.

Revd Kate McFarlane