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An Extraordinary Model of MissionThere is, I think, something rather striking about the instructions that Jesus gives to the seventy-two disciples in today’s Gospel. They are sent out with almost nothing: no money, no bag, no travelling equipment, not even a spare pair of sandals. They are not to linger in conversation on the road, we read. They are not to waste time worrying about where they may stay. They are simply to head out, enter a home, pronounce peace, accept hospitality, eat whatever is put in front of them, heal the sick, and announce that the kingdom of God has come near.By any stretch, it is an extraordinary model of mission. It is certainly not the sort of strategy that would find favour with most management consultants—or, dare I say it, even many in the Church. There is no organisational infrastructure, no carefully constructed communications strategy, no branding exercise, no five-year plan. There is just a group of people sent out in vulnerability, carrying the most extraordinary message of peace and of healing.And on this Feast of Saint Luke, it is good for us to take a little time to reflect and think on this.Saint Luke and a Gospel That Takes FleshAs I know that you know, Luke occupies a distinctive place in the Christian imagination. He is traditionally remembered as a physician, an evangelist, and the author of the Gospel that bears his name and of the Acts of the Apostles. He is associated with a Christianity that is attentive to the human person in all of their particularity: body as well as soul; in suffering and in hope; in poverty and in wealth; in exclusion, and also in belonging.As we read through his Gospel, we might note that it is full of those who might otherwise remain at the margins of society: the poor, the Samaritans, the sick, sinners, strangers, and those whose lives have been rendered invisible by the assumptions of respectable society.As we read through, we note also something profound in Luke’s understanding of the gospel: that it is not an abstract proposition about God, but something that happens to people. It takes flesh in human relationships, in the healing of bodies, in the restoration of dignity, in the sharing of meals, and in that most wonderful and unexpected discovery that God is already at work in places that we may well have overlooked.And so, in true Anglican style, there are three things in today’s Gospel which seem particularly important: the nature of peace; the relationship between healing and proclamation; and the extraordinary vulnerability of Christian mission.The Nature of PeaceSo let’s begin with peace.Jesus instructs his disciples that whenever they enter a house, their first words are to be: “Peace to this house.” It might come across as a conventional greeting, a polite expression of goodwill. But of course a fuller, more scriptural understanding of peace as shalom is far more substantial than that. Peace not simply as the absence of conflict, nor a private and inner feeling of tranquillity, but rather the full restoration of right relationships: with God, with one another, with the whole created order, and with ourselves. This thing that is to be pronounced is a declaration of the condition in which human beings can flourish, because all is well and as it should be.We notice that this peace is not something the disciples are called to manufacture. They do not arrive with a plan and a programme for making people peaceful. Rather, they bring with them a peace which precedes them—which is, of course, God’s gift: a gift which, having received, they are then invited to offer and share with others.There is something worth pausing on here, I think: that Christian mission does not begin with anxiety about our church’s survival, nor with a desire to make itself relevant, nor even with the conviction that it has something important to say. Rather, Christian mission begins, ultimately, with the prior action of God.Rowan Williams—who, if I am being really honest, I slig