As he is about to ascend into heaven, Our Lord Jesus commissions his disciples to carry forward the mission of the Church, which is essentially the continuation of His own threefold mission as Priest, Prophet, and King.
The triple mission of Christ
The Letter of St. Paul to the Hebrews describes Jesus as our High-Priest according to the order of Melchizedek (Heb 5:10). The role of a priest is to offer sacrifice. Jesus offered the pure and perfect sacrifice of his own body on the altar of the Cross for the forgiveness of sins and renews that same sacrifice on the holy altar at every Mass.
St. Peter identifies Jesus as the Prophet foretold by Moses, who said: “The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet from your brethren as he raised me up. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you” (Acts 3:22). Jesus is our New Moses, our great Teacher who proclaims the Truth of the Gospel and indicates the Way that leads to salvation. For he himself is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6).
The people of Israel proclaim the Kingship of Jesus on Palm Sunday. His triumphal entry into the city of Jerusalem fulfills the prophecy of Zechariah: “Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass” (Matt 21:5). Jesus is the Son of David, the eternal King of Israel. He rules by right of birth and by right of conquest over every heart, every home, every people, and every nation.
The vocation of the laity
The mission of the Church is to carry on this threefold mission of Christ. The clergy and religious have their own role to play in fulfilling this mission within the Church, but so do the laity:
“These faithful are by baptism made one body with Christ and are constituted among the People of God; they are in their own way made sharers in the priestly, prophetical, and kingly functions of Christ; and they carry out for their own part the mission of the whole Christian people in the Church and in the world” (Lumen Gentium [LG] 31).
What is the vocation of the laity? First of all, it is not lay ecclesial ministry. To fulfill your vocation as a lay person, you do not have to become a lector or an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion or a catechist for the religious education program. Those are all ways of helping the priest to fulfill his mission in the Church, but they are not ways of fulfilling your mission as a lay person in the Church.
Don’t get me wrong; priests often need help with various things around the parish in order to fulfill their mission, and most of them are tremendously grateful for the assistance that lay people can provide. But assisting the clergy is not the primary vocation of the laity. The laity have their own mission in the Church and in the world, for which they are better equipped than the clergy or religious. That mission is to sanctify, evangelize, and Christianize the secular world:
“The laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven. In this way, they may make Christ known to others, especially by the testimony of a life resplendent in faith, hope, and charity. Therefore, since they are tightly bound up in all types of temporal affairs, it is their special task to order and to throw light upon these affairs in such a way that they may come into being and then continually increase according to Christ to the praise of the Creator and the Redeemer” (LG 31).
The triple mission of the laity
As members of the Church, the laity share in the mission of the Church, which is the continuation of the priestly, prophetic, and kingly mission of Christ. Hence the laity also have a triple mission that they must fulfill in the Church and in the world.
The priestly mission of the laity is to sanctify the world through the offering of spiritual sacrifices: “For all their works, prayers and apostolic endeavors, their ordinary married and family life, their daily occupations, their physical and mental relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne — all these become ‘spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ’ (1 Pet 2:5)” (LG 34).
The prophetic mission of the laity is to evangelize the world by giving witness to Jesus Christ through both words and deeds: “The laity go forth as powerful proclaimers of a faith in things to be hoped for when they courageously join to their profession of faith a life springing from faith. This evangelization, that is, this announcing of Christ by a living testimony as well as by the spoken word, takes on a specific quality and a special force in that it is carried out in the ordinary surroundings of the world” (LG 35).
The royal mission of the laity is to Christianize the secular world by subjecting the whole temporal order to the rule of Christ the King: “The laity have the principal role in the overall fulfillment of this duty. Therefore, by their competence in secular training and by their activity, elevated from within by the grace of Christ, let them vigorously contribute their effort, so that created goods may be perfected by human labor, technical skill, and civic culture for the benefit of all men according to the design of the Creator and the light of His Word. May the goods of this world be more equitably distributed among all men, and may they in their own way be conducive to universal progress in human and Christian freedom. In this manner, through the members of the Church, will Christ progressively illumine the whole of human society with His saving light” (LG 36).
The whole intention of our diocesan evangelization initiative to Go Make Disciples can be summed up as an effort to empower the laity to take up their proper mission to sanctify, evangelize, and Christianize the secular world in which we live, beginning with our own families and local communities, extending all the way to our nation and the world.