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Good morning. The word ‘ambassador’ has been much in the news in recent days. It’s a term that’s widely used. Film stars act as goodwill ambassadors for international organisations. Sports teachers tell their pupils, ‘When you’re playing an away match, you’re an ambassador for your school.’

The popular image of an ambassador is of an overdressed figurehead at a glittering reception passing chocolates around to beautiful guests. But really an ambassador is an interpreter of one country or culture to another, a bearer of messages that may or may not be well received.

Many people know what it feels like when friends split up, and trying to remain on cordial terms with both parties incurs anger, suspicion or accusation from one or both of them. It’s tough to be in the middle when two people, or countries, have lost the loving feeling. But that’s precisely what ambassadors do: they feel in their own body the pain received and inflicted by those they are mediating between.

When St Paul writes to the Corinthians he points out that this is exactly what Jesus was doing: he interposed himself between humanity and God, and got caught in the crossfire, as is likely for any intermediary. Jesus was an ambassador from God to humanity and from humanity to God.

Paul called upon the Corinthians likewise to be ambassadors of reconciliation – in other words to form communities liberated from the prison of social patronage, the curse of economic disparity and the poison of racial hostility. In a later letter Paul calls himself an ‘ambassador in chains,’ which indicates forming such communities had a significant social cost.

But it’s easy to miss the implication of what Paul is calling the Corinthians to be. Paul lived in the midst of many hatreds and enmities, as we do today. And in that context he says the single most important thing a person can do is to join a community of hope that brings enemies face to face with one another. He has a name for such a community. He calls it ‘church.’

Today we tend to assume church is a group of likeminded people who gather to share belief and activity. But for Paul, you only earn the right to use the name ‘church’ if you’re a community that’s a genuine ambassador, representing parties at enmity one to another, and bearing together the pain and hurt of misunderstanding and hostility.

To be an ambassador is to help people communicate and reconcile across profound difference. It’s seldom easy. But it’s the most important job in the world.

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