16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Matthew 28:16-20
In Matthew’s gospel this is the only account we have of the risen Christ speaking with his disciples. But they are vital words for the churches mission. Words that point us to Jesus’ work done Jesus’s way.
Each part of what Jesus says is vital.
All authority has been given to him.
All. Jesus is lord over everyone and everything. He has the right to command everyone. We are to submit to Jesus’ rule – and everyone should do this. Jesus claim is to universal total rule. He is the king, and to him every knee will bow.
He has the right to tell us how to live. He has the right to tell us what is right and wrong. He decides. Not us. But note also that if he is lord, we are not. Christians don’t get to order others how to live. Instead notice how the mission is carried out.
Therefore, as you go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. I’ve deliberately translated ‘as you go’ to highlight that the imperative verb here is ‘make disciples’. It is almost as if the ‘going’ is assumed. Disciples will go. They will move to wherever Jesus’s mission calls them. To be a disciple is to be on the move. Then to be a disciple is to make disciples of all nations. Disciples need to be on the move because they need to see all nations coming to Christ.
That may mean a long move, but it may also not need us to go very far. There are many nations right now in the hotel up the road from us who have fled to the UK from persecution and trouble at home. Where we lived before there were many nations studying in the universities. Many nations working in all sorts of vital roles. All churches need to be welcoming to people from other nations, and show them God’s love in all sorts of practical ways. As Christians our own nations are incidental. We have a higher loyalty – to Christ and his kingdom.
As they go to the nations disciples are to make disciples by baptizing and teaching. Baptism is a symbol of the first response disciples make on the journey of discipleship – a death to self and a rising to new life in Christ. It implies that disciples have explained the message of Jesus and told of the risen Christ, so that others want to repent and believe – summed up for Matthew in the idea of baptism.
This baptism is in the name (singular) of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – the three members of the Trinity. The gospel writers don’t make the idea of Trinity explicit in their work – but they do show us the Trinity in action. Earlier in his gospel Matthew has told us of Jesus’s baptism where the Son was baptized and as the Son was baptized the Father spoke from heaven and the Spirit descended like a dove. Matthew has shown us the three in action together. And so baptism from the earliest times makes sure that new disciples know something of the mystery of the Triune God.
These disciples have to be taught – everything Jesus has taught the first disciples originally. This stems from Jesus’s authority over all. Jesus teaches his disciples to teach other disciples everything that Jesus taught them. We don’t need to teach the world to obey all of Jesus’s individual teachings – the world cannot obey those until it submits to him as Lord. Rather we live in whatever situations we are called to as the community of disciples who show Jesus’s love and compassion in our actions to those around us and cause them to want to know what it is we believe and why it has such an impact. We teach them, by word and deed, what it means for Jesus to be our Lord, so that they will want to live with him as their Lord too.
And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. As we do that, Jesus promise remains. The NIV translates the word older translations (and the ESV) translate as “behold” – a word we don’t use any more – as “surely”, emphasising the truth of his promise. More fundamentally the “behold” is a word that means “pay attention to this” – “pay attention to this” says Jesus – I am with you every day, until the completion of the age.
Jesus is with his disciples as they go about making disciples of others. He is always with us. He is not physically present now, but he is here by his Spirit. He is with us. The great promise of the Bible is that God comes to live with his people. We know that by faith now, and one day we too will see the Risen Jesus when he comes to restore all things. Until that day we can be those who can live out our lives of obedience to Jesus as we show others and help others to be his disciples too.
Our discipleship stands in line with those first disciples who heard Jesus give them this commission. We stand with them as those who have encountered the risen Christ, and we seek to live out his life in our world that the world might see and believe.
Joshua's Tree Rooted 