Matthew 28:16-20

Missioned to the Nations 

Matthew 28:16-20     Jesus Commissions the Disciples     

Matthew chose to speak of Jesus mysteriously, but really, present in the Church as the risen and glorified Christ. His presence would be immediate, and on-going. Matthew’s claim sits well with the inner experience of every believer.

The mountain location suggested the earlier occasions in the narrative when Matthew had sought to highlight particularly significant moments, scattered along the journey of Jesus:

• It had been on a high mountain that Matthew had situated the encounter of Jesus with Satan. There, Satan had shown him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour and promised him they could all be his, provided Jesus would fall down and worship him [4:8-9].
• It was up the mountain that Jesus had delivered his Sermon on the Mount, his outline of the life of discipleship in the new community [5:1].
• Before presenting Jesus walking on water, and hinting at his unique relationship to God, Matthew had said that, first, he went up the mountain by himself to pray [14:23].
• It was up the mountain, somewhere in Galilee, that Jesus had sat down and exercised his ministry of healing, and had fed the crowd of four thousand, thereby foreshadowing God’s outreach to the nations [15:29-39].
• Similarly, it was up a high mountain that Jesus had been transfigured before Peter, James and John, and that his message of suffering preceding death had been confirmed by the Father [17:1-8].
• On the Mount of Olives (possibly the only actual geographical mountain), he had delivered his apocalyptic discourse to his disciples. Later in Gethsemane, situated on that same mountain, he had entered into his time of trial and had prayed earnestly to his Father.

Matthew did not have any particular Galilean mountain in mind. The location would serve simply to indicate the importance of what Jesus was about to say.

The two responses of prostrating and doubting expressed the ongoing reality of Christian experience. Worship would be the response appropriate to disciples who believed the exalted status of Jesus. Doubt would be a constant reality within the community, mirroring the little faith frequently noted of the disciples earlier in the narrative. In some ways, doubt is the context from which faith arises, and to which it is the answer. Those who have never wondered may never have truly appreciated the magnitude of what they claim to believe.

Matthew’s comment recalled what Jesus had said to Peter as he began sinking into the water: You of little faith, why did you doubt?

Jesus came up to them – he took the initiative. Where had he come from? Who was this Jesus? He was the Jesus to whom, already, all authority in heaven and on earth had been given (the use of the passive voice implied that God was the one who had actively given that power and authority to him). So Jesus came as the glorified Son of Man, of whom the Book of Daniel had written:

Jesus’ unique kingship had been the focus of attention in much of the Passion narrative.

As Matthew had constructed his narrative, the Son of Man had already come, by anticipation, through his death and resurrection. His judges, the chief priests and the Jewish council, had witnessed that coming, as he had claimed they would [26:63-64].  But recognition would require “eyes that see” – and that was precisely what they lacked.

Jesus’ commission would ensure the outcome to which he had referred earlier in his apocalyptic discourse on the Mount of Olives: This good news of the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world in witness to all the nations. Then the end will come [24:14]. 

In commissioning the disciples to make disciples of all the nations, Jesus echoed the language of Daniel that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him. In sending them to make disciples of all the nations, Jesus seemed to have looked beyond individual conversions to the conversion of cultures. It is precisely in cultures, as social systems, that much of the “sin of the world” is embedded. (People tend to sin because they have learnt it from, and been strongly influenced by, the society in which they live.) Yet, the mission to whole cultures would not rule out individual conversions of people living within those cultures.

Some scholars have asked whether, by using the term nations (which the Jews reserved generally to identify non-Jewish nations), Matthew understood Jesus as sending the disciples only to the Gentile nations. Certainly, when sending the apostles out on their first experience of mission around Galilee, Jesus had clearly restricted that mission: Do not follow the road to Gentile territory; and do not go into a Samaritan town. Rather, go to the lost sheep of the House of Israel [10:5-6]. Jesus himself had focussed his attention within Israel, despite a couple of excursions over the borders. Yet, with the death and resurrection of Jesus, horizons broadened radically. 

Again, the context of Daniel seems to argue against any restrictive interpretation – Jews, too, were to be called to discipleship. Judaism was the obvious mission field of the earliest Christian communities. 

Kingdom or Community?

Throughout his life, the Kingdom had been the focus of Jesus’ teaching and activity. Indeed, he was crucified as a king. Constantly, Jesus distinguished the pseudo-values of the kingdoms of the Roman establishment and of the Jewish leaders from the true values of the Kingdom of God. He urged people to choose. He insisted that their choice be expressed in action.

For all those who choose to follow Jesus, the Kingdom of God must remain their clear focus. In making disciples of the nations, they were to call people to choose: God’s Kingdom and its values, or the kingdoms of the world and all they stood for. The mission would be opposed. Frequently, disciples would have little room to move, and little scope to make significant difference to the world in which they lived.

They could not postpone their own conversion. With those who thought similarly, they would form a small community. That community of disciples would be important. Given the power of social structures and systems, in responding to the call to conversion, people would need the support of an alternative community – the community of like-minded disciples (which Jesus had earlier referred to as his Church).

Jesus had spent time, particularly in the second half of his public ministry, forming this community of disciples. Matthew had devoted great care to gathering the teachings of Jesus on the practicalities of faithful living within that community.

Until their numbers became such that the disciples could influence the world in which they lived, their work for the Kingdom would be restricted. They would live according to Kingdom values within their community, hoping always, by example and by teaching, to call to conversion all who might listen to them and join with them.

But life in community would never become the primary focus of their being. The purpose of the Church was always to call people into God’s Kingdom.

The disciples were instructed to baptise people into the Christian community. Baptism would replace the rite of circumcision, which had previously initiated males into the People of God. But baptism, as understood by Jesus, was more than a rite of initiation. Baptism would be an undertaking to die with Jesus in order to rise with Jesus, to be criticised, persecuted and spoken against evilly [5:11], to be betrayed, hated, even tortured and put to death [24:9-10]. Accepted in baptism, that commitment would be lived out constantly in life as disciples accepted their mission to make disciples of all nations. And, as baptism further signified, in losing their lives they would find their lives – they would become ever more alive with the life of the risen Christ. 

Within the Christian community believers would share in the life of the risen Jesus, a life originating in the Father, made available through union with the Son, and empowered by the Spirit.

Matthew’s readers had been long acquainted with Father, Son and Spirit. When giving his account of the post-baptismal experience of Jesus, Matthew had spoken of a voice from heaven identifying Jesus as my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. The Spirit of God had descended from that same heaven, alighting on Jesus and, subsequently, leading him, firstly, into the wilderness, and, beyond that, into his public ministry.

In using the phrase, into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, no doubt, Matthew was adopting the formula already used by his community in the rite of baptism. In the Hebrew world, name signified the public expression of the truest, unique, and unknowable inner reality of persons. In the new world, ushered in by Jesus, baptism would bring believers into deep contact with the mystery of God.

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said: until heaven and earth disappear, not one iota or one small letter of the law will disappear until everything comes about [5:18]. With the death and the resurrection of Jesus, heaven and earth had passed away. Matthew had pointedly emphasised the apocalyptic images of earthquakes, opened graves and saints coming back to life. All had been accomplished. With Jesus’ resurrection, the letter of the Hebrew law had disappeared. Disciples now were to obey, not the Torah, but all that Jesus had enjoined on them.

The disciples were to teach the nations (or the baptised?). When Jesus had sent the twelve on their mission around Galilee, he did not commission them to teach. At that stage, they were still in the process of learning – indeed, their going on mission was one of Jesus’ ways of deepening that learning experience. But now, in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and in light, too, of their failing and their subsequent experience of being forgiven, they were at last ready to teach what they had learnt. The Jesus they were to preach was an innocent Jesus, sacrificed because of the demands of a sinful world, who returned from death to bring peace and forgiveness to his murderers. The crucified and risen Jesus illustrated, in the most perfect human way, the mystery of God.

They were to teach the nations to observe all that I enjoined on you.

Obedience can originate from different levels of a person’s psyche. At the surface level, it means simply to do what someone (external to self and with greater authority) requires.  Its focus is the action done or not done. Of itself, it does not look to the internal attitude of the one who obeys. It can include unwilling compliance, and, at times, a sense of unfreedom. Obedience, in this sense, certainly sees the requirements demanded by the other as commandments.

At a deeper level, and in line with the derivation of the word itself, to obey God means to align one’s will with the mind, will and heart of God. It means internal change and growth; and, in things that matter, it happens only over time. It is done in freedom, not simply from a genuine respect for God, but from discovering, recognising and making one’s own the values of God. It calls for an ever deepening knowledge of the heart of God, accompanied by an ever developing knowledge of one’s own heart. It may be a life-long task. It is little different from what had already been recognised by the sages of Israel and, in theory at least, was ever before the mind of all true Israelites. It had been clearly confirmed by Jesus himself [22:36-40]:

What had Jesus enjoined?

A review of the whole Gospel reveals that Jesus in fact enjoined very little. He invited; he persuaded; he called; he explained; he warned – but direct commands were few.

He reiterated the commandments that for him summed up the essence of the Jewish Torah:

In many ways, the few things he did enjoin were given at random, and can be difficult to distinguish from his invitations and his warnings (many of which, as is obvious from their context, carried more weight than commands).

Basically, the overriding task for disciples was to obey Jesus in the sense of learning to listen to his heart and to live accordingly. Such obedience would be a lifelong task. He wished to form his disciples in such a way that they would obey him in the same way that he had obeyed his Father – freely, intelligently and joyfully. 

Learning Obedience from Jesus’ Example

Jesus and his Father. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus insisted that he had not come “to abolish the law or the prophets – he had come to fulfil them” [5:17]. Speaking to his disciples, he insisted: “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” [5:20].

Jesus obeyed his Father by “penetrating through” the letter of the law to its heart.  He sought the original purpose of the law – the values which, on occasion, were inadequately expressed by the letter of the law. His approach to law involved freeing it from its original cultural setting to translate it into humanity’s growing sense of truth. That search for the law’s true purpose was a work of discernment. For Jesus, it meant listening to his own deepest self – the self created in the image of his God. Against the background of the distilled wisdom of Israel, he listened thoughtfully to all that truly resonated with his humanity. In so doing, he put himself in touch with his own conscience, where the “voice of God” echoed within him.

Purposefully, he critiqued the letter of the law, at times agreeing wholeheartedly, at other times extending it, sometimes revising it. He believed that, in this way, he was genuinely fulfilling the law.

Jesus and Disciples. When Jesus invited his disciples to “change and become like children” [18:3], he was not asking them to live childishly, but, rather, to consider their own “honour” as insignificant as the non-existent “honour” of children. When he asked for obedience, he was calling his disciples to an adult response to God and to himself. He respected the humanity given to them by his Father, with its intelligence and its freedom. At the same time, he recognised that their humanity was submerged in the sin of the world, which infected them and distorted their perception and judgment. They would continually need to inform and to sharpen their consciences. Constantly, he called people to conversion – a response that required a radical questioning of assumed attitudes and ways of acting. He taught; he challenged; he questioned; he invited; he persuaded. However, he sought always an intelligent and free response.

Jesus was not interested in the unquestioning conformity of robots. He prized the deep convictions of responsible and accountable persons. Specific choices of behaviour, whilst obviously important, were less important than the honest love that motivated them.

Finally, Matthew proceeded to give his understanding of Jesus’ relationship to the world and to his disciples.

Matthew accepted the conclusion of Mark: Jesus would meet the disciples in Galilee. More than that, he would remain with disciples until the completion of this age. His presence would be mystery, accessible only through faith, but it would be real: I am with you...

Alternatively, the phrase, the completion of this age,  could be translated as “the final achieving of the world’s purpose and goal”. The work of disciples would continue to be a work in progress – not just till the end, but beyond the end to its ultimate completion and fulfilment.

In his Infancy Narrative, Matthew had commented on the identity and relevance of the child conceived in the womb of Mary:

The Gospel concluded as it had begun: In Jesus, God is with us.

End