This excerpt is from N. T. Wright's "Matthew for Everyone" commentary covering the verses in Matthew 28:16-20. I've highlighted points that really resonated with me and thought they might with you as well. What do you think? What is your favorite part? Do you agree or disagree with parts?
16 So the eleven disciples went off to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had instructed them to go. 17 There they saw him, and worshipped him, though some hesitated.
18 Jesus came towards them and addressed them.
‘All authority in heaven and on earth’, he said, ‘has been given to me! 19 So you must go and make all the nations into disciples. Baptize them in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. 20 Teach them to observe everything I have commanded you. And look: I am with you, every single day, to the very end of the age.’
You sometimes wonder, when listening to some of the great classical composers, whether they really know how to bring a piece to an end.
One of the most notorious is Beethoven. There are times when, at the end of a symphony, you think you’re just coming to the end, but the chords go crashing on and on, sounding almost ‘final’ but leaving room for just one more … and then another … and then another … until the very last one dies away and the symphony is truly complete. No doubt a serious student of music would explain that there was a purpose in it, but for many listeners it seems as though a great deal has been packed into the ending, almost as though the whole symphony is being gathered up into those last few explosive chords.
Matthew’s ending is much like that. Not that it goes on longer than we expect; it is in fact quite compact. But it contains so much that we would do well to slow down in our reading of these final verses and ponder each line, indeed each phrase, to see how they gather up the whole gospel and pack it tight into the final meeting between Jesus and his followers.
The scene begins on a mountain. No surprises there: a great deal in Matthew happens on a mountain. The temptations; the Sermon on the Mount; the transfiguration; the final discourse on the Mount of Olives; and now this parting scene. Moses and Elijah met the living God on a mountain, and they have appeared in this gospel talking with Jesus; now Jesus invites his disciples to meet him, so that they can be commissioned in turn.
What does surprise us is that, according to Matthew, some of them hesitated. The word can actually mean ‘doubt’, though we can’t be sure how much of that Matthew means here. Did they hesitate over, or doubt, whether it was truly Jesus? Or did they hesitate over, or doubt, whether they, as good Jewish monotheists, believing in yhwh as the one true God, should actually worship Jesus? It isn’t clear.
What is clear is that the majority of them did worship Jesus, and that Matthew firmly believes this was the right reaction. On several previous occasions in the gospel he has used this word (‘worship’) to describe people coming reverently to Jesus. Usually it seems to mean simply that they prostrated themselves before him, adopting an attitude of reverence though not necessarily implying that they thought he was divine. (See 8:2; 9:18; 14:33; 15:25; 20:20; and indeed 28:9.) Now, however, to jump for a moment to the last line of the book, it is clear that Matthew wants us to see that in Jesus the promise of the very first chapter has been fulfilled. Jesus is the ‘Emmanuel’, the one in whom ‘God is with us’ (1:23). Now he declares that he himself is ‘with you always’. The only appropriate reaction to this is indeed worship, worship of the one true God who is now, astonishingly, revealed in and as Jesus himself.
In particular, Jesus has now been given ‘all authority in heaven and earth’. We recall that in the temptations the devil offered Jesus this prestige, but without exacting the price that he has now paid (4:8–10). That would have been a hollow triumph, leading to the worst tyranny imaginable. Jesus’ authority as the risen one, by contrast, is the authority of the one who has defeated tyranny itself, the ultimate tyranny of death; his is the authority under which life, God’s new life, can begin to flourish. Despite what many people today suppose, it is basic to the most elementary New Testament faith that Jesus is already ruling the whole world. That is one of the most important results of his resurrection; it is part of the meaning of messiahship, which his new life after the crucifixion has made plain.
People get very puzzled by the claim that Jesus is already ruling the world, until they see what is in fact being said. The claim is not that the world is already completely as Jesus intends it to be. The claim is that he is working to take it from where it was—under the rule not only of death but of corruption, greed and every kind of wickedness—and to bring it, by slow means and quick, under the rule of his life-giving love. And how is he doing this? Here is the shock: through us, his followers. The project only goes forward insofar as Jesus’ agents, the people he has commissioned, are taking it forward.
Many today mock this claim just as much as they mock the resurrection itself. The church in its various forms has got so much wrong, has made so many mistakes, has let its Lord down so often, that many people, including many who love Jesus for themselves, despair of it and suppose that nothing will ever change until Jesus himself returns to sort it all out. But that isn’t Matthew’s belief, and it doesn’t fit with what we know of Jesus’ commissioning of his followers in Luke, Acts and John. It doesn’t fit with Paul’s vision of his task. They all agree with Matthew: those who believe in Jesus, who are witnesses to his resurrection, are given the responsibility to go and make real in the world the authority which he already has. This, after all, is part of the answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom will come on earth as in heaven. If we pray that prayer, we shouldn’t be surprised if we are called upon to help bring about God’s answer to it.
The tasks Jesus leaves his followers, tasks which will bring his sovereign authority to bear on the world, are straightforward enough to outline, though daunting and demanding to put into practice. The first is to make disciples. As Jesus called the fishermen by the sea of Galilee, and trained them up as ‘learners’, imitating his way of life and coming little by little to understand his kingdom-message, so his followers ever since have the responsibility of calling men, women and children to follow him, and training them to understand and follow his message and his way. Evangelism—announcing God’s good news, focused on Jesus, to bring people to faith and obedience—remains central to the way in which Jesus’ authority is brought to bear on the world.
The second task is to baptize them. Baptism is not an optional extra for followers of Jesus. Jesus himself linked baptism to his own death; part of the meaning of baptism is to commit us, through plunging into water, to dying with Jesus and coming to share his new life. (Paul spells this out in Romans 6, but many other passages imply it, including the present one.) Baptism is the public, physical and visible way in which someone is marked out, branded almost, with the holy ‘name’. As Jesus was given, by the angel, the name ‘Jesus’, signifying his real identity and the task that lay before him, so now, with his work complete, we suddenly discover that the ‘name’ which we are all to share is the new ‘name’ of the living God—the father, the son and the holy spirit.
Matthew innocently places this formula on Jesus’ lips, unaware that in centuries to come it would become well-known as a brilliant piece of dogmatic theology. He is, at this point, rather like someone innocently whistling a snatch of tune that a great composer will later make the centrepiece of a wonderful oratorio. Throughout the gospel he has shown us that Jesus knew himself to be, in a special sense, the unique son of the God he (and Israel as a whole) knew as ‘father’. This went with his being specially equipped for his task with the ‘holy spirit’, the spirit who gave him the power to do what he did, and the status of being God’s ‘anointed’ (e.g. 3:16; 12:28). Now, apparently, those who have followed Jesus and have become true disciples are themselves to be caught up in this divine life and purpose. What happened to and through Jesus in the unique gospel story is to be repeated as the message goes out into the Gentile world.
The third thing they must do is to teach. The gospel of Jesus generates a lifestyle quite different from the way the world lives. Jesus has already highlighted this at various levels, from the personal morality outlined in the Sermon on the Mount to the high demand for forgiveness in chapter 18, and not least to the overturning of the normal way rulers behave (20:25–27). But doubtless Matthew wants us to think particularly of the five great blocks of Jesus’ teaching around which the gospel is constructed. These are to be the basis of what the church must teach the new disciples.
This task remains unfinished in our own day. If Christians around the world gave as much energy to it as they do to learning so many other things, worthy in themselves but none so important as this, we would make more headway with the gospel than we usually seem to do.
But Jesus never leaves people simply with a list of commands to keep. The three instructions he has given are held in place by the promises at the beginning and end of the passage. The reason we are to do these things is because he already possesses all authority; the promise which sustains us in the task is that he is with us always and for ever. He is, as we have said, the Emmanuel. God-with-us turns into Jesus-with-us. There is no greater personal promise than that.
From the height of this final mountain we look out at God’s future from Jesus’ perspective, and what do we see?
We see, first, the astonishing early results of the gospel. In ad 25 nobody outside a small town in Galilee had heard of Jesus. By ad 50 there were riots in Rome because of him, and by ad 65 his followers were being persecuted by the emperor himself. All roads led to Rome; once Rome knew of something, everywhere else knew quite soon afterwards. Jesus’ claim to an authority higher than kings and emperors was made good over and over again in the lives, and often enough the deaths, of his followers.
We see, second, the fall of Jerusalem in ad 70. Jesus had warned of what would happen to the city and Temple if it refused his message; the warnings came horribly true. This, as we saw in chapter 24, is part of the meaning of ‘the end’. It was, in all sorts of senses, the end of the world for the Israel of old, the end for the chief priests, the Pharisees, and all who had made the Temple the centre of their way of life.
But out beyond these events we see a greater future. The ‘age to come’ has already broken in to the ‘present age’. But, as Paul makes so clear, not until death itself is destroyed, and the whole world comes under the rule of Jesus, will God’s purpose be fully accomplished. How are we to conceive of this?
To answer, we come back to the Lord’s Prayer once more, set by Matthew at the heart of Jesus’ great Sermon (6:9–13), and forming a fitting way for us to take our leave of this great gospel. Bread, forgiveness and deliverance are, of course, always going to be needed as long as the present world continues. But there will come a time when those needs are swallowed up in the complete life of the new age: when God’s will is done on earth as in heaven, because heaven and earth have been joined together in the new creation; when God’s kingdom, established by Jesus in his death and resurrection, has finally conquered all its enemies by the power of the divine love; and when, in line with the ancient hopes of Israel, and now with the central intention of Jesus himself, the name of God is honoured, hallowed, exalted and celebrated throughout the whole creation. Every time we say the words ‘Our father …’ we are pleading for that day to be soon, and pledging ourselves to work to bring it closer.
Wright, T. (2004). Matthew for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 16-28 (pp. 204–210). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
The Great Commission
16 So the eleven disciples went off to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had instructed them to go. 17 There they saw him, and worshipped him, though some hesitated.
18 Jesus came towards them and addressed them.
‘All authority in heaven and on earth’, he said, ‘has been given to me! 19 So you must go and make all the nations into disciples. Baptize them in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. 20 Teach them to observe everything I have commanded you. And look: I am with you, every single day, to the very end of the age.’
You sometimes wonder, when listening to some of the great classical composers, whether they really know how to bring a piece to an end.
One of the most notorious is Beethoven. There are times when, at the end of a symphony, you think you’re just coming to the end, but the chords go crashing on and on, sounding almost ‘final’ but leaving room for just one more … and then another … and then another … until the very last one dies away and the symphony is truly complete. No doubt a serious student of music would explain that there was a purpose in it, but for many listeners it seems as though a great deal has been packed into the ending, almost as though the whole symphony is being gathered up into those last few explosive chords.
Matthew’s ending is much like that. Not that it goes on longer than we expect; it is in fact quite compact. But it contains so much that we would do well to slow down in our reading of these final verses and ponder each line, indeed each phrase, to see how they gather up the whole gospel and pack it tight into the final meeting between Jesus and his followers.
The scene begins on a mountain. No surprises there: a great deal in Matthew happens on a mountain. The temptations; the Sermon on the Mount; the transfiguration; the final discourse on the Mount of Olives; and now this parting scene. Moses and Elijah met the living God on a mountain, and they have appeared in this gospel talking with Jesus; now Jesus invites his disciples to meet him, so that they can be commissioned in turn.
What does surprise us is that, according to Matthew, some of them hesitated. The word can actually mean ‘doubt’, though we can’t be sure how much of that Matthew means here. Did they hesitate over, or doubt, whether it was truly Jesus? Or did they hesitate over, or doubt, whether they, as good Jewish monotheists, believing in yhwh as the one true God, should actually worship Jesus? It isn’t clear.
What is clear is that the majority of them did worship Jesus, and that Matthew firmly believes this was the right reaction. On several previous occasions in the gospel he has used this word (‘worship’) to describe people coming reverently to Jesus. Usually it seems to mean simply that they prostrated themselves before him, adopting an attitude of reverence though not necessarily implying that they thought he was divine. (See 8:2; 9:18; 14:33; 15:25; 20:20; and indeed 28:9.) Now, however, to jump for a moment to the last line of the book, it is clear that Matthew wants us to see that in Jesus the promise of the very first chapter has been fulfilled. Jesus is the ‘Emmanuel’, the one in whom ‘God is with us’ (1:23). Now he declares that he himself is ‘with you always’. The only appropriate reaction to this is indeed worship, worship of the one true God who is now, astonishingly, revealed in and as Jesus himself.
In particular, Jesus has now been given ‘all authority in heaven and earth’. We recall that in the temptations the devil offered Jesus this prestige, but without exacting the price that he has now paid (4:8–10). That would have been a hollow triumph, leading to the worst tyranny imaginable. Jesus’ authority as the risen one, by contrast, is the authority of the one who has defeated tyranny itself, the ultimate tyranny of death; his is the authority under which life, God’s new life, can begin to flourish. Despite what many people today suppose, it is basic to the most elementary New Testament faith that Jesus is already ruling the whole world. That is one of the most important results of his resurrection; it is part of the meaning of messiahship, which his new life after the crucifixion has made plain.
People get very puzzled by the claim that Jesus is already ruling the world, until they see what is in fact being said. The claim is not that the world is already completely as Jesus intends it to be. The claim is that he is working to take it from where it was—under the rule not only of death but of corruption, greed and every kind of wickedness—and to bring it, by slow means and quick, under the rule of his life-giving love. And how is he doing this? Here is the shock: through us, his followers. The project only goes forward insofar as Jesus’ agents, the people he has commissioned, are taking it forward.
Many today mock this claim just as much as they mock the resurrection itself. The church in its various forms has got so much wrong, has made so many mistakes, has let its Lord down so often, that many people, including many who love Jesus for themselves, despair of it and suppose that nothing will ever change until Jesus himself returns to sort it all out. But that isn’t Matthew’s belief, and it doesn’t fit with what we know of Jesus’ commissioning of his followers in Luke, Acts and John. It doesn’t fit with Paul’s vision of his task. They all agree with Matthew: those who believe in Jesus, who are witnesses to his resurrection, are given the responsibility to go and make real in the world the authority which he already has. This, after all, is part of the answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom will come on earth as in heaven. If we pray that prayer, we shouldn’t be surprised if we are called upon to help bring about God’s answer to it.
The tasks Jesus leaves his followers, tasks which will bring his sovereign authority to bear on the world, are straightforward enough to outline, though daunting and demanding to put into practice. The first is to make disciples. As Jesus called the fishermen by the sea of Galilee, and trained them up as ‘learners’, imitating his way of life and coming little by little to understand his kingdom-message, so his followers ever since have the responsibility of calling men, women and children to follow him, and training them to understand and follow his message and his way. Evangelism—announcing God’s good news, focused on Jesus, to bring people to faith and obedience—remains central to the way in which Jesus’ authority is brought to bear on the world.
The second task is to baptize them. Baptism is not an optional extra for followers of Jesus. Jesus himself linked baptism to his own death; part of the meaning of baptism is to commit us, through plunging into water, to dying with Jesus and coming to share his new life. (Paul spells this out in Romans 6, but many other passages imply it, including the present one.) Baptism is the public, physical and visible way in which someone is marked out, branded almost, with the holy ‘name’. As Jesus was given, by the angel, the name ‘Jesus’, signifying his real identity and the task that lay before him, so now, with his work complete, we suddenly discover that the ‘name’ which we are all to share is the new ‘name’ of the living God—the father, the son and the holy spirit.
Matthew innocently places this formula on Jesus’ lips, unaware that in centuries to come it would become well-known as a brilliant piece of dogmatic theology. He is, at this point, rather like someone innocently whistling a snatch of tune that a great composer will later make the centrepiece of a wonderful oratorio. Throughout the gospel he has shown us that Jesus knew himself to be, in a special sense, the unique son of the God he (and Israel as a whole) knew as ‘father’. This went with his being specially equipped for his task with the ‘holy spirit’, the spirit who gave him the power to do what he did, and the status of being God’s ‘anointed’ (e.g. 3:16; 12:28). Now, apparently, those who have followed Jesus and have become true disciples are themselves to be caught up in this divine life and purpose. What happened to and through Jesus in the unique gospel story is to be repeated as the message goes out into the Gentile world.
The third thing they must do is to teach. The gospel of Jesus generates a lifestyle quite different from the way the world lives. Jesus has already highlighted this at various levels, from the personal morality outlined in the Sermon on the Mount to the high demand for forgiveness in chapter 18, and not least to the overturning of the normal way rulers behave (20:25–27). But doubtless Matthew wants us to think particularly of the five great blocks of Jesus’ teaching around which the gospel is constructed. These are to be the basis of what the church must teach the new disciples.
This task remains unfinished in our own day. If Christians around the world gave as much energy to it as they do to learning so many other things, worthy in themselves but none so important as this, we would make more headway with the gospel than we usually seem to do.
But Jesus never leaves people simply with a list of commands to keep. The three instructions he has given are held in place by the promises at the beginning and end of the passage. The reason we are to do these things is because he already possesses all authority; the promise which sustains us in the task is that he is with us always and for ever. He is, as we have said, the Emmanuel. God-with-us turns into Jesus-with-us. There is no greater personal promise than that.
From the height of this final mountain we look out at God’s future from Jesus’ perspective, and what do we see?
We see, first, the astonishing early results of the gospel. In ad 25 nobody outside a small town in Galilee had heard of Jesus. By ad 50 there were riots in Rome because of him, and by ad 65 his followers were being persecuted by the emperor himself. All roads led to Rome; once Rome knew of something, everywhere else knew quite soon afterwards. Jesus’ claim to an authority higher than kings and emperors was made good over and over again in the lives, and often enough the deaths, of his followers.
We see, second, the fall of Jerusalem in ad 70. Jesus had warned of what would happen to the city and Temple if it refused his message; the warnings came horribly true. This, as we saw in chapter 24, is part of the meaning of ‘the end’. It was, in all sorts of senses, the end of the world for the Israel of old, the end for the chief priests, the Pharisees, and all who had made the Temple the centre of their way of life.
But out beyond these events we see a greater future. The ‘age to come’ has already broken in to the ‘present age’. But, as Paul makes so clear, not until death itself is destroyed, and the whole world comes under the rule of Jesus, will God’s purpose be fully accomplished. How are we to conceive of this?
To answer, we come back to the Lord’s Prayer once more, set by Matthew at the heart of Jesus’ great Sermon (6:9–13), and forming a fitting way for us to take our leave of this great gospel. Bread, forgiveness and deliverance are, of course, always going to be needed as long as the present world continues. But there will come a time when those needs are swallowed up in the complete life of the new age: when God’s will is done on earth as in heaven, because heaven and earth have been joined together in the new creation; when God’s kingdom, established by Jesus in his death and resurrection, has finally conquered all its enemies by the power of the divine love; and when, in line with the ancient hopes of Israel, and now with the central intention of Jesus himself, the name of God is honoured, hallowed, exalted and celebrated throughout the whole creation. Every time we say the words ‘Our father …’ we are pleading for that day to be soon, and pledging ourselves to work to bring it closer.
Wright, T. (2004). Matthew for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 16-28 (pp. 204–210). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
