I’m sure you’ve all had a day that you wished would last forever. Maybe it was a party or celebration. Maybe it was a day at an amusement park, or a day in nature. Maybe it was time with loved ones. Whatever it was, you wished it would go on forever, but it was all too short a time.
The stories after Jesus’ resurrection in the Bible are all the same way. We wish they would be long and detailed. We wish they’d answer lots of questions. We wish Jesus would linger. But they are all brief, and they leave us wanting more.
When it comes to Matthew’s gospel, while he is brief, he packs loads of meaning into just about every word. The five verses of our gospel reading today cover a multitude of themes and they all interact with each other. We aren’t going to cover them all, but at least a few of the major ones. Let’s start with verse 18 where Jesus says to the disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” That’s a pretty bold statement to make! ALL authority in heaven and earth has been given to ME… Jesus appears to have risen from the dead with a huge ego! But that is certainly not the case.
We need to remember back to 4:8-9 when Jesus is being tempted by the devil. The devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor and says to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” It is easy to imagine that as Jesus literally falling down before a man in a red suit with horns and a pitch fork. But that’s us imposing our imagination on the text. It is a test to see if Jesus will live by the ways of the world, or will Jesus live by the ways of God? If you want to imagine this scene imagine the devil professional, well groomed, and in a business suit. Will Jesus use what he has in service to himself or will he be in service to God’s kingdom regardless?
Move to the crucifixion scene, the key scene in understanding everything of Jesus’ ministry. What are Jesus’ last words? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus has been faithful. He’s done everything perfectly right in life. He has trusted and obeyed. And what has it gotten him? He's a failure. In fact, he’s a complete and total failure. None of his disciples followed any of his teachings. All of his followers fled. Even his closest followers: Peter, James, and John couldn’t even stay awake for an hour to be with him when he asked him too and he was in deep distress.
Jesus had been a total failure. No followers. Rejected by the religious leaders. Rejected by the Romans. Rejected by the crowds. Even the criminal element of society mocked and rejected him. What a waste of a life! What a waste of all that potential! Why didn’t Jesus use at least some of it to do something of enduring value? He would die and be forgotten – a nobody crushed in the machinery of the Roman Empire.
And then, dying, Jesus even feels abandoned by God – God to whom he has been faithful. Why?
It is often suggested that when Jesus was dying he did not know about or expect there to be a resurrection. This was it. The end. If Jesus had expected something like that his last words would have been something along the lines of, “Don’t worry everybody. I’ll see you all at Starbucks at 10:30 on Sunday!”
St. Paul wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote to the Philippians that they should have the same mind as Christ, who, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:6-8)
That is the faithfulness of Jesus. That absolute selflessness is the mind of Jesus which then allows him to appropriately say, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” God has given that to him, not the devil. The devil’s way would be for Jesus to take it for power’s sake. But he would not have truly had it. Jesus’ way was to be given it through obedience. Then it was truly his.
Self-preservation and self-interest are deep parts of ourselves. But they ultimately take us away from God. We struggle with this. We will always struggle with this.
And we should know that we are not alone in this.
When God asks us to do difficult or seemingly impossible things we are often tempted to say, “God, is this really you? Is this really your will? Give me proof.” People have been doing that for as far back as the Bible records.
What would it take for you to have sure and certain proof for the historic reality of the resurrection of Jesus? Seeing him face-to-face? Touching him?
Our translation does us a disservice when it translates Matthew 28:17 as, “When [the disciples] saw him they worshipped him; but some doubted.” Nope. It’s not that some doubted. Although we could still exclaim, “What more proof do you want than the man standing in front of you as real flesh and blood!?!” It is more literally, “Whey the disciples saw him they worshipped but had some doubts.” It’s not that some doubted. It’s that they all had some doubts.
Our gospel writer Matthew is trying to get across to us that faith and doubt are not opposites. Doubt and faith go hand in hand. Don’t beat yourself up when you are unsure of things. Matthew doesn’t actually say this. We find this in the letters of John; that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear. I don’t mean minor fear, or healthy fears. I mean fear that keeps you from doing anything for God and instead just doing life safely in the eyes of the world.
These few verses can make our head spin because there is so much going on in them. But we have two more issues that we need to bring into the mix as well.
We have Jesus’ authority in heaven and earth, disciples worshipping and yet still doubting, and to that we add the command to baptize and teach.
If you were here last week you may remember that I said teaching was a big deal in Matthew. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is not called a sermon. It is called a teaching. Jesus equips his followers to do all sorts of things, but he never tells them to teach. Last week we read that the guards at Jesus’ tomb were told by the religious leaders to go out and teach lies about what had happened.
And this week, in the very last sentence of Matthew’s gospel and among the last words of Jesus are the command to teach.
Why now? And what are these still-doubting disciples supposed to teach?
The reason they weren’t authorized to teach before is because they didn’t have the truth. The truth they needed to teach was the crucifixion. And that is a very odd thing to be able to teach! We’d think it would be the truth of the resurrection they are to teach. But nope. It’s crucifixion.
Matthew’s gospel is full of contradictions, contrasts, and twists and turns. They continue all the way right here to the end. There is one final contradiction.
Jesus’ final words are, “I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
And so we have doubting disciples now commanded to teach a message of crucifixion about a resurrected Lord who is with them even though he isn’t.
Hmmm. That’ll make your head spin!
And yet, is that not the truth we all live?!
I get so frustrated when Christians are taught that if their prayers weren’t answered it was because they didn’t believe surely enough and still had doubts. I know full well where Jesus’ own teachings suggest such things. They’re even in Matthew’s gospel! But that’s just it. I think Matthew gets at the deepest truth of Jesus by teaching us about Jesus within our own doubts and fears. This gospel does not come down from the sky in perfect divine form – to pristine and perfect to be touched or questioned. This gospel comes to us from within our own reality. It invites us to join in an authentic struggle.
And it is in that authentic struggle that we find the risen Lord right there alongside us – right with us in the beliefs and the doubts and the uncertainty and the fear and the confusion, and everything there is about being alive.
We’re not done with Matthew’s gospel even though we’ve reached the end. In the next several weeks we’re going to go back and look at the Sermon on the Mount, which we skipped over earlier. But if nothing else, learn from Matthew’s gospel that our Lord does not stand above us with a frown judging us as lacking because we fall short, or because life makes a mess of things – even our purest and most selfless desires. And instead realize that in the incarnation God came to be with us – with us in the mess and the confusion. And that God wants to laugh with us and weep with us, and succeed with us, and fail right along with us. Because that is how God truly loves us.
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