Making Disciples (Matthew 28:16-20)

Just about every day, most of us go somewhere. There might be days when we just like to stay at home and not go anywhere special, or our mobility might be limited and we might not be able to go where we would like as often as we might hope to, but in one way or another we can usually go to lots of different places at various times. For example, this morning, we have left our homes to go to worship. During the week we might go to work, school, or sport. Other times we might go shopping, to see friends, or just for a walk.

Wherever we might be going, there are time when we might like to go without any specific destination in mind or for no particular purpose. However, mostly we go somewhere for a reason. Our gathering for worship this morning is a great example that when we go, we often go with a purpose.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel, when Jesus was about to leave his disciples, he gave them what is commonly known as the Great Commission. Jesus said,

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matt 28:18-20 NIV)

The main point people often like to make about the Great Commission is that Jesus is telling his disciples, including us, to “Go!” This is understood by a lot of Christians as being a missional imperative: Jesus commands his followers to go into the whole world to share the good news so that people can come to faith in him and be saved.

I guess that if our high school English teachers tried to teach us grammar, most of us probably didn’t enjoy it very much. However, for some Bible texts, understanding grammar can help us discern what the text is saying to us. The grammar Matthew uses in the Greek doesn’t emphasise the word “Go” but instead “make disciples”. The Great Commission isn’t so much about “going” because we are usually going somewhere in our lives anyway. Instead, it’s about the purpose for our going and what Jesus wants us to do as we go. Jesus isn’t telling his followers to go out their front door as much as he is teaching us what he wants us to do when we walk out our front door. Jesus’ emphasis is to “make disciples”.

This shift in meaning of the Great Commission might be challenging for most of us. For a long time in our Australian Lutheran church culture, a strong emphasis on what it means to be Christian has revolved around going to church. It can almost seem like our purpose as the church is to get people into a church building to be part of a church service on a Sunday morning. Jesus is teaching us something very different. Instead of trying to get people to where we are, he tells us that we will be going out to where they are. The purpose of this movement is not just to bring people to a service, but instead to “make disciples”. While gathering as God’s people in worship is a vital part of being Christian community, Jesus tells us that one thing he wants us to do as we go through our lives is to form other people as his followers. Jesus makes disciples and then teaches us to disciple others.

Jesus then goes on to give us two key actions involved in discipling others.

The first is to baptize. When people are baptized, we enter into a learning relationship with Jesus as our teacher. There are many ways we can understand what God does in baptism such as washing us clean, forgiving our sins, adopting us as his children, and more. One part we can neglect, however, is that when we are baptized in the name of the Triune God, God begins a new kind of life within us. Jesus teaches us what this life looks like as he becomes our teacher and we become his students. As his disciples, we look to him to teach us what living as God’s children is like as we follow him. If we are bringing infants to be baptized, we bring our children to begin learning a new way of life as God’s forgiven and adopted children. That’s why baptism is never just a one-off event. It is the start of a new life as God’s loved and forgiven children which we spend our while lives learning and growing into.

This brings us to the second part of what Jesus tells us about discipleship: teaching us to obey everything he has commanded us. Jesus teaches a radically different way of living to what we learn from the world, and even often what we have learned in church. Matthew’s gospel has the most comprehensive account of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5 to 7. If you haven’t read it in a while, make some time this week to look through it again. We can summarize Jesus’ teachings as loving God with all our hearts, minds, souls and strength, and loving our neighbour as we love ourselves (Matt 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28), or loving one another as he loves us (John 13:34,35; 15:12,17), trusting the Lord and do good (Psalm 37:3), or having faith in him and showing that faith through love for others (Galatians 5:6b). Learning to live like this leads us into the life to the full that Jesus promises (John 10:10) and is a way of living we continue to learn throughout our whole lives.

Jesus instructs us to make disciples with the promise that he is always with us, even to the “end of the age” (v20 NIV). As we go throughout our lives and grow as his disciples, and as we lead others into this new life by discipling them and helping them learn his new way of living, Jesus is with us as the one who has all authority in heaven and earth (v18) to guide, equip, provide for and bless us. He sends us in the liberating grace we have through faith in him as his followers. Discipleship means constantly learning how Jesus’ liberating grace and love makes big differences in our lives in all the different circumstances we face. It also means helping others to discover and explore this liberating grace and love for themselves as we disciple them into the way of life Jesus teaches us in our everyday lives.

Where will we be going this week? The Great Commission doesn’t tell us to “Go” because Jesus assumes we will already be going somewhere this week and into the future. Wherever we go, we go as Jesus’ disciples who have been baptised into a new relationship with him and are learning to live in the way of faith, grace, peace, hope and love that he is teaching us. As we go into the future as a community of faith, Jesus goes with us with all authority in heaven and on earth. He commissions us to make disciples of others by baptizing and teaching them, so together we can learn the new way of life he teaches and find the life to the full he promises.

More to think about or discuss:

• Where did you go in the past week? Where do you plan to go in the coming week?
• How might your going in the past week or coming week look different to you if you trusted that Jesus will use your going to help you learn to live as his disciple?
• How might your going in the past or coming weeks look different to you if you trusted that Jesus wants to use your going to help others learn to live in the way he teaches?