Matthew 28

The resurrection narrative in Matthew is the most spare and the most immediately purposive of the four gospels: no extended appearance scenes, no meal by the sea, no Thomas's hands in the wounds. There is an appearance to the women — unique to Matthew among the gospels — and then the scene on the mountain in Galilee with the eleven. The mountain setting echoes the Sermon on the Mount, the transfiguration, and the forty days' testing: Matthew's crucial moments take place on mountains, and the final commissioning completes the pattern. The detail that some doubted even as they worshiped — and that Jesus approaches them and speaks without addressing the doubt — is the gospel's last portrait of the disciples: the same group that doubted in chapter 14, that slept in Gethsemane, that fled at the arrest, that denied at the trial, now receives the commissioning. The commission is not given to the perfect but to those who have been following through failure.

The Great Commission at 28:18-20 is the gospel's culminating statement and the passage that has shaped the global expansion of Christianity more than any other. All authority in heaven and on earth — the claim reverses the temptation scene, where the kingdoms were offered by the wrong authority. Go therefore — the therefore is the hinge: because of this authority, the following action. Make disciples of all nations — the restriction to the lost sheep of Israel (10:5-6) is explicitly superseded. Baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit — the Trinitarian formula that will become the standard baptismal formula of the Christian liturgy. Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded — the whole of the gospel's teaching, the five discourses, the Sermon on the Mount above all, is to be transmitted as the content of the mission. And I am with you always, to the end of the age — the Emmanuel of the beginning (God with us) is the promise of the close. The gospel that opened by naming the child God-with-us closes with the risen one promising to be present always.