Text: Matthew 28:17 “when they saw [Jesus in Galilee] they worshipped him, but some doubted”.

When I first qualified as a doctor, I went to work at the Wesley Guild Hospital in the town of Ilesha in Nigeria. The missionary doctors and nurses in Ilesha had an Easter custom which I haven’t met elsewhere. On Easter Monday, after the solemn observances of Holy Week and the joyful celebrations of Easter Sunday, all the staff had a day off and they went on an outing together that was known as “going to Galilee”. But why “go to Galilee” on Easter Monday? Surely all the action was taking place in Jerusalem? Not according to Matthew. It was events in Galilee and not Jerusalem that were the main focus of the climactic ending of what we have come to call the Gospel according to Matthew.

For most of the disciples Galilee was home. Galilee was where they had lived and worked: fishermen, a tax collector, and the rest. Galilee was where their families lived: Peter’s mother-in-law lived in lake-side Capernaum. Galilee was the place to which they had fled after the awful events of Good Friday. They had left Jerusalem and its terrible memories behind them. They had gone home. Matthew’s gospel relates the resurrection appearance of Jesus to those same disciples on the mountain top, the mountain near the Sea of Galilee where several times in the gospel Jesus had been with them. He had been there first to teach the crowds and to pray alone. He had been there before to feed the multitudes and to heal the sick. He had been there already when he was revealed to his chosen disciples in the Transfiguration. It was natural therefore that the disciples should “see” Jesus there again as they grieved and pondered over the fate of their leader.

What was Matthew trying to convey by this final appearance of Jesus? What message did he want to give to the church in the peroration at the end of his Gospel, as he brought it to a close and penned his final words? He was first of all rehearsing the 50-year oral tradition that had accumulated since the death of Jesus. However, he did have before him the whole Hebrew Scripture to guide his writing: he needed that to buttress his argument that Jesus was the Messiah, the expected and anointed one, the deliverer of the Jewish People. And he had another more recent document on his desk: the Gospel according to Mark written about 10 years earlier. But as we heard last week, there was little enough in Mark to help Matthew when he came to write his last chapter: there was no mention there of any appearance of the Risen Jesus to the twelve disciples in Jerusalem. Only a rather unconvincing story of an angel appearing to some women at the tomb, telling them anyway to go to Galilee where “they would see Jesus”, but they told no one because they were afraid. These earliest evangelists could afford to tell a fantastical story about an Easter garden appearance to women, but women didn’t count for much among Jesus’ followers or in the early church and so no great significance could be attached to such appearances. We must not read back into ancient writings our own no doubt politically correct views about gender equality. The proportion of women among the disciples and apostles was vanishingly low. What counted in the early church would have been appearances to the men, and especially to the leaders Peter and John, James and Paul. Paul had listed these appearances in his first letter to the Corinthians in AD55 [Read 1 Cor 15: 3-7]: appearances to Peter, to the Twelve, to five hundred of the brothers, to James and then all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself. But there is no evidence that Matthew or any of the Gospel writers knew of Paul’s letters to the churches, or the letters of the other apostles.

So, another twenty-five years later than this letter of Paul, in AD80 after the fall of Jerusalem when only the Wailing wall was left, Matthew’s gospel has just five verses summarising what was then understood about the appearances of the Risen Jesus - what it was that had led them to a belief in His resurrection. Let’s read them again. [Read Matthew 28: 16-20]

Matthew had three very important things to say here; three beliefs he shared with the early persecuted church; three understandings about Jesus that he wanted to preserve for the new and the next generation of Christians. First, he wanted to tell them that Jesus, though crucified and disgraced, was now glorified/exalted by God. Next, he wanted to remind them of Jesus’ life-long message and purpose: to teach and make disciples. And third, he wanted to re-assure his hearers and readers that this task laid on them by Jesus was not as impossible as it seemed, because Jesus himself was still with them, and always would be, but in a special different way from before.

Remember, Matthew was not a journalist, not an historian nor a biographer. He is not relaying an eye-witness account of events after the crucifixion. He was not producing evidence for this political theory or that. He was not telling a life of the historical Jesus. Rather, he was writing a Gospel; writing the Good News of God, the Gospel of the Kingdom. The nearest equivalent today is writing a sermon! So he had to do it well; summon up his best material, craft it into a good structure, and tell it with cogency.

So to make his first point, that Jesus is now glorified, he uses some second-hand but nonetheless powerful material. He wants to make sense of the feeling of the disciples that even after the crucifixion, they had the strange idea that Jesus was still alive and, more, that he was with God and in God. Matthew had previously written of a vision of some of the disciples where they imagined Jesus trans-figured in a cloud on a mountain-top, his face shining like the sun, his garments white as light, talking with Moses and Elijah. They had even imagined they had heard the voice of God saying “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” but Matthew might have got that memory mixed up with the baptism of Jesus. [Read Matthew 17: 1-9; Transfiguration story] To this story of a vision of the disciples on a mountain-top, Matthew mixes in old story of a vision on another mountain-top, long ago at the time of the Exile in Babylon, taken from the Book of Daniel. That vision was of “one like the Son of man”, a curious phrase that Matthew himself had used of Jesus in the chapter preceding the Transfiguration story. [Read Daniel 7: 1, 13-14]. So that Son of man was ushered into the very presence of the Ancient of Days and was given authority, glory and sovereign power. He was given everlasting dominion over a kingdom that will never be destroyed. Such was his status that this Son of Man became a very part of the all-powerful One-and-Only God. What a vision! What a sublime understanding of the possibilities for mere humanity and of the willingness of God to share and enfold mortality into himself.

Matthew couldn’t do better than that, so he recast that old vision of Daniel’s and brought it back to life. He made it relevant for their own time – the first century, and in their own place - Galilee. He merged it with the Transfiguration story and wrote a sublime statement of the new power and authority of Jesus conferred by God upon his own Son: “all power in heaven and earth”. It is most instructive to read these three stories side by side: the parallelism is striking.

So in this final declaration that their crucified Jesus was indeed Messiah - chosen and anointed of God, Matthew does not rely on stories of healing miracles during Jesus’ lifetime. He does not rely on miraculous events on an Easter morning that may or may not have been witnessed by women. Matthew does not rely on reports that Jesus may have been taken up directly into heaven in a miraculous ascension. Not at all. Matthew asserts the glorification and exaltation of Jesus by linking it to the vision of Daniel: a vision of the Ancient of Days giving to the Son of Man all authority, glory and power. That may not carry much weight for us in our more matter-of-fact culture today, but Matthew could simply have reminded his hearers of what those long-ago crowds had realised for themselves on that same mountain when Jesus had been preaching to them. “When Jesus had finished his [sermon on that mount], the crowds were amazed at His teaching; for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes. That moral authority comes only from God. And like the Jewish crowds, we too can recognise it through the transparent Godly quality of the life and teaching of Jesus.

Now we move on to Matthew’s second point. In his final appearance to the disciples Jesus makes demands upon them. He lays a task upon them. He hands over to them the responsibility for what he has himself been doing during his short ministry. And he does it with all the authority that God has given him: he says “Go, therefore, and teach all nations”. Matthew doesn’t lift this from Daniel’s vision. Matthew doesn’t adapt this from the Transfiguration narrative. No, there is something new, original and important here. Not the equipping and sending out of the disciples: not the mission to preach and heal – those had already been covered during the three years of training and instruction in discipleship. [read Matt 10: 5-8] . What was new in the Great Commission of chapter 28 was the universality of the target population. It wasn’t just to the lost sheep of the house of Israel that Jesus was sending his disciples. They weren’t any longer to by-pass the Samaritans. They weren’t now required to avoid the Gentiles. No, in Matthew’s final clarification of their continuing task, the Gospel was opened up to the world. What had been the preserve of the people of Israel now was to be available for all nations. And this is all the more remarkable because Matthew, of all the gospel writers, was the one most concerned to establish the claims and the mission of Jesus as an extension of the promises made to the people of Israel. And this is a message that took its time to sink in. Matthew reports that while some of the disciples worshipped Jesus on that mountain, others “doubted”. The doubters must even have included Peter and James and John who at the Council of Jerusalem in AD 52 were still at odds with Paul about this very issue. [read Galations 2: 1-2, 6-10] In the language of Galations 2, the disciples still wanted to “go only to the circumcised”, while Paul and Barnabus were finally “entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised”, that is, to the Gentiles. So Paul writes to the Colossians [ch 3] , “there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all”. But we have taken on board that command, that commission. Our outreach, our mission is for all: for rich and poor, black and white, Jew and Greek. Despite falling numbers and resources, the Methodist Church still has strong Home and Overseas Missions programmes.

And before his last resounding Amen, Matthew has a final promise for his readers. He has reassurance for those who accept the authority of Jesus and commit to discipleship with him. They will indeed be strengthened and equipped for the task. But for Matthew this comes not through a dramatic incident in Jerusalem in a mighty wind and with tongues of fire. The disciples, remember, are on a mountain-top in Galilee and Matthew knows that, on mountain-tops, Spirit comes in cloud and light. And [1 Kings 19:12] in that light and from that cloud God speaks in a still small voice: that voice was heard as the voice of Jesus to whom all authority had been given, all glory and power. And that familiar voice said to them: “Lo I am with you always even unto the end of the world”. Matthew started his Gospel with “Emmanuel, God with us”. By the end Jesus had become the Cosmic Christ, saying “I am with you always”. The Jesus who had been with those twelve Disciples for three years in Palestine would still be with them in their continuation of his mission to the world: as remembered teacher and ever-present inspiration. And so surely he is also with us and with his myriads of disciples not only for all time, but in every place. Amen