It’s not hard to think of biblical lands as wilderness and wasteland: Big Bend as far as the eye can see, but remember that the land God promised His people was a land flowing with milk and honey—that means grasslands and wildflowers, miles of them.  A bountiful land, making the soul glad in God.  Spring in Israel, from what I gather, is a beautiful time of year: mild, green, with occasional, softening rain.  The apostles would have delighted in that beauty as they made the walk from Jerusalem north to Galilee, where the risen Jesus had said he would meet them.  The beauty, glory, hope, and excitement were filling all their hearts, which not so very long before had been weighed down with sorrow, fear, and guilt.  For us, Easter was a while ago, but all those events were still very near, for them.

Without elaborating, Matthew is clear: “the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go” (28:16).  Eleven, not twelve.  The group was broken; they were broken.  All felt like hypocrites; they also knew so well that Jesus accepted brokenness; they knew that was the offering that delighted Jesus, because Jesus could do something with brokenness.  He never was able to do much with those who denied they were broken, those who insisted they needed no help, at least not the help Jesus was offering.

Jesus has called his dearest friends back to Galilee: green, flowering Galilee, where it all began.  Was this a retreat, a renewal?  Something more?  To find out, they had to go to Jesus; they had to do what he instructed them to do.  That’s how it always is on our journey for Christ, our walk to Christ.  If we don’t do what he tells us to do, we’re never going to know.

They had been told the news about the resurrection, and, as Luke reminds us, they also had seen Christ risen at least twice—three times, as John tells us.  Thomas had been absent the first time.  When Jesus visited the second time, he had a special task for Thomas.  They had all watched.  Now, after and despite all that, Matthew tells us there in Galilee, “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted” (28:17).  Doubted what?  That it was really, truly Jesus?  We’re told he was with them in his glorified body, and we may just remember how, in John’s telling, there on the beach that morning, with the roasted fish ready for them, none dared ask who this man was, because they knew it was Jesus (Jn 21:12).  Glorified Jesus, while still recognizable, is also, somehow, different.

Maybe the apostles didn’t doubt it was Jesus speaking with them but that it was Jesus bodily, physically there, speaking with them.  As he had walked across the waters that terrible night long before, they had all been convinced it was some dread ghoul, some spirit from below, as though the storm had thrown open the gates of the underworld.  That Easter evening, in the upper room with the apostles, Jesus had taken some broiled fish and eaten it for all to see, assuring them he was not a disembodied spirit, that he was with them physically, glorified.  He invited them to touch him and assure themselves.  It was indeed his dead body that had been raised, restored to fullness of life, glory life, brilliant with God’s light, radiant with God’s grace: light, grace, and fulness available now to all who would come to Jesus, to all who would receive him by opening that barred, dead-bolted door of their hearts, and God’s hand on the latch, ready and willing to open.  Jesus, glorified, stands ready to take you by the hand.  Open, and receive.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to think of Christ risen as a spirit—if Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and Anakin Skywalker can show up at the end, off on the sidelines, all glowy and blue-ish, smiling and enjoying the music, surely Jesus could, too.  God is Spirit, as the Westminster Standards remind us.  The big leap is to regard Jesus as physically raised, physically alive, physically ascended, glorified, to return, physically.  The body of Christ.  Discern the body of Christ.

Some doubted.  That’s a pity but no surprise.  Jesus addressed the same message to all the apostles, those who accepted and the uncommitted alike: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (28:18).  Important as it is to hold to the physical resurrection of Christ and to his physical presence with his apostles until his ascension, what Jesus emphasizes in this moment is his authority: Jesus directs all things, here and everywhere.  Christ’s is a cosmic authority, reminding us that this is God’s authority.  Christ decides.  Christ authorizes.  Christ has power.  Christ is our point of access to the One who is Biggest of all.  Consider this prayerfully especially today, before this table.

God’s power is creation power—something where there was nothing, a way where there was no way, light where there was only darkness without hope or thought of light.  In that word authority we also hear the stem author.  We typically think of an author as the writer of a book or some document.  An author, literally, is a creator: one who brings something into being, who causes the tree to bud, bloom, and bear abundant fruit.  Authority is creation power.

If Jesus risen in glory has this authority, he has it for this very purpose: to make fruitful, to make life and labor fruitful.  “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” (28:19).  It’s as if Jesus were saying: because I am the one who makes fruitful, go; take me with you and go.  Time for action.  Time to put into practice what you have learned from me, what I have told and taught you.

Make disciples.  You and I can’t make disciples.  God does that.  As we go and tell, go and show, go and live for Christ, daily—imperfectly, yes, but always also with Spirit-given striving for faithfulness—God will stir hearts, open eyes, and people will draw nearer.  Some will remain, will become disciples alongside us.  We will teach them.  We will learn from them.  We will learn together with them.  Jesus doesn’t want the Word to stay put, treasured away in that locket over our hearts.  Jesus wants the Word to go and do its creation work of making disciples.

Now, the order of events here may seem a little curious.  Jesus says go and make disciples, then he says to baptize.  Does this mean we first make disciples and then baptize them?  Doesn’t that then make infant baptism a terrible skewing of the proper order of things?  (I imagine our Bapti-terian brothers and sisters are secretly cheering, here.)  Beloved, I think the making and the baptizing go hand-in-hand.  Now, I’ve baptized enough babies whose parents never thereafter brought him or her to church, and I think that’s a real problem.  And congregations have vowed before one another and God to be a help in raising in the faith children whom they never see after baptism, whom they know they’re never going to see again, and I think that’s a problem.  Baptism doesn’t seal the deal.  For us, among other things, Baptism is the sign of the desire to devote to Christ and a reminder that God blesses this desire.

Those who come to Jesus get baptized, and those who are baptized grow in Christ: this is what I take Jesus to be saying.  Just as we would never refuse to baptize someone who has clearly come to Jesus, who has the yearning for Jesus, so, too, we must continue teaching, discipling those who are baptized among us, at whatever age.  To baptize but not disciple is to miss the mark; baptism is a stage on the journey—memorable, beautiful, powerful, and to be built upon, cultivated, made fruitful.  Teach and baptize, baptize and teach.

Disciples know the Father through the Son by the Spirit.  In Baptism, God is assuring us that He does give His Spirit, who will remain, so long as the invitation remains.  God will not force Himself where He is not welcome.  And God will manifest Himself to the lost many times in many ways, urging them, beckoning to them.  There is no knowing the Father apart from the Son and the Spirit (Jn 10:30, 14:9).  Apart from the Spirit, not only can we accomplish nothing, neither can we know anything of the Father or the Son, despite the evidence all around us (Rom 1:18ff).  The Father sends the Son to make all of God’s character plain to people, to put us into direct contact with God.  The Father sends the Spirit to open eyes, ears, hearts, and hands to what He is doing.  To be baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” is to invoke the fullness of God, the fullness and completeness of His character, the fullness and completeness of His acts; to baptize in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit is to pray that all God’s fullness, all God’s goodness, would be present with and at work in the life of the one washed by the waters, bathed in the love of God.

Baptism is not finished in the moment.  By the grace of God, every disciple lives out his or her baptism, day by day, choice by choice, blessing by blessing, failure by failure, prayer by prayer.  We don’t make disciples by baptizing.  Baptism shows our desire for salvation, for ourselves and infants and children whom we vow to nurture in the faith, trusting God to seal them in His redeeming love.  God makes disciples as we baptize and teach.  It matters, therefore, what we teach.  In too many churches, there are too many things that are no longer taught.  Increasingly, they are no longer taught because they are no longer believed.

Jesus instructs those followers to teach new believers “to obey everything I have commanded you” (28:20).  Briefly, Jesus commands us to love one another as He has loved us.  He loves us sacrificially.  He loves us in truth and grace.  He loves us not because we are perfect but precisely because we are not.  His love shall perfect us, in God’s time.  Disciples do as Christ taught, not according to the standards and fashions of any society, culture, or time, but according to God’s Word—revelation: life in Christ is life on God’s terms.  Life has always been on God’s terms.  It always remains so.  Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, presuming to be fully competent themselves to make those crucial, life or death decisions without reference to any God or supposed Word of God.  Look where it got them, and us.  And God would not let them, after, take of the Tree of Life, because life is on God’s terms.  Those who do not, who will not live life on God’s terms are the walking dead.

Christ for us is life and the light of the world, light for that valley of the shadow of death through which we must journey.  As we go, as we make disciples, as we baptize in the name of our God in Trinity, as we teach newcomers (and one another) to obey the commands of Jesus, that life and that light are with us, more than sufficient for all times and seasons of life.  Jesus himself assures us, “surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (28:20).  That’s the promise of a blood brother.  That’s the promise of love.  That’s a love worth receiving.  That’s a love worth telling and worth sharing.

Guide us, O God, by Your Word and Spirit, that in Your light we may see light, in Your truth find freedom, and in Your will discover Your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.