Matthew's End: Discipleship, Baptism, and Trinity

[For comment on the Genesis reading see this post from 2023]

The lectionary returns to Matthew today for the first time since Easter Day, and we find ourselves at the very end of that Gospel—and still, or again, reading the story of a resurrection appearance, even after the end of the Easter season. This passage presents Jesus meeting the eleven in Galilee—an event promised to the women who had met the risen one first (28:7)— including Jesus’ farewell, and what, at least since the 19th century, has been termed the “Great Commission.” The most obvious reason for its inclusion on this Trinity Sunday is the single most explicit reference in the New Testament to the triad of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in v.19. Yet there is more here about the nature of the God who raised Jesus from the dead than a mere proof-text.

Daniel Harrington describes the passage as “a summary of the whole Gospel.”1 Jesus’ instruction to teach all that he has commanded (v.20) does now make the whole text of the Matthew into a sort of catechesis. As a “summary” though, it presents some themes in ways that are strikingly new: a risen savior after a dead hero, a universal mission following a very Jewish story, a new community constituted alongside (?) Israel. Each of these involves recognizable elements of the preceding Gospel narrative transformed—like Jesus himself—and not just recapitulated.

Matthew’s Gospel has emphasized discipleship, and even here at the end Jesus acts as teacher instructing his followers; yet the idea that disciples should be “of all nations” is new. Through this Gospel, Matthew has emphasized Jesus’ mission to Israel itself. In Jesus’ teaching, fidelity to the law of Moses has been upheld. Any sense of a scope for his work that went beyond Israel has only been hinted at. This new development in the plot is also crucial to understanding what had and had not happened before, not least around ethnicity and religious identity. Some readers get tripped up (e.g.) by an apparent lack of inclusivity on Jesus’s part, prior to cross and resurrection, such as the (commonly misread) story of his interactions with a Gentile woman (15:22-28). Her bravery now means even more, since it was an anticipation of that new community that has now become possible because he has suffered and returned. This Gospel has not been just a set of isolated stories, but a single story in which things have changed.

Commentators disagree on just what the reference here to “all nations” (v.19) actually means. “Nations” is also the word for “Gentiles” in this and other Jewish literature, i.e., for non-Jews. The interpretive question becomes whether the term is meant inclusively, to say that the Gospel is now for all peoples without distinction, or whether it’s meant exclusively, referring to the Gentiles and with the Jews either assumed—or left to one side. It is however very unlikely that this moment ushers in a wholly Gentile Church, since even though Matthew has depicted a particular generation of Judeans and their rejection of Jesus harshly, this Gospel in particular remains firmly grounded in Jewish thought and practice. Instead we should understand this new mission then as the promises of God being made available also to the wider world through the Jews, just as (e.g.) Isaiah had prophesied (49:6 etc.).

The introduction of baptism is a surprise here though, or should be. Baptism hasn’t been part of the Matthean narrative since Jesus’ own baptism by John, early on in the Gospel. While we don’t tend to think of Matthew as a “two-level story” the way some commentators read John’s Gospel—as simultaneously a story about the early community as well as about Jesus—there are points in Matthew when we may glimpse the life of the community in or for which this Gospel was written. Presumably the readers are already aware of an initiatory ritual of baptism, accompanied by the threefold formula reported here.

The baptism of John (the Baptist, not the Evangelist) had not been a ritual of membership in a new religion, but was an act of Jewish preparation for the coming reign of God, perhaps a riff on the use of ritual washing and the mikvah elsewhere in Judaism to prepare for worship. While those whom John baptized became his followers in a sense, his baptism itself did not separate them from Judaism in any way. So the way baptism is presented now, as a means to make disciples of non-Jewish disciples, is new but still not quite how Christians would later come to think of it.

We don’t get the sense from the Gospels that the movement around Jesus had been using baptism to distinguish his disciples during his ministry (despite John 3:22). Matthew’s commissioning story now suggests that Gentiles (in particular) who wished to follow Jesus were to be offered baptism as initiation into the movement. This is something closer to a mark of religious conversion, but the very Jewish nature of the ritual may mean we should think of these Gentile disciples as converts to Judaism—or at least to a movement within it, namely that of the followers of Jesus. So we have some insight here into the adaptation of baptism in the emerging Christian context, as offering Gentiles in particular a mean to purify themselves (the basic meaning of a washing ritual) and prepare for the reign of God. Yet the language most applicable to this process here is “being made disciples,” not “becoming Christians.”

How does all this shed light on what Christians would late confess as the doctrine of the Trinity, other than listing the three persons in this new form of baptism? At least two other aspects of this passage provide something new about the nature of God that go beyond this mention of the triad as a proof-text.

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The first is how this glorified risen Jesus offers a new divine revelation, including about himself. While this theophany may remind us (as often in Matthew) of Moses at Sinai, Jesus now bears something more than just reflected glory. His opening words to the eleven (“all authority…”) allude to Daniel’s vision in that Book, of the heavenly “son of Man” (Dan 7:13) who receives authority from the “ancient of days.” The risen Christ is claiming a unique relationship to God that, just as surely as any trinitarian formula, recasts how Jesus relates to the one whom he called Father.

Second, the promise with which the story concludes, that Jesus will be with them always “to the end of the age,” is more than a sentimental suggestion that they will remember him or somehow keep him alive with their faithful actions. Luke’s and John’s Gospels each go considerably further to elaborate on how Jesus’ presence and absence are both realities for the community, via the work of the Holy Spirit. Here Matthew also clearly takes Jesus far beyond the place of being a teacher or exemplar, to being a constant spiritual presence in their midst, but seems to make little here of the work of the Holy Spirit; yet we should remember that John the Baptist had distinguished Jesus’ ministry from his own by saying Jesus would bring a baptism “with the Holy Spirit” (3:11)—to which the eleven are now in fact exhorted.

So while Matthew does not offer a developed doctrine of the Trinity, both the triadic baptismal formula and the transformed sense of Jesus’ identity and relationship— to the Father and also to the continuing community of disciples—offer a glimpse into very early understandings that would ultimately develop into trinitarian belief. When new disciples are baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” they are not simply being given a doctrinally correct formula, but are being drawn into the life of the God who is being described in new ways with these words. Both the risen Jesus who pronounces that formula here here, and the mysterious presence of Jesus that will sustain and lead the community afterwards, are means by which these new disciples will encounter and serve the “Ancient of days,” in the abiding presence of that glorified “Son of Man.”