Matthew 28:16-20
READING THE GREAT COMMISSION FROM THE MARGINS
Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:16-20)
I want to begin with a question. Not a trick question, just an honest one. When you hear the words “Go and make disciples of all nations,” where do you picture yourself standing?
Most of us, if we are honest, picture ourselves as the ones going. We are the senders or the sent. We are on the side of the commission. We hold the map. We know the destination.
But what if we began somewhere else? What if we began by asking: where does Jesus give this commission? And who is he giving it to?
The answers the text gives us are surprising. And they change everything.
This happens in Galilee. Not Jerusalem.
Galilee is not the centre of power. In Jesus’s day, it was the borderlands. It was the region that the religious leaders in Jerusalem looked down on. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, the prophet Isaiah is quoted calling it “Galilee of the Gentiles” – a place where the outsiders lived, the mixed communities, the people on the edges.
Jesus could have appeared anywhere. He is the risen Lord. He could have walked into the Temple courts in Jerusalem and made his announcement there, in front of the priests and the authorities. But he does not. He goes back to Galilee. Back to the margins. Back to the place he grew up, the place where he first called fishermen and tax collectors to follow him.
This tells us something important about what kind of mission Jesus is commissioning. It does not begin at the top and work its way down. It begins at the edges and moves outward. It begins among ordinary people, in an ordinary place, with a group of disciples who, the text quietly tells us, included some who were still doubting.
Even doubt is welcome on this mountain. Even uncertainty is not disqualifying. Jesus does not wait for his disciples to have everything figured out before he sends them. He meets them where they are, doubt and all, and speaks.
So the first thing this text asks us is: are we willing to begin at the margins? Are we willing to see the edges of our communities, the forgotten places, the people who are not at the centre of power, as the very place where God is most at work?
The authority Jesus claims is not the world’s kind of authority.
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
These are enormous words. And we need to hear them in their context. The disciples listening to Jesus had just lived through the most terrifying week of their lives. They had watched the Roman Empire arrest their teacher, put him through a mock trial, and nail him to a cross. Rome was the greatest power on earth. Rome had legions of soldiers, vast resources, and the authority to execute anyone who challenged its rule.
And Rome thought it had won.
When Jesus stands before his disciples and says “all authority has been given to me,” he is saying something that would have sounded almost laughable to the world outside: the one the empire killed is the one who holds ultimate power. Not Caesar. Not the governor. Not the religious authorities who handed him over. The crucified one.
This is the foundation of everything that follows. The Great Commission is not built on the authority of any empire, any nation, any institution, or any culture. It is built on the authority of a man who was poor, who was marginalised, who was executed by the state, and who rose from the dead.
That is important to note when we think about how this commission has been carried out across history. Because there have been times, many times, when the gospel was taken to other peoples wrapped in the authority of empire rather than the authority of the cross. When missionaries arrived with soldiers. When “making disciples” meant replacing people’s languages, their customs, their ways of knowing God, with European ones. When the authority invoked was the authority of a powerful nation, not the authority of a crucified Saviour.
The text will not support that. The authority Jesus claims is the authority of the one who said: the greatest among you must be your servant (Matthew 23:11). The authority of the one who washed his disciples’ feet. The authority of the one who said: whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me (Matthew 25:40).
If we carry this commission, we carry it in the name of that authority. Not the authority of the powerful, but the authority of the crucified and risen one who stands with the poor.
Teaching everything Jesus commanded is a much bigger call than we think.
“Teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
Everything. That word should stop us in our tracks.
What has Jesus commanded? Go back through Matthew’s Gospel and the list is extraordinary. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers (Matthew 5:3-9). Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44). Do not store up treasure on earth (Matthew 6:19). You cannot serve God and wealth (Matthew 6:24). Do not judge (Matthew 7:1). When you give to the needy, do not announce it (Matthew 6:2). The greatest commandment is love of God and love of neighbour (Matthew 22:37-39).
And then, at the end of Matthew 25, perhaps the most searching words in the whole Gospel: when did we see you hungry and feed you, thirsty and give you drink, a stranger and welcome you, naked and clothe you, sick and visit you, in prison and come to you? And the answer:
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40)
That is what “everything I commanded” looks like. It is a way of life. It is an ethic of radical welcome, of care for the poor, of enemy love, of gentleness with the vulnerable.
So here is the honest question the text puts to us. When we have gone to the nations, have we taught everything? Or have we sometimes taught some things and left others out? Have we been faithful to the full weight of what Jesus commanded, or have we sometimes made disciples of our culture, our traditions, our ways of doing church, and called it the gospel?
This is not a question meant to make us feel guilty and sit down. It is a question meant to make us go deeper. To return to Jesus. To ask him again: what did you actually command? And to follow that, even where it is uncomfortable.
What does it actually mean to make disciples?
Jesus does not say: go and make converts. He does not say: go and build institutions. He does not say: go and plant churches that look like ours. He says: make disciples. And that word, in the original Greek, is matheteusate. It comes from the word for learner, for one who walks alongside a teacher and learns by watching, listening, and doing.
A disciple is not a passive recipient. A disciple is someone who walks with Jesus. Who learns his way of seeing the world. Who begins to love what he loves and grieve what he grieves. Who sits at the table with the people he sat with, and stands with those he stood with.
Now here is what this means for how we think about mission. If making disciples is about walking together with Jesus, then it cannot be something one group of people does to another. It cannot be a one-way transfer. The person who comes to follow Jesus from the villages of Ghana, from the slums of India, from the indigenous communities of New Zealand, from the housing estates of Rochdale, is not a project. They are a fellow learner. They are on the same road.
And this is where mission from the margins becomes so important. Jesus did not commission a dominant culture to export itself to weaker ones. He commissioned a small, marginalised community to invite the whole world into a way of life. The difference matters enormously. Export says: we have what you need, and we will bring it to you in our packaging. Invitation says: come and walk this road with us, and teach us how you walk it too.
Some of the most faithful discipleship happening in the world today is not coming from the churches with the biggest buildings and the most resources. It is coming from churches that have learned, through suffering, what it means to follow a crucified Lord. The church in South Sudan that gathers under a tree and prays without ceasing. The church in Iran that meets in secret and knows the cost of faith. The Dalit Christian communities in India who have found in Jesus someone who sees their dignity when the world around them does not.
These communities are not at the receiving end of discipleship. They are among its most faithful practitioners. And the question for those of us who come from traditions with power and resources is not: how do we bring discipleship to them? The question is: are we humble enough to learn from them?
To make disciples of all nations is to be in a relationship of mutual learning. It is to say to every community on earth: you have something to teach us about what it means to follow Jesus. And we want to hear it.
What does it mean to baptise? And whose name do we baptise in?
Jesus says: baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. This is a beautiful and weighty phrase. And it has been, at different points in history, both a word of welcome and a weapon of exclusion. So we need to sit with it carefully.
Baptism in the New Testament is always a crossing over. It is a public declaration that you belong to God and not to the powers that once defined you. Paul writes in Galatians 3:27-28: as many of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
Read that again. Baptism erases the boundaries that the world uses to rank and exclude people. It does not erase identity, it does not erase culture, it does not erase the particularity of who you are. But it says: none of those things are the final word about you. The final word is that you belong to Christ.
Now this is good news. This is genuinely liberating news. But here is where we have to be honest. Baptism has sometimes been administered in a way that said the exact opposite. It has sometimes been used to say: you belong to Christ, and belonging to Christ means becoming like us. Learning our language. Adopting our customs. Abandoning your name.
There are communities today whose grandparents were given European names at baptism because their own names were considered too heathen to carry into the Christian life. Think about what that says. It says: the God who made you, who gave you your language and your family and your name, that God is not the God of this baptism. This baptism is an entry into our world, not a declaration that God was already present in yours.
But that is not what the text says. The text says baptism is in the name of the Father who made all things, the Son who became flesh in a specific place and culture and language, and the Spirit who blows where it wills and cannot be contained by any one tradition. Baptism in that name is not an invitation into European Christianity. It is an invitation into the life of a God who is already present everywhere, who was at work in every culture before any missionary arrived, and who is large enough to be praised in every language on earth.
The Psalms knew this. Psalm 87 envisions people from Egypt, Babylon, Philistia, Tyre, and Ethiopia all being registered as born in Zion, all belonging to God. The vision of God’s people in Revelation 7:9 is a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne. Not a crowd that has been made to look and sound the same. A multitude, in all their glorious difference, together before God.
That is what baptism is pointing toward. Not cultural assimilation. Not the victory of one tradition over all others. But the gathering of all peoples, in their fullness, into the life of the God who made them all.
Mission from the margins understands this. It says: we go not to make people like us, but to point them toward the one who already loves them, who was already at work among them, and who invites them to follow him in the fullness of who they are.
The promise is the most important part.
After all the commands, after “go” and “make disciples” and “baptize” and “teach everything,” Jesus ends with a promise. Just one sentence. But it is the sentence that holds everything else together.
“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)
Remember. He says remember. As if he knows that we will forget. As if he knows that the road will be long and hard and confusing, and that there will be moments when we wonder whether we have got it right, whether we have done more harm than good, whether the mission was worth it.
And into all of that uncertainty, he says: I am with you. Always.
Not: I will be with you when you get it right. Not: I will be with you when the results are good. Not: I will be with you when you have figured out all the theology. Always. To the end of the age.
This is the grace at the heart of the Great Commission. We are not left to do this on our own. We are not sent out with nothing but a set of instructions and a map. We are sent with a presence. The risen Christ himself goes with us.
And that means this: the mission is not about our power, our resources, our strategies, or our cultural influence. It is about his presence. Wherever we go, in his name, with his heart, following his commands, he is already there. He is with the Dalit communities of India who have found in Jesus a Lord who stands against the caste system. He is with the churches of sub-Saharan Africa who have received the gospel and made it deeply their own. He is with the persecuted communities of the Middle East who know what it means to follow a crucified Lord. He is with the indigenous Christians of the Pacific who are finding, with great care and prayer, what it means to follow Jesus from within their own sacred landscape.
He is with all of them. And they are teaching us what everything he commanded looks like.
So let us go back to where we started. The disciples are on a mountain in Galilee. Some of them are doubting. The world outside this hillside thinks the story is over. Rome has won. The tomb is sealed.
But the risen Christ is standing right in front of them. And he is sending them out, not with the power of empire, but with the authority of the cross. Not to impose a culture, but to make disciples of a way of life. Not to replace what they find in every nation, but to embody the love that transforms everything it touches. And he is not sending them alone. He is going with them, to the end of the age.
The commission is still open. It is still being carried out, by communities all over the world, in many languages, in many forms, from many different starting points. And the most faithful way we can honour it is to return, again and again, to the one who gave it. To learn from him what authority looks like. To ask him again what everything he commanded means. To listen to brothers and sisters around the world who hear his voice in ways that deepen and correct our own.
And then to go. Not with our hands full of our own resources. But with the one promise we actually need: I am with you always.
“I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:20
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