The Trinity, Matthew 28, and the Great Commission

The Sunday gospel lectionary reading for Trinity Sunday in this Year A is Matt 28.16–20. As with the readings in Years B and C, it is short and compact. (See below for commentary on this, and here for video discussion of it, and here for video discussion of the epistle from 2 Cor 13, both also linked at the end.)

But many will not preach on this passage! For some reason, this is the one Sunday of the year when those preaching feel they should depart from the Scripture readings, and (sometimes for the only time in the year) try and preach on a theological idea. I can understand the temptation; Stephen Holmes, in his Quest for the Trinity notes the influence of Karl Barth, who commented:

The doctrine of the Trinity is what basically distinguishes the Christian doctrine of God as Christian…in contrast to  all other possible doctrines of God (cited in Holmes p 4).

I think this is true, and you only realise how surprising this is if you ask someone who has not thought about it: what is the central distinguishing feature of Christian faith? I remember being asked this when I started ordination training, and still feel my sense of surprise, first, that I hadn’t ever really considered the question and, second, that this was the answer.

But focussing on preaching on the Trinity is a bad idea for several reasons. First, why depart from preaching on Scripture on this day of all days? Secondly, why choose to preach on the Christian doctrine which, although distinctive, has been the biggest and most challenging that theologians have wrestled with down the centuries? Thirdly, why preach on something that so many get so badly wrong, with illustrations of clover leaves or ice, water and steam that alternately lapse into tritheism and modalism or (even worse and more common) make the false analogy between the ‘persons’ of the Trinity and human persons in social Trinitarianism? These problems might be a good reason to do some teaching—but whether this can be done on one Sunday of the year, in a service of worship, is another matter.

Yet there is a bigger reason not to preach ‘on the Trinity’ on this one Sunday. If the Trinity is indeed not so much taught in Scripture (though Revelation gets pretty close to this) but the doctrine underlying all of Scripture, without which Scripture does not make sense, then if we have been preaching faithfully on Scripture all through the year, then we have in fact been preaching on the Trinity! What we might do is to make the Trinitarian assumptions of our text clear as we preach on them—but that is something we should be doing all the year.

I was encouraged to read this comment on social media in response to my previous post on Pentecost:

I REALLY appreciate this post and the emphasis on maintaining a trinitarian lens through which to understand and explain Pentecost and the role of the Spirit. Thanks.

Perhaps this Sunday is a moment to reflect on our preaching through the year, and ensure we have a Trinitarian orientation to it, just as we should have an anti-antiSemitic orientation to our preaching and reading of Scripture. as well.

So I offer here some briefs notes on the reading from Matt 28.16–20, followed by some important contributions on the subject of the Trinity from previous articles here which might help shape your preaching on this occasion.

It is immediately striking how condensed this conclusion to the gospel is, and how abrupt is the change of scene and focus. The previous extended narrative has all been set in Jerusalem—but now the scene is Galilee, without explicit explanation. The clue to this is surely found in the narrative shape of the gospel as a whole. Like the other synoptics (Mark and Luke), Matthew has depicted Jesus’ ministry as essentially in two halves: the dynamic, popular, and successful ministry in Galilee, where Jesus has moved about freely and drawn the crowds; and the final ministry in Jerusalem, where opposition has closed in around him, he cannot move in the open, and the crowds are divided in their opinion.

Such opposition as there is in the north is sometimes connected with the south, as in Luke 5.17, which hints that the situation is more complex. And of course the depiction in the Fourth Gospel, of Jesus moving frequently from north to south, not least to celebrate the Pilgrim Festivals, is more much historically realistic; the binary depiction of ministry in the Synoptics is a narrative construction.

The movement to Galilee is often thought to be problematic in terms of an overall chronology, apparently contradicting the clear command of Jesus in Acts 1.4 for the disciples to ‘remain in Jerusalem’. Against this, we need to note how selective and condensed these passages are; how the Fourth Gospel agrees with Matthew on the disciples returning to their home territory; the fact that Luke does not tell us where Jesus was with the disciples during the ‘forty days’ in which he taught them about the kingdom through the Holy Spirit (Acts 1.2–3); and that Matthew does not tell us that Jesus ascended to the Father from Galilee. So the contradiction is more apparent than real.

Although most English translations imply that there was a specific mountain or hill that Jesus directed them to, the grammar of the text is more general—’to the mountain/hill country where Jesus had directed them.’ The phrase ‘to the mountain/hill’ occurs quite often in Matthew, most notably at the beginning of the first of the five discourses that Jesus gives, suggesting an echo of the five Books of Moses, known as the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5.1).

The juxtaposition of the disciples both ‘worshipping’ and ‘doubting’ jars on first reading. But, as with the account of Thomas’ encounter with Jesus in John 20, we need to be careful about how we read these terms.

The term proskuneo can have a sense of mere respect to a social superior, with its etymology of bending the knee, but it can also have the stronger sense of ‘worship’, and the context of both the encounter with the risen Jesus and his teaching which follows surely gives us this second, stronger, sense. The verb distazo, translated ‘doubt’, only occurs twice in the New Testament, both in Matthew, and both in the context of recognition of who Jesus is. The earlier occurrence is Matthew’s unique account of Peter stepping out of the boat onto the water in response to Jesus’ invitation in Matthew 14.29–31; when Peter sees the wind and the waves, he is afraid, and cries out, and is rescued by Jesus who chides him for his little faith and his ‘doubting’.

It denotes not intellectual doubt so much as practical uncertainty, being in two minds—the disorientation produced by the unfamiliar and overwhelming situation… It indicates that they did not know how to respond to Jesus in this new situation, where he was familiar and yet now different; compare the bewilderment and fear of the three disciples who witness the Transfiguration (R T France, NICNT Matthew pp 1111–1112).

This aspect of being ‘double-minded’ is paralleled in another di– term dipsuchos in James 1.8. Within Matthew’s narrative, this is their first encounter with the risen Jesus, so it is unsurprising that their ambivalence matches that recorded in Luke 24.38.

‘Jesus came to them’ is an expression of encouragement and reassurance, parallel to the same phrase we saw at the Transfiguration in Matt 17.7. His commissioning of them includes a fourfold ‘all’, sometimes obscured in English translations:

1. He has been given ‘all’ authority, which he confers on them in their ministry.
2. He sends them to ‘all’ nations with the good news of the kingdom.
3. He calls them to teach ‘all’ that he has in turn taught them.
4. He will be with them ‘all’ of the days to the end of the age.

The granting of them authority for ministry offers a strong parallel to Matthew’s version of the sending of the Twelve in Matt 10, in which he blends the local commission of Jesus for that period with the longer challenge of future ministry. But the language of authority, heaven and earth, and the nations also creates strong parallels with the vision of the ‘one like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven to the Ancient of Days’ in Daniel 7.13–14, language that Matthew records Jesus using in the Olive Discourse/Little Apocalypse in Matt 24.30.

The idea of being sent to ‘all nations’ appears to contradict Jesus’ vocation only to the ‘lost sheep of the House of Israel’ (Matt 10.5), yet we have had anticipations of this all through the gospel—from the coming of the Magi to seek the new king in Matt 2, through the faith of the centurion in Matt 8 pointing to the future coming of ‘many from the East and the West to feast with Abraham’ (Matt 8.11), to the anticipation of just such global ministry in the Olivet Discourse at Matt 24.31. Note that this mission ‘to the nations’ does not replace the mission to Israel, but extends it.

The Gentile mission extends the Jewish mission – not replaces it; Jesus nowhere revoked the mission to Israel (10:6), but merely adds a new mission revoking a previous prohibition (10:5) (Craig Keener, cited in France p 1115).

The command to ‘make disciples’ uses the unusual verb matheteuo, related to the noun for a disciple (mathetes, from which we get the word ‘mathematics’ which originally referred to general learning and instruction); it is often said to be unique to this passage, but in fact occurs in Matt 13.52 (in the description of the scribe who has been trained in the kingdom), in Matt 27.57 (to describe Joseph of Arimathea, who has been ‘discipled’), and in Acts 14.21 (where Paul and his companions have made many disciples). It refers to a process of teaching and training—and it is striking that the ‘teaching’ follows baptism in Jesus’ order, suggesting that, as reflected in (for example) Acts 8 and Acts 16, and in contrast to much practice of the early church of the second and third centuries, baptism is administered at the first confession of faith, and the teaching of discipleship then follows as a longer process.

There is simply no reason to claim that the triadic formula of ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ is a later emendation of the text, despite the clear indication in Acts that baptism was initially ‘in the name of Jesus’. This would not be the only example of early practice taking time to conform to the teaching of Jesus as recorded in the gospels.

It is striking that here, there is a single, threefold ‘name’, thus identifying Jesus and the Spirit with the name of God. This incorporation of Jesus into the godhead is exactly what we find in Paul’s writings, most notably in three examples:

1. In 1 Cor 8.4–6, Paul cites the Shema, the central confession of Jewish faith, that ‘there is no God but one’ in explicit contrast to pagan claims that there are multiple gods. But in doing so, he then incorporates Jesus into that ‘one’, arguing that there is ‘one God, the Father…and one Lord, Jesus Christ’, when in the Old Testament ‘Lord’ is simply a way of referencing the God of Israel.
2. In Rom 10.9–13, it is the confession that ‘Jesus is Lord’ which saves—a recognition that he is both lord of our lives and the cosmic lord enthroned at the right hand of the Father. But Paul seals his argument by citing Joel 2.32: ‘For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved”‘. For Paul, this ‘Lord’ on whom we call is the Lord Jesus, but for Joel, this saving ‘Lord’ is Yahweh וְהָיָ֗ה כֹּ֧ל אֲשֶׁר־יִקְרָ֛א בְּשֵׁ֥ם יְהוָ֖ה יִמָּלֵ֑ט. Paul is incorporating Jesus into the saving identity of God.
3. In Phil 2.9–11 God bestows the name that is above every name on Jesus—which is his own name. In anticipating that ‘every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord’, Paul is borrowing the language of Is 45.23 which asserts that God alone is the one who commands worship in all the earth.

And of course we find the same kind of triadic language in the opening epistolary greeting from John to his readers in Rev 1.4–5.

So this is indeed a fitting conclusion to the gospel, which draws together multiple threads in a compressed form, and sends out both the original disciples and successive generations of readers, commissioning them on a global task of proclaiming the good news of Jesus and the kingdom until he returns.

If you are tempted to talk more about the Trinity than the passage, then here are some pointers from previous articles.

Mike Higton, Professor of Theology and Ministry at Durham, preached on Trinity Sunday a couple of years ago. To demonstrate that this was not complicated, he preached (almost) the whole sermon in words of one syllable. He concludes: