22.05.05 Colin Matthew 28.16-20 Trinity Sunday
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You will know the saying that the word is
mightier than the sword, and there are many occasions in life when words are
very important:
Words
can and do change lives. Maybe 35 years
ago, I was out walking with a friend, a former Curate of St James. I was wondering what job I might do since I
was bored with what I was doing at that time and he asked if I had thought of
being a teacher. That seemed far from my
reality at the time, but those few words changed my whole
life.
Here
in this very short passage of 5 verses at the end of Matthews Gospel, Jesus
speaks a few words that change forever the lives of the 11 disciples. Those few words that Jesus says to the
disciples also change the whole course of history right up to the present
day. Jesus says to them: “I have been
given all authority (From God the Father) in heaven and on earth. Go then, to all peoples everywhere, and make
them my disciples; baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit, and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you. And I will be with you always, to the end of
the age”. Those words have become known
as the Great Commission to the disciples.
It’s quite astonishing really, that the bringing together by Jesus, of
these 11 ordinary men and the challenge of his last words to them, should change
the whole course of history.
These
last words of Jesus articulate clearly the three-fold nature of God that we
celebrate today on Trinity Sunday. Most
of our festivals in Church are about events: Christmas remembering the birth of
Jesus, Easter the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, Pentecost the coming of the
Holy Spirit. Trinity Sunday is unusual
in the Church calendar in that it celebrates a doctrine – the 3-fold nature of
God: God the Father, God the Son and God
the Holy Spirit: three persons so completely one that they are indivisible is
what the Doctrine states.
Some
words which helped me think about the meaning of the Trinity in relation to
people were spoken by Francis Schaeffer, one of the great Christian writers of
the 1960s/1970s. He taught that the
Trinity is a picture of the loving relationship within
the three-in-one God - central to the very being of God is a shared love and
relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And, since human beings are made in the image
of God, our created nature is exactly similar
to
God’s - that is our created design is to be in a community of loving
relationships with God and with each other.
Our
own
human need for love and shared relationships comes from the fundamental nature
of God. At the heart then of the
doctrine of the Trinity, and of our human nature, is the need to be
in
a community of love and shared relationships.
The
Doctrine of the Trinity is not a conundrum.
It’s not a mathematical 3 in 1 formula to confuse us. Rather it is a picture of a community of
loving relationships in God. It is part
of the natural created loving relationships that we are born to have, if we
choose to form them.
In God the Holy Trinity we see love without barrier or limit; we glimpse the kind of loving relationships which God intended for humanity. And in response, God invites us to experience and to be formed by this same love. This loving relationship calls us to lives of service, and God sends us out to live this life of love, making disciples and teaching them to obey his commands.
This
Great Commission that Jesus gives to his disciples is to make more
disciples. Jesus does not command them
to preach … to evangelise ... to win the world.
Their job is the ‘discipling’ of others i.e. they will spend good time
with people sharing. It’s a softer word
than evangelising. Their job is to
share: in their life, in their words and in their deeds, the community of love
which is at the very centre of the nature of God. Only the Holy Spirit can use that witness to
the community of love to bring others into a renewed relationship with God.
The
Jesus we read of in the Bible is gentle, tender and sensitive, not harsh and
demanding. People can only be attracted
into the loving community of God’s people if they actually experience that
loving community. This then is our
individual task: to show in our life
what being part of God’s loving community is like. Our task as a congregation is to develop and
share here on earth the reality of loving community amongst people which is
central to the nature of God.
Sometimes
I guess we feel that the great commission to go and make disciples is beyond
us. But we need to remind ourselves of
the fact Jesus
chose ordinary people to carry out an extraordinary mission. This is fully in keeping with God's work
throughout history. God chose the young
lad, David, instead of one of his older and stronger brothers. God sent most of Gideon's army home before
sending the rest into battle. To God,
our ability is less important than our availability and our willingness to
obey.
It was two ordinary women,
as recorded earlier in chapter 28,
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, that Jesus instructs to "Go and tell my
brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me". In that time and place, women were not
considered fit to serve as witnesses in court, but Jesus chooses women to be the
witnesses to his resurrection. In that
time and place, men gave orders and women did what they were told. Yet Jesus asked these ordinary women without
any power in their society, to tell the disciples to go to
The
disciples are ordinary people too, like you and I, and this is the first time in
this Gospel that they have been together since Jesus was arrested and the
disciples deserted him. We can only
guess at their state of mind as they proceed toward the mountain. We should not be surprised that some of these
ordinary people, the disciples, should doubt or hesitate. Nothing in their experience has prepared them
for what they were now experiencing, because the task they are given by
Jesus is staggering, and must have seemed ludicrous to this little group of
disciples. After all, there were only
eleven of them - how could they possibly take the Gospel to the whole
world? How could they convey the love of
Jesus to people whose languages they could not understand? How could they take the word to continents
whose existence they could not even imagine?
And yet, by the grace of God, it happened!
Often in
life we put ourselves down and think that we are not important enough to have
any impact on the world. We think our
words do not carry any weight with other people. But let’s remember that these founding
members of the Christian Church were a very inauspicious group of ordinary
people. They had failed to live up to
Jesus teaching many times during the three years they were with him. One of them had betrayed Jesus. They were for the most part not particularly
well educated men. Yet, their obedience
to the command of Jesus changed the whole course of world history.
Jesus
does not choose us for our ability. He
does not choose us because we can make spectacular speeches like Winston
Churchill or Martin Luther King. He
chooses us because of our desire to be part of the community of loving
relationships that is fundamental to the Trinity of Being which God
is.
It
if were not for the disciples response to the Great Commission that Jesus gave
them, few people would have ever heard of or felt the redemptive power of Jesus
Christ. His name would be only a minor
footnote in history. As disciples of Jesus
ourselves, we can continue with his great commission to us by demonstrating to
those we meet day-by-day a life which exhibits the loving community of
relationships which is central to God’s nature.
We do this for others by showing in our life and our actions practical,
disciplined and sacrificial love for others. We also show it by ensuring our
words demonstrate and communicate in our daily lives the tender, gentle and
loving nature of God.
These things are no more
difficult for us as ordinary people than they were for the disciples as ordinary
people. For us, like them, all that is
required is being available and obedient to the God who is the originator and
exemplar of loving relationships.
Jesus promises to be with
us to the end of the age. Let us pray
today that he will help us to live a life of obedience, demonstrating in our
lives the loving relationships that are possible when we are in touch with the
God who is three in one.