Reflection by The Ven Dr Deborah Broome

Sent on mission by an outward-facing God

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they 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 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 

That’s how Matthew’s Gospel ends, with the resurrected Jesus giving the disciples their final instructions.  Jesus has been vindicated by God, he’s passed through death, he has all authority in heaven and earth.  When someone comes to you from the other side of the grave, he’s worth listening to.  And this is what he says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all 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.”  It’s what we’ve come to call “the Great Commission” – this is Jesus sending his disciples out to make other disciples.  He’s sending out those who already know him to talk to those who are still outsiders and bring them into the community of those who know and love God. 

Jesus is commissioning his disciples for mission in the name of the Trinity – which is of course one of the reasons we read this on Trinity Sunday. “Commission,” like “mission” is about purpose: it’s about being sent out with the authority to do something. Jesus is sending us out too, but sometimes I think we’ve turned the Great Commission into something that’s a problem for us, something we’d rather not think about. There are two mistakes we can make about “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” and the first is to think it’s got absolutely nothing to do with us. (What some have called “the Great Omission.”)

We sometimes want to think this has nothing to do with us – that it’s just a suggestion, an activity we might want to think about some time or another, or we look around for the wiggle room. Or we hear it as something about going overseas on mission trips, and because not everyone is called to that life, we ignore it. 

The other mistake is the opposite of thinking this Commission has nothing to do with us – and that’s to think it has everything to do with us. That we’re supposed to do this all on our own – and when we think that, we feel completely daunted and give up before we even start.  That’s when it helps hugely to remember what Jesus says right at the end: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” We are not on our own. We haven’t been given a task to do by someone who delivers a few basic instructions and then goes off to the movies for the afternoon. We’re called into action by someone who stays and works with us: we’re called to disciple others and bring them into the family of God and we do this together with that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit who is right here helping us. Here, right at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, we get the connection between mission and the Trinity.

Mission is not something we do on our own: it’s the mission of the Trinity, into which we join.  Mission looks outward. It’s about something other than simply waiting for those who are like us to come to us – it’s about going to those who are different from us, reaching outward towards those who are spiritual outsiders and welcoming them into the faith community. And we get that sense of looking outwards when we look at God. 

The persons of the Trinity aren’t turned in on one another, existing in a loving but closed-in bubble. From the very beginning God was reaching out – reaching out to create not only the natural world and all the living creatures, but also us: people with whom a relationship is possible. We’re created in God’s image, and so – right from the very beginning – we’re the ones created to reach out to others, created to welcome others into a loving community. When we do mission, we are being true to ourselves, the selves we were created to be, created in the image of an outward-looking God, created in the image of the Triune God.