Genesis 1:1-2:4a | Psalm 8 | 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 | Matthew 28:16-20
Listen to it here.
•
A few years ago, I worked at a church in San Francisco that opens its doors every friday of the year to the whole city to come buy their food without money: The Food Pantry at Saint Gregory’s distributes thousands and thousands of pounds of food every year, and they set it out all around the altar, which stands in the middle of the sanctuary.
The people line up outside: Chinese grandmas, homeless parents, hungry college students, curious onlookers, strung out meth-addicts. They all bunch up outside and then come in through the church’s front doors, making their way around the stacked piles of oranges and cabbages and bread and frozen chicken breasts and fill their various bags and suitcases.
There are no requirements for getting food other than showing up. You don’t have to live in a certain place or have an income below a certain line. All you have to do is show up. And, what was even more surprising to me, even shocking to that part of my self that wants the “right” people in charge: the people who run the Pantry, a giant enterprise, are all people who originally came for food.
Almost all of them have been on and off the street since their first visit, and more than one of them has more than a passing acquaintance with methamphetamine or heroin. Surely, I caught myself thinking, the Food Pantry is being run by the wrong people.
•
All through the history of Israel, God always does this: God is *always* choosing the wrong people.
God chose to protect Cain, who murdered his brother, rather than condemn him to death.
God took a shepherd boy, the youngest son, and made him king of Israel. David, that king, then went on to arrange murders and commit adultery, and yet somehow, God managed to make good out of this very imperfect man.
Paul, the man who some Biblical scholars call the “Second founder of Christianity” started his career by having Christians stoned to death, and Peter seemed to spend most of his time confused and contradicting his teacher.
These are the people that God seems to like choosing, and we see it again today, here at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel.
When we meet the disciples, they have been hiding out in Jerusalem, doing their best not to meet the same end as their friend Jesus, maybe mulling over just exactly what they might have done to prevent the grisly execution that most of them were too afraid even to come witness.
Or thinking about how futile it had all been. How powerful the forces were that had been arrayed against them, how foolish Jesus had been to have even tried.
And then, their friends Mary come breaking into their rooms, telling them that Jesus isn’t dead after all, jabbering on about earthquakes and visions and how they have to go back to Galilee and that Jesus will meet them there.
•
How hard do you think it must have been to get up and leave that room. To get up and travel the hundred or so miles north to Galilee, back to where it had all started, to meet the friend that you had betrayed and that you had *seen* dead.
If it had been me, and I had heard that Jesus was back, I think the first thing that would have entered my mind would have been, “Oh, no… he’s going to be *so* mad at me…”
One way or another, though, they did head north, back home. I imagine a kind of desperate expectation both to meet Jesus there, and maybe hoping, after all, that he wouldn’t show up.
But he did. Jesus came to them.
He meets them, and even in the face of this appearance, though they worship, some are still doubting. There he is in front of their faces, and yet they are still confused, still wondering what can possibly be going on.
•
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus doesn’t have much to say to the disciples when he meets them after the Resurrection. But what he does have to say is perhaps the most shocking, absurd thing he has said yet.
•
Jesus spent his life making the authorities angry and inviting the wrong people into fullness of life. He touched unclean people and told them they were clean. He ate dinner with sinners and made them his friends. He did these things and got killed for it.
It wasn’t that he was doing miracles or attending feasts. It was that he was touching unclean bodies and revealing their wholeness at the times the authorities had told him he was not supposed to do so. It was because he was inviting the wrong sorts of people to his table and treating them as though they were beloved by God.
In the specialized lingo of seminaries and church work, this is what we call having “bad boundaries.” Rather than keeping a decorous distance from the people he is serving, scheduling office hours and only becoming just as involved as he needs to in order to send the person on their way, Jesus breaks the rules that have been set for him. He knocks down the boundaries that have been set up by people of good faith to keep society running as it’s supposed to.
Over and over again, Jesus goes to the people that he shouldn’t and gives them the love and power that they cannot possibly deserve.
And all along, people would ask him, “By what authority do you do this?”
•
And so here, on the mountaintop, after days of desperation, fear, and confusion, the disciples come to Jesus in doubt and in faith, and to all of them, he says, “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.”
Jesus is claiming authority that no human being is supposed to have. He’s taking authority from all the rulers, all the parents, all the husbands, all the soldiers, all the guards, all the governors. He is even claiming as his the authority of God herself.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says.
As any of you who have done much study of Old Testament will know, name have power. Names are more than just labels for people in Hebrew thought: they are the essence of the person themselves. And so for Jesus to put himself on par with the name of the Father and the Holy Spirit, is a boundary-crossing of the most provocative sort.
•
A fully-articulated theology of the Trinity would only emerge after centuries of struggle and conflict and even treachery and backstabbing (again, we see the kinds of people that God likes to choose), but even from the earliest days of the Church, the disciples knew that in this man from Galilee, they had met God in a new and unique way.
And what the Church would come to understand is that in characteristic fashion, God herself had shown just how bad her boundaries really are: God went so far as to enter creation itself and live a human life, with all of its messes, embarrassments, joys, and confusions.
Jesus is able to claim God’s authority because, in a way that the disciples could only begin to imagine, Jesus is himself an encounter with God’s own self. Meeting him, they meet God.
Only God is not how they expected: Not in great power and majesty, but in a convicted and executed criminal. The God they met joins them in their humanity, rather than demanding that they ascend to him in perfection.
God did what God always does: showing up in unexpected places, offering food to the hungry, making servants out of those enslaved to the worst that the world has to offer.
•
And so, perhaps with many of the same doubts that the disciples had as they met Jesus there on the mountaintop in Galilee, we are allowed to overhear his instructions to them. Jesus is not content merely to appear to his friends: he comes to them, and then puts them to work. “Go, make disciples of all nations,” he says.
I do not care if you don’t think you believe enough or don’t think that you are the right kind of person, he says. Go, you doubtful and questionable people: I love you, and am inviting you into the work of breaking open the heart of the world, so that there might never be a “wrong” sort of person again.
