July 19, 2011 | Editor’s note: Faith & Leadership offers sermons that shed light on issues of Christian leadership. This sermon was preached on April 5, 2011, in the chapel of Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School.  

Matthew 28:18-20 is not the only missionary commission in the New Testament. Mark, Luke and John all have their own versions of the missionary commission which the risen Jesus entrusted to his disciples, none of which we should forget.

There are dangers in the fact that -- especially since the publication of the Scofield Bible in 1909 (whose headings affixed the title “The Great Commission” to Matthew 28, but not to Mark 16) -- evangelical Protestants have dignified Matthew’s version, to the exclusion of the others, with the title “The Great Commission.”

Evangelicals have too often grounded their theology of mission in this text alone, rather than in the whole witness of Scripture to the loving missionary purposes of God, as if the only reason we do mission was because Jesus has commanded us to, and we had better obey him.

However, there is more than enough meat in Matthew’s version of the commission to keep us going for one sermon, so I invite you to consider with me some aspects of the Great Commission that are all too often neglected.

Here are three great omissions from the Great Commission.

1. “All authority” is given to Jesus, not “all dominion” to us.

In the second chapter of his Gospel, Matthew depicts a group of mysterious figures from the East -- the magi -- who find their way to the infant Jesus. As they present their precious gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, they bow their knees in worship before him: “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him” (Matthew 2:11 NIV).

This is a quite staggering emphasis from a Jew writing for Jewish readers. “You shall have no other gods before me,” affirmed the first of the Ten Commandments. But here is a human infant receiving worship from representatives of the Gentile nations, worship that rightly belongs to Yahweh alone.

Matthew reiterates the point about the unique authority of Jesus throughout his Gospel. Jesus taught, he tells us, “as one who had authority” (7:29). He claimed that “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (9:6). In chapter 21, what is at stake in his encounter in the temple with the chief priests and elders is his authority to teach. And the climax of Jesus’ discourse on the Mount of Olives in chapter 24 is when he dares to appropriate to himself Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man “coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory.”

So when the risen Jesus asserts that “all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me,” he is not making a claim that would be totally novel to Matthew’s readers.

Nevertheless, in the light of the resurrection, the all-embracing nature of the authority of Jesus as the Christ can be proclaimed with a clarity that was not possible before: the unique authority over all nations given by the Father to the Son is now fully revealed and displayed to the eyes of faith by the resurrection.

Just like the magi in chapter 2, the disciples, doubting and half-believing though some of them, now bow the knee and worship the man Jesus -- something they would not have dreamt of doing hitherto. And it is this cosmic authority that is the basis for the missionary commission given to the disciples, indeed to all disciples until the end of the age, which includes us.

We should note that the text does not say, “All authority is given to you; therefore, go.” If it did, we would have a text that implied that God has handed this whole enterprise of world mission over to us, lock, stock and barrel. Converting the world would then be our business, not God’s, and it would be a business, a simple matter of employing the right methods with sufficient resources. Our understanding of mission should never degenerate into that kind of business mentality.

But neither does the text say, “All authority is given to me; therefore, there is no need for you to go.” If it did, we would have a text that displayed impeccable hyper-Calvinist logic and invited the church to sit on its backside and await the singular and sovereign moving of God to draw all humanity to himself.

That, of course, was precisely the view that William Carey set out to combat when he wrote his famous pamphlet, “An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens,” in 1792. Carey was endeavoring to refute those English Particular (i.e. Calvinistic) Baptists who believed that to take any initiative in bringing the gospel to the world beyond European Christendom, which they supposed to be the “normal” sphere of operation of the Holy Spirit, would infringe the sovereignty of God. Carey, evangelical Calvinist that he was, had it exactly right: “All authority is given to me -- therefore, you go.”

If we forget the first part of that statement, mission becomes just another process of human persuasion or propaganda, an attempt to capture or colonize the minds of men and women so that they should all think just like us. That is not Christian mission.