Go and Tell the Whole World

The last time Peter hurried to Jesus, he jumped out of a fishing boat and swam to the beach. This time he had to climb.

Before he died, Jesus had told his friends, "After I am raised, I will go ahead of you into Galilee." On the morning the tomb was found empty, he met some women on the road and said it again: "Tell my brothers to go to Galilee. There they will see me." So his friends set off up the mountain he had chosen.

There were eleven of them. There had been twelve, but Judas, the friend who sold Jesus to his enemies for thirty silver coins, was dead.

The path was steep and full of loose stones. (Fishermen know a great deal about boats and nets. They know very little about mountains.) Peter puffed. Somebody slipped on the stones and grabbed a bush.

"Are we nearly there?" someone groaned.

"He said this mountain," said another. "He'll be there."

He was. When they came over the top, Jesus was already waiting for them.

Some of the eleven dropped straight to their knees and worshiped him. Others hung back. They knew he had died on a cross. They knew he had been buried behind a stone. Every one of them had seen him alive since then, Thomas too, and still part of them wondered if their eyes were playing tricks. One rubbed his face. One stood stiff with his hands at his sides. The Bible says it plainly: some of them doubted.

Jesus did not wait for them to be sure. He walked over to all of them, the kneeling ones and the doubting ones together, and he spoke.

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me."

(Authority means the right to be in charge. Every king, every star, and every storm now answered to the man standing on that hilltop.)

"So go," Jesus said, "and make disciples of all nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you."

A disciple is someone who follows a teacher and learns to live the way he lives. The eleven had been disciples for three years. Now they were to make more, everywhere.

All nations! Egyptians and Greeks and Romans, people in cities no one on that mountain had ever seen, speaking languages none of them could speak. Most of the eleven had hardly ever left the land of Israel.

Then Jesus gave them the last words in Matthew's book.

"And surely I am with you always, every day, to the very end of the age."

Going down the mountain was easier than coming up.

But eleven men could only walk so far. They could not cross every sea or learn every language, and none of them would live forever. Before many years passed, a king had James, John's brother, killed with a sword.

The news kept going anyway. The eleven told others, and those people told others, across seas and down roads, year after year.

It kept going because of the promise on that mountain. Matthew's book begins with an old promise from the prophet Isaiah, about a baby who would be called Immanuel, which means "God with us." On a hilltop in Galilee, the grown-up Jesus made that name a promise to everyone who would carry his news.

He had reached the top of the mountain before the eleven got there. Ever since, on every road his people take, Jesus has gone on ahead of them and walked right beside them, every day, just as he said.