Have I talked about this with you?

Growing up, being part of churches that talk about making disciples, I heard a lot about the last few sentences of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus tells his disciples, the eleven, to go and make disciples. Or as they are going, to make disciples.

We’ve had conversations about how to do that work, about what counts. We’ve had arguments about whether it means making converts or making disciples, about what methods are most effective.

It becomes, for many people, burdensome and obligatory, yet another way to feel like we are not measuring up, that we are not good enough as Christians.

Over the past few months, I’ve reflected on the phrases before and after Jesus says to make disciples.

He starts this small speech by saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.” He ends it by saying, “behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

What many of us know as the great commission is embedded in a great commitment.

If Jesus is, in fact, with us always, then it means always. And what he knew as he said those words is that some of the people he was looking at in that moment doubted it was him. And he knew that all of those people would die, as would generations of people since then. And he knew that people would have lives of suffering, lives of loneliness, lives of cancer and crashes and chaos.

And he knew that some of them might think that he was only around happy people. He knew that some people would begin to think that suffering was punishment, that illness represented a lack of faith. He knew that people would make up rules about him and that people would wonder if he’d forgotten them.

And so the last words he prompts Matthew to write, so that if all we had was this one Gospel the last words we read would be these: “behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

So, when I sit in dim rooms full of beeps and despair, I don’t have to make up my own words. I can quietly say, “he didn’t say he’d fix things the way we want them. Some of us have let you believe that. And I’m sorry. He did, however, say this: ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”

The great commission and commitment.