Then Jesus came up and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Matthew 28:18-20 (NET2)

Both Jesus’s statement that he has received all authority in heaven and on earth and his instruction or command to his disciples may seem to come out of the blue. We may even suspect that Jesus never said such a thing, that we are dealing with things made up by (a) later Gentile Christian(s). After all, didn’t Jesus say that he was sent only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 15:24)?

But there is another explanation, one perhaps at least as plausible: All this flows from the deep logic of the Son of Man. For Jesus to be the Danielic Son of Man, which he arguably claims to be in all four Gospels, he must receive authority from God and all nations must serve/worship him (see Daniel 7:14). In an interesting way, it may also be related to Jesus’s belief in the coming of the kingdom of God. There is an Old Testament expectation that YHWH will one day become king over all the earth (see Zechariah 14:9) and something along these lines is found in Daniel 7:27 (ESV): “And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.”

But why all this talk of teaching and making disciples? Why not try to subjugate the nations by military force? Perhaps we must look to the Old Testament again for an explanation. There may be other passages that shed light on Jesus’s actions. Isaiah 2:1-4 or Michah 4:1-2, perhaps? “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.” Was this understood as instrumental to the coming of the many nations to the mountain of the house of YHWH (see Michah 4:1 and Isaiah 2:2)? Perhaps even more powerful and important is the start of Isaiah 42 (ESV): “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring for justice to the nations (…) He will not faint or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law.”

But what about the baptizing? Why baptize Gentiles? And why in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Is it to make them ritually clean (see Leviticus 15), or is it to related to repentance and/or the start of a new life (Matthew 3:1-11, Romans 6:1-4), or is it related to following the example of Jesus (Mark 1:9) and/or to receiving the Holy Spirit (Mark 1:8, Acts 19:1-7), or are perhaps a number of these things the case? Remarkably, within Judaism in general there seems to be a practice of baptizing Gentile converts, and it is perhaps in relation to this that Jesus’s instruction should be understood. According to Maimonides, as quoted by T.F. Torrance, “in all ages when a Gentile is willing to enter into the Coventant, and gather himself under the wings of the Shekinah of God, and take upon him the yoke of the Law, he must be circumcised and be baptized and bring a sacrifice.”[1]

Finally, what are we to make of Jesus talk of always being ‘with’ his disciples? It may be that, of the whole passage, it is this part that the skeptic will find hardest to swallow. How could a first century Jew have said such a thing? The fact that some of the closest parallels in the Bible are statements about or by YHWH himself may not be very reassuring to him (see, for example, Genesis 28:15 and Joshua 1:5). But if verses like John 5:19 tell us something about the historical Jesus, then perhaps we should not be so suprised; “whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise”.

[1] T.F. Torrance, “Proselyte Baptism,” New Testament Studies 1, no. 2 (1954): 150.