Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 27:1 (Winter 2013)
Article: Editor’s Reflections
Author: William David Spencer

PP 27:1 (Winter 2013) p. 2

Editor’s Reflections

William David Spencer

Every Christian knows that Jesus Christ’s “Great Commission” in Matthew 28:19 has been the motivation for his people launching out across the world and discipling all who respond to the good news of salvation since our Lord began the church. What many Christians do not know, however, is that an entire theology of God is present in this great epic statement. And a summary of our way of life and our hopes of glory are all here too.

Jesus delivers this charge as he brings to a close his ministry on earth. Everything is now behind him. The suffering of persecution, rejection, and, finally, execution is over. The triumph of his resurrection has stunned the religious community. The temple veil hangs torn and useless, and the glory of God’s presence has rushed out of the holy of holies and has taken up residence among the faithful followers of God-Among-Us. All abroad are risen saints—those, like Lazarus, who have been brought forth alive when the tombs were opened as Jesus died (Matt 27:51-53). Rather than figments of legend, symbolic, fictitious images that show a god has died, these risen reminders of Jesus’ resurrection circulated for years as a living testimony to the One who conquered death. Between the years AD 123/4 to 129, when the Emperor Hadrian, who had followed Trajan (into whose reign the apostle John had lived), was in Asia Minor,1 the apologist Quadratus wrote a well circulated pamphlet to Hadrian, defending the faith. In it, he wrote:

Our Saviour’s works were always there to see, for they were true—the people who had been cured and those raised from the dead, who had not merely been seen at the moment when they were cured or raised, but were always there to see, not only when the Saviour was among us, but for a long time after His departure; in fact some of them survived right up to my own time.2

No wonder all Jerusalem was astonished (Luke 24:13-24).

And now Jesus had gathered his eleven remaining disciples back to a mountain in Galilee, the faithful, the doubting, the thoroughly confused (Matt 28:16-17), and he gave them their directive. He announced: “Given to me is all authority in heaven and upon earth, go (literally, having gone), therefore, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name (singular) of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:18-19).