Trinity Sunday: Hollowell.  Matthew Chapter 28 vv.16 to end. 

Athanasian Creed.
Our Gospel this morning brings the reader to the end of St. Matthew's Gospel with what has become known as the Great Commission.  The commandment of Jesus to his disciples to go out to preach, making  disciples of all nations in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.    
This is a new development to an earlier commission by Jesus in the same Gospel, where he tells the disciples to confine their preaching specifically to Jews, the lost sheep of the House of Israel. 
This is the seed that Jesus planted in the minds of his eleven disciples that eventually over the following centuries spread  Christianity across the known world. 
As one commentator put it, this tiny book has changed more lives than any other printed work.  T many people St. Matthew is the Gospel  and it has shaped whole civilizations.   That is clear.
But in this modern age we are bound to ask  "is it true?"    Did, as Matthew tells us, a Virgin really conceive and give birth to a baby boy in Bethlehem ?   Did wise men guided by a star come to worship him; Did he grow up to be able to walk on water, perform miracles and found the Church?  
These are all reasonable questions that someone, say,  coming to Christianity for the first time might ask.   But they will lead us into pointless negativism.  Our educated,  modern, minds will decide that no one ever walked on water, that corpses do not come to life and that Virgins do not conceive.
But there is there a danger that if we reject the Gospel on so called intelligent grounds, we do so because we are too bound in by our imaginative limitations to see what St. Matthew's Gospel is doing.  
It is not a newspaper story or a television documentary  to which one applies rational test of veracity.  Before applying those kinds of rational analysis,  imagine the chapters that describe the trial and Crucifixion of Christ set to Bach's music in the St. Matthew Passion.  Think about the millions of people who have recited  -  in all kinds of differing situations  -  the prayer set our in Chapter 6 of this Gospel that begins   "Our Father".  Think about the paintings that depict the Bible stories so graphically. 
Think of the women of Argentina who in the face of intimidation  "Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted". 
A book of power and passion.  A new religion being fashioned from the old  -  Judaism.
As one commentator I read put it, the Matthew Gospel is not about the historical Jesus, it is about Jesus as seen through the lens of a particular  group  -  Christian  -  and a particular faith somewhere in the Mediterranean world about 80 or 90 years after the death of Jesus. 
It is a gospel that reflects the rift between the orthodox Jews, criticising Jesus for example for healing a man on the Sabbath,  and the followers of St. Paul who wanted to leave the synagogue and take the faith around the world.  -  as reflected in our reading today.   
And there are parts of this gospel that have had profound consequences in human history.  I am thinking for example of what is said in the preceding chapter when Pilate says " I am innocent of this man's blood, see it to yourselves.  And the people answered him " His blood be on us and on our children".  
The message of Jesus in this gospel is the opposite of our own obsessions with security  -  financial military and domestic -.  He tells us not to  lay up treasure on earth, not to resist evil with violence. 
Then there is the superiority of the poor over the rich.  The detached and the por are the ones who can hear his gospel, as Jesus through is messengers tells John the Baptist. 
Message to tough for us in this modern age?  Live as though there is no tomorrow,  don't store up treasure and you'll be one to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  
Bill Gates giving away Pound600 million.  We can bear that in mind even if we are not ready to give away all our worldly good as Jesus told the young man  in Chapter 19. 
Nor can we expect to be perfect even as God is perfect  ( end of Chapter 5).  We might not murder but we can still be angry.   We might not commit adultery but we can still feel lust.  Christ is the physician who comes to heal sinners not the righteous.  
The injunction to go out and preach to all the world is the last commandment of Jesus to his disciples.  But before that , a couple of  chapters earlier, he tells them the parable of the King who separates the sheep from the goats, welcoming the chosen into his Kingdom.  The chosen are those who have seen him not in his glory but as poor, naked, hungry in prison and in need.
In this parable neither the blessed nor the damned understand that in so far as they had responded to human need in their own lifetimes, they had responded to God.  That is this Gospel  -  it's central message.  
I'm afraid that by the stern tests of this Gospel most of us will be like the rich young man, unable to live up to its precepts.   But I believe too that most of us, by re-reading St, Matthew in this light of its central message to all the world,  will undoubtedly  be changed for the better. 









