Apocalyptic Events At Tomb: Matt. 28.1-8
This section is Matthew’s conclusion to his five-part book. He has faithfully told the story of Jesus as the New Moses and concludes with the account that shook the roots of the old creation and ushered in the new creation. In the final paragraph, he commissions the workers of the kingdom for this new age which has successfully invaded the present evil age.

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

Jesus resurrection was the central focus of early Christian preaching. When the earth shook, the guards at his tomb also shook. They were not up for such an encounter. They had no grid to put the events of the morning through. The shaking of the old creation and the emergence of the new creation in Jesus had begun. It was the first day of the new creation.

Jesus Meets Woman: Matt. 28.9-11

Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened.

This small scene is unique to the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus appears unexpectedly and the woman shows great love and reverence by touching the risen body. Jesus brings this touching to a halt by sending the woman to his disciples which he now calls brothers. It shouldn’t be lost that the first teachers about the resurrection were women sent by Jesus to teach men. His encounter with the woman replaces sadness with joy. Matthew makes three points:

Point #1: The body of Jesus was a real body which could be touched.
Point #2: By using the term brothers for his disciples he had restored what had been lost by their rejection. Therein is the mercy of God.
Point #3: The risen Jesus appears to people not to satisfy their personal needs but to send them on a mission. The disciples could no longer cling to their old relationship with Jesus, they now encountered the same Jesus, but received a new mission. Encounters with Jesus lead to mission, nothing has changed.

False Teaching About Resurrection: Matt. 28.12-15

When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

While the women bring the good news to the disciples, the guards go to the chief priests and elders who create  a lie to counter the good news. The solution of the Jewish leaders was to bribe the Roman soldiers. Having failed to prevent the resurrection, they are reduced to trying to render it unbelievable. This may have been an ever present problem to Matthew’s church as it still is to the church today.

Jesus Comes to His Church to Commission It: Matt. 28.16-20

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “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 of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

This final paragraph is unique to Matthew. It is the key to understanding his whole of his Gospel. The words of Jesus may be divided into three sayings:

Saying #1. The Announcement Of His Authority: Because he died and was resurrected, Jesus had received total power over the universe. This power enables him to initiate a universal mission. What all believers and unbelievers alike will see and experience at the end of time, the church will see and experience from the death-resurrection onward — the power of God to do his work.

Saying #2. The Commissioning Of His Disciples: This commissioning is divided into three parts.

Part #1: The disciples were sent into the world to make disciples. The whole gospel of Matthew has explained what being a disciple means. In short, it means to follow Jesus by obeying his teaching and doing his works.
Part #2: The second part tells them that they should baptize these disciples into this new relationship with God as a marked sign that death to the old creation and birth into the new creation had occurred.
Part #3: They are told that they should involve themselves in all areas of what Jesus taught. This means to imitate Jesus in preaching and performing miracles. They must do the words and works of Jesus.

Saying #3. The Final Promise to Sustain: The final word takes the disciples into the future from their present experience until his return at the close of the age. Here is Jesus consoling and strengthening his disciples. He will not be an absentee landlord. He will be with them as his name from the beginning of the book reveals — he is God-with-us. This is the all-powerful Jesus setting his dynamic rule into his new people so they may do his continued his work on earth. The picture is completed by Matthew not showing Jesus ascend as in Luke and Acts. He is pictured as coming to his church and remaining with it all the days to the end of the age.

Suggested Reading

• How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels Tom Wright
• Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters Tom Wright

What if church used Open Space Technology on occasion? The following are its four basic concepts:

• Whoever comes/is here are the right people
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
• Whenever it’s over, it’s over

I might add, everyone gets an opportunity to speak. What would that look like? Maybe we should ask Paul, he wrote about it somewhere!

Another Sunday has come and gone in which I spent a short period of time inside a building where we followed a pattern that has come to be called church. We gather. We drink coffee and have surface conversation. We sing. We hear announcements. We listen or not to someone teach/preach. We are invited to ask God into our broken lives or we are beckoned to an altar to ask forgiveness of our sins. We drop by a glass with wine or juice and broken crackers and dip and eat or small shot glasses reminiscent of a bar are passed around with juice or wine and we call it communion. Yesterday as I left this weekly routine, I asked myself the same question that the song title asks: “Is that all there is?” Surely, the answer has to be no!

One wonders when we will change our paradigm. When will we discover that Sunday is the day of the week that should remind us that in Jesus we live in a new creation as new human beings with the assignment of demonstrating that new creation to others around us. Tom Wight asked in his recent book, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today, the following question: “What are you going to do this Sunday that is creative, that brings justice and mercy, that offers healing and hope” (170). One has to wonder that instead of living to turn the world right side up, we continue to live in the world thinking its thoughts and practicing its actions. One wonders what would occur if we took Wright’s question seriously? One wonders why we are always inviting God to do something when he is working already nonstop? One wonders when we will comprehend that he is inviting us into what he is doing, inviting us into his unbroken world instead of us inviting him into our broken world. So, what are you going to do next Sunday that brings justice, mercy, healing and hope to your neck of the woods?

This past weekend was really fun. First, there was Off the Map conference in Seattle with Phyllis Tickle, Michael Frost, and Todd Hunter presenting us with an Anglican Eucharist. Phyllis is so spry for her 75 years and the author of The Great Emergence. Michael talked about refocusing church through a Missional lens while addressing Worship, Discipleship, and Evangelism.

On Sunday Morning David Ruis was the guest at Vineyard Community Church in Shoreline, WA and Phyllis Tickle was the evening guest. David is always fun to listen to. Phyllis gave us a tour of 2000 years of church history in about 30 minutes plus a Q&A time. She has a great sense of humor. She said something like, “If you are a female and 76 you can say any damn thing you want.”

David Ruis

Phyllis Tickle

Phyllis Tickle Video

Clip provided by Recycle Your Faith.

I am part of a book club at the community of faith that I participate with. We are reading The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. This was one of the books we read as a cohort in the DMin program at George Fox. The following is one of the responses that I posted on our community book club reading board. I had listed several question from chapter 1 of the book and then reflected on one of them.

Here’s one of the questions that I am continually reflecting on:

“How does it feel to be a part of a community that is living “between the times,” (the concept of liminality, i.e., between the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity (or what ever it will be called by history) and knows it?”

When one stops to think about the time we live in, we usually think “present” time versus “past” or “future” time. The NT provides us a concept that we really live “between the times.” The time we live in is referred to as “this present evil age” and it fits between the “first coming” of Jesus and the “second coming” of Jesus. We don’t live in the “past” or in the “future” but in the “presence of the future” a “between the time” time.

Let’s apply that concept to now. We live between the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity. We actually live in neither all the time. We are influenced by both modernity and postmodernity at the same time, a “between the time” time. There is a slight difference. Modernity has not disappeared and neither has Christendom. Postmodernity (or what ever it will be called by historians 1000 years from now) is not fully here. On has not replaced the other. It took modernity 1000 years to replace the middle ages. So we live in the tension of the “between the times” time.

As my wife, Donna Faith, stated to me, different personality types respond differently to life. Thus there is not a “single” answer to the question. There is only how one feels about it.

Personally, I love the tension. I seem to thrive on it. It excites me to think about some “older” things passing away and some “newer” things coming into existence. I love “older” things, after all I am one. I often wonder what wonderful things that my children will face in the years to come that aren’t even a part of my imagination in the present. The only constant thing is change and that is what living “between the times” brings. After all, nothing stays the same. I look at my hand and say, “yep, that is a hand,” but a year from now it will be completely new. Every cell in my hand today will have died and been replaced by new ones, while my hand looks “static” it is not. My hand lives “between the times” of being what is and becoming what it will be. Such is the destiny of VCC. She lives today as she is becoming what she will be tomorrow.

I think VCC knows she is a “between the time” community. She holds on to the “older” things that are not hindrances to creating “newer” things, a blessing from her creator.

Here is a link to the concept of Liminality by one of the authors of Missional Church. The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality (Christian Mission and Modern Culture) by Alan J. Roxburgh.