“Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19)
The key phrase in this vision is: ‘make disciples.’ The rest elaborates what that means. Disciples are to come from all nations and be given a new identity through baptism as those who belong to the God who is now known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are to be taught to obey all that Jesus had taught and they are to know that Jesus will always be with them. Whatever our vision is, it must have making disciples at its heart.
As recorded at St. Luke’s
Biblical Vision 5: Disciples (Matthew 28:16-20)
The Top 3 Influencers Today
Who or what influences you? Do you know? Do you care? Does it matter? And if it does matter, why do you allow that person, people or organisation to influence you?
We live in a world of social media and social influencers.
The main platforms that influencers operate on are Instagram, Tik Tok, X (formerly known as Twitter) and YouTube. These platforms enable anyone to write or share video content potentially with vast networks of people around the world.
For example, we will upload this sermon to YouTube and anyone in the world will be able to watch it. But the truth is very few will watch it online. The St. Luke’s YouTube channel has around 219 subscribers and the sermon with the most views has around 250 views.
Compared with the top social media influencers, these numbers are miniscule.
Top of the list is footballer, Cristiano Ronaldo, who has over 800,000,000 followers across all platforms, including over 600,000,000 on Instagram.
Next up is Selena Gomez, a singer song writer, who has over 580,000,000 followers across all the platforms, but mainly on Instagram.
In third place overall, but with the largest number of YouTube Subscribers, is MrBeast, who has 320 million subscribers on YouTube! In case you are wondering what makes MrBeast famous, well it’s not because he is a great sportsman like Cristiano Ronaldo or an amazing singer like Selena Gomez, it’s that he is very, very good at creating YouTube videos that hook you in!
And that is increasingly, how we are fed information and entertainment through the internet. We are led to watch and read that which catches our attention and draws us in. And as we watch all this information we are influenced.
Companies pay the influencers to push their products, so that we are influenced to buy them. But we are also influenced by the people we watch. We aspire to want to become like them, to have their talent, their fame, their wealth. We increasingly think these are the things that matter in life.
To have influence is to have power. MrBeast has even talked about the possibility of running for President of the USA.
Discipled or Influenced?
In the baptisms earlier on we urged both Alby and Pippa, to ‘fight valiantly as disciples of Christ.’ In our reading, Jesus’ great commission to his disciples and by extension to the church is to go and make disciples.
But is to be a disciple to be merely someone who is influenced by Jesus or does it mean more? Is being a disciple of Jesus a bit like being a YouTube follower of Ronaldo, Gomez or MrBeast? Is baptism just like clicking, ‘Subscribe’ on the internet? Or is there more to being a disciple?
First Century Internet?
A related question is about the scope of Jesus’ vision. Just as influencers today, seek to grow a massive worldwide subscriber base, Jesus’ tells his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations.
Except Jesus had to do it without the internet. Now information travels at the speed of light, then it was at the speed of a horse. To become a worldwide influencer today is challenging and only a handful manage it. Then it was impossible.
How could a man in his early thirties living in an occupied country on the edge of the Roman Empire, with no wealth, power or army and just a handful of uneducated followers hope to influence the whole world. Humanly, speaking this was perhaps the most ridiculous vision ever shared.
Yet, today, if being baptised is the equivalent of being a subscriber, then Jesus does not just have 100s of millions of followers, but billions. In fact, it is estimated that there are 2.5billion Christians in the world today, that is over three times the social media followers of Cristiano Ronaldo.
How was it possible for Jesus to create such a vast number of followers with no internet, no army, no money and no power?
The answer was that his disciples were to be the network and to build the network. If they the eleven disciples were to go and make disciples, then the disciples they made were also to be those who would make disciples and so on, until the network of disciples spread throughout the world and the message and influence of Jesus transformed the world.
For this to work, to be discipled had to mean more than to be influenced. You may choose to watch videos of Cristiano Ronaldo, you might even subscribe to his YouTube channel and encourage some of your friends to do the same, but you will probably not see your mission in life to be a part of growing Ronaldo’s internet following.
So, what is different about being a disciple of Jesus? How is it that Jesus’ followers could build a network to share his message that has lasted 2,000 years and created more followers than anyone else in history?
Disciples Recognise Jesus’ Authority
For any normal human being, Jesus’ vision was ridiculous. But Jesus, although, he was fully human like you and me was unique and special in so many ways.
These words of Jesus come at the end of Matthew’s gospel. If you want to see how special Jesus is, you need to read the whole gospel. When you do so, you will see that Jesus was the one that the Jews had been promised by God would come. He was the culmination of God’s plans, not some random bloke who cropped up and said a few interesting things. You will also see that his teaching was powerful, memorable, radical and unique. Not only that, but he performed miracles that showed both amazing compassion for the sick and power over sickness. You will find a man who had such a clarity of vision, that to the incomprehension of his closest friends he allowed himself to be arrested and crucified, stating that his death would be for the redemption of the world and the creation of a new relationship with God. Then most powerfully of all, he did not stay dead, but on the third day rose again and appeared to his followers.
Not surprisingly, at the start of our passage, the eleven disciples are face to face with this Jesus, trying to come to terms with this series of events and particularly His death and resurrection. They didn’t know what to do. Should they worship or doubt that this could all be true?
Then Jesus makes the boldest claim of all:
“All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me.”
Such a claim would be outrageous, if it was not for the fact that Jesus had just risen from the dead! In the mouth of the resurrected Jesus, however, it makes perfect sense.
And not only that it changes everything. If Jesus is the ultimate authority, then it makes sense not just to become a follower in a social media sense, but to dedicate your whole life to him, indeed, to risk your whole life for him.
And this is what his disciples did. Despite the threats and commands of human authorities, the imprisonments, beatings and ultimately executions, they carried on telling people about Jesus and inviting them to become his disciples too. No matter what they sought to obey Jesus’ command.
Disciples Obey Jesus’ Teaching
The word disciple means to be a learner. It is more than being vaguely influenced by someone, because you are interested in them or what they have to say. Rather it is a desire to find out, understand and live out what they teach. It means to orient your life by the direction that Jesus gives.
In today’s world we have so many potential ways to be told how to live and think and what to say. We watch youtube videos, read online article, books, newspapers or listen to podcasts. The internet algorithms can quickly lead us down a rabbit hole of radical ideas that seem to be backed up by one video or article after another.
But do we stop to think, why am I listening to, believing or even obeying this particular person that I am watching? What makes them special? Why should I aspire to be like them? What makes their advice better than anyone else’s?
Jesus’s teaching may be hard to obey – whoever said loving your enemy was easy? But, if Jesus truly was the one who was God’s promised king, the one who loves us so much he died for us, the one who has defeated death and the one who has been given all authority on heaven and earth, then doesn’t obeying him make more sense than obeying anyone else?
And unlike all the modern gurus and philosophers, his teaching has stood the test of time and been accepted by people from all cultures around the world. Surely, it makes more sense to obey him than anyone else? Surely, being his disciple is the best way to go.
Disciples Know Jesus’ Presence
So, disciples recognise Jesus’ authority and obey his teaching, they also know his presence.
In the last verse, Jesus makes a promise. He says,
“And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Jesus is not just a historic character. A good teacher whose words are preserved in the Bible. For those who are his disciples, he is with us now, by His Holy Spirit.
Just like the first disciples, we can pray to him and seek his help in this life, both to live for him and cope with life’s challenges. Being a Christian is not just about obeying 2,000 year old teachings, it is about a relationship now with the living God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Jesus’ vision was laughable
Jesus’s vision to reach all nations, with a bunch of uneducated powerless men, was laughable then and at times the idea of being a true disciple of Jesus can seem laughable now.
But, when we come to see who Jesus really is, how important his teaching is, and that we can have an ongoing relationship with him now, we can begin to understand why his vision was achieved and is still being achieved and I hope you might also want to become part of that vision.
Perhaps there are some here today, who now realise that in a world full of influencers trying to make you a follower, even though they have nothing worthwhile to offer you. Maybe now is the time to look again at Jesus as the only one worth being influenced by and more than that becoming a disciple of.
St. George's Church Ramsgate 