Lent For Everyone Reading Plan
The reading plan continues for the week after Easter. The reading for Tuesday after Easter is Matthew 28:16-20. (If you want to listen, scroll to the bottom of that page for the audio links.)
In a long entry, which is well worth reading, Tom Wright says that these verses, the Great Commission are where Matthew has been headed all along: “All four gospels tell a story which many in today’s world have forgotten, or have never even known. It is the story of how Jesus became the king of the world. That’s where we have been going, ever since, back near the beginning, Jesus came into Galilee announcing that ‘heaven’s kingdom is at hand’. So often this has been turned into a very different message, about ‘telling people how to go to heaven’, that we have ignored the far more startling truth that Jesus was actually talking about how heaven was coming to us. In other words, how God, the God of heaven and earth, was coming to earth to establish his sovereign, saving rule.”
“Now, risen from the dead, Jesus declares that it’s happened. ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me!’ . . . This is the great message of the whole gospel. Jesus is King and Lord, not just ‘in heaven’ (that would be quite a ‘safe’ idea) but on earth as well.”
“But what — what on earth, we might say — does that actually mean? If Jesus is really King and Lord, why is the world still in such a mess? How does he exercise this ‘lordship’? How does this sovereignty, claimed so strongly in this passage, work out on the ground?”
“Ask yourself this question: how did Jesus come to this point of being king?” . . .
And a little rap, by Princeton, influenced by S M Lockridge That’s My King
