Worshiping Doubters

Trinity Sunday — Matthew 28:16–20

And when they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted [Matthew 28:17].

It is the ending of a Gospel, and Matthew will not let it be tidy.

The eleven disciples have traveled to Galilee — to a mountain Jesus designated, though Matthew does not name it. They have made the journey in obedience to an instruction they received before they understood what it was for. And when they see him, the text says, they worshiped him.

But some doubted.

That sentence has unsettled readers for centuries, and rightly so. This is the climax of the Gospel — the risen Christ, the gathered disciples, the moment toward which everything has been moving. And Matthew places doubt inside it without apology or explanation.

The Greek word is distazo — and it does not mean what we usually mean by doubt. It is not the skeptic's detached interrogation, not the philosopher's suspension of judgment. The word carries a sense of standing in two places at once, of being pulled in two directions while remaining in place. Not absence of faith. Rather, dividedness within it.

Which may describe the church more honestly than we care to admit.

Think of any Sunday morning when the congregation rises to say the creed. We believe in one God… the words begin, and voices join — steady, halting, old, young, confident, weary. Yet surely not every person standing there feels entirely resolved. Someone has buried a spouse three weeks ago and is quietly wondering whether resurrection is more wish than promise. Someone else has prayed for a child, or for sobriety, or for healing, and heard only silence. A physician has seen too much suffering to move easily past the hard verses. A college student has come home carrying questions she no longer voices aloud. And yet — they stand. They say the words. Not because certainty has arrived, but because something in them still leans toward Christ, still turns in the direction of worship.

Matthew's strange sentence may be less an anomaly than a portrait. The doubters are not outside the sanctuary. They are standing in the pews, saying the creed. Sometimes they are the ones beside us. Sometimes they are us.

What does Jesus do with this?

Nothing.

He does not address the doubt, comfort it, or rebuke it. He does not pause to take inventory of the room, to separate the confident from the wavering, to wait until the emotional weather has cleared. He simply speaks — and what he says is among the most sweeping claims in all of Scripture.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me [28:18].

The scope is almost vertiginous. Not authority in some domains, not influence in the religious sphere. All of it. The claim reaches from the ground beneath their feet to whatever lies beyond the furthest horizon. And it is made to eleven people standing on a hillside in Galilee, some of whom are still finding their footing.

Therefore — Jesus continues, without a breath — go [28:19].

The logic is breathtaking in its directness. Because all authority belongs to me, you are sent. The commission does not wait for the doubt to resolve. It does not require the wavering to cease before the work begins. It arrives into the unresolved middle, to people still standing in two places at once, and it asks them to move.

The work of the Gospel has never depended on the perfect readiness of those who carry it. It has depended on the one who sends them — and on the authority that belongs not to the sent but to the Sender.

The eleven are not commissioned because they have arrived. They are commissioned because He has.

The disciples are sent, Matthew tells us, to all nations — a horizon that would have been almost inconceivable to eleven Jewish men standing on a Galilean hillside. They are to make disciples, to baptize, to teach everything Jesus has commanded. The commission is not modest. It is not scaled to their current capacity.

And it happens in Galilee.

Not Jerusalem, the holy city, the seat of the Temple, the place where the great things were supposed to occur. The Gospel ends in the north, in working country, among people who knew these hills as fishermen before they knew them as disciples. Matthew quietly returns them to the place where the story began — not to a throne room, not to a sanctuary, but to ordinary ground.

Resurrection does not culminate in permanent ecstasy at the center of religious power. It sends people back into the familiar world, now charged with seeing it differently. The mountain in Galilee is not an escape from ordinary life. It is the place where ordinary life receives its new commission.

There is something in that geography worth holding. The church begins, not at the pinnacle, but on a hillside in working country, among wavering worshipers who have just been handed something far larger than they are — and who will carry it, as people always have, back into the ordinary texture of their days.

And then His last word.

Not a command. Not a doctrinal summary. Not a program for the work ahead.

And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age [28:20].

Those who have been reading Matthew carefully will recognize what is happening. The Gospel opened with a name: Emmanuel — God with us. It was the name the angel gave to Joseph in a dream, before anything had begun, before a single miracle or teaching or healing. The promise of presence came first, before there was anything to be present for.

Now, at the end, the same promise closes the Gospel. Not as repetition but as completion. Matthew has been telling, across twenty-eight chapters, the story of what Emmanuel looks like in a human life — what it costs, where it leads, what it survives. And having told that story, he returns to the beginning. God with us. I am with you always.

The commission is real. The scope is vast. The doubt is still present, unresolved, folded into the moment. And His last word is not about any of that.

It is presence. Unconditional, unearned, not contingent on the resolution of the wavering or the success of the mission. The one who claimed all authority in heaven and on earth does not say: now perform. He says: I am with you. To the end of the age.

Which is the only ground on which any of this is possible.

Between distazo and I am with you always — between the wavering and the promise — lies everything the church has ever been asked to do.

It has never been otherwise. The commission has always fallen on people who were not finished becoming believers, who stood on hillsides in working country with worship and uncertainty occupying the same chest at the same moment. Who said the creed on Sundays while carrying questions they could not resolve. Who went anyway.

Matthew does not tell us how the eleven responded. There is no record of their reaction to the commission, no moment where the doubt lifts and certainty takes its place. The Gospel simply ends — with the promise still hanging in the Galilean air, and the disciples still standing there, and the whole unfinished business of the kingdom placed in their hands.

Which is, I suspect, exactly where we find ourselves.

The doubt has not disqualified us. The commission has not waited for our readiness. And the One who sends us has not left.