Matthew 28:20

διδάσκοντες α., teaching them, present participle, implying that Christian instruction is to be a continuous process, not subordinate to and preparing for baptism, but continuing after baptism with a view to enabling disciples to walk worthily of their vocation. τηρεῖν : the teaching is with a view not to gnosis but to practice; the aim not orthodox opinion but right living. πάντα ὅσα ἐνετειλάμην ὑμῖν : the materials of instruction are to be Christ's own teaching. This points to the desirableness for the Church's use of an oral or written tradition of Christ's words: these to be the rule of faith and practice. καὶ ἰδοὺ, introducing an important promise to the missionaries of the new universal religion to keep them in courage and good hope amid all difficulties. ἐγὼ μεθʼ ὑμῶν, I the Risen, Exalted, All-powerful One, with you my apostles and representatives engaged in the heroic task of propagating the faith. εἰμὶ, am, not will be, conveying the feeling of certainty, but also spoken from the eternal point of view, sub specie aeternitatis, for which distinctions of here and there, now and then, do not exist. Cf. John 8:58, “before Abraham was I am”. In the Fourth Gospel the categories of the Absolute and the Eternal dominate throughout. πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας, all the days, of which, it is implied, there may be many; the vista of the future is lengthening. ἕως τῆς συντελείας τοῦ αἰῶνος, until the close of the current age, when He is to come again; an event, however, not indispensable for the comfort of men who are to enjoy an uninterrupted spiritual presence.

This great final word of Jesus is worthy of the Speaker and of the situation. Perhaps it is not to be taken as an exact report of what Jesus said to His disciples at a certain time and place. In it the real and the ideal seem to be blended; what Jesus said there and then with what the Church of the apostolic age had gradually come to regard as the will of their Risen Lord, with growing clearness as the years advanced, with perfect clearness after Israel's crisis bad come. We find here (1) a cosmic significance assigned to Christ (all power in heaven and on earth); (2) an absolutely universal destination of the Gospel; (3) baptism as the rite of admission to discipleship; (4) a rudimentary baptismal Trinity; (5) a spiritual presence of Christ similar to that spoken of in the Fourth Gospel. To this measure of Christian enlightenment the Apostolic Church, as represented by our evangelist, had attained when he wrote his Gospel, probably after the destruction of Jerusalem. Therein is summed up the Church's confession of faith conceived as uttered by the lips of the Risen One. “Expressly not as words of Jesus walking on the earth, but as words of Him who appeared from heaven, the evangelist here presents in summary form what the Christian community had come to recognise as the will and the promise of their exalted Lord” (Weiss-Meyer).