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Jesus and the Brocken Spectre

Matthew 28.16-20 (NRSVA)
In yesterday’s reflection on the closing verses of 2 Corinthians we saw how the idea of God as Trinity can be traced back to Jesus himself. And this is made explicit in today’s Gospel passage from Matthew.
Jesus never ascends to God in Matthew’s version of events, but he does meet his closest disciples on a mountaintop where some of them worship him, although Matthew pragmatically admits that some doubted what was going on.
Did they think they were seeing a ghost, or that it was a trick of the light, like the Brocken spectre which haunts the Yorkshire Moors. This phenomenon is named after a mountain in Germany where it was first described. It looks like an ethereal figure enveloped in light or in a rainbow arc.
Or did the disciples just doubt that they should be worshipping Jesus? Jewish people have always been very clear that there’s only one God, who’s indivisible. So perhaps they were doubtful about worshipping him even if they believed he was a truly inspired and wonderful person. Perhaps they saw Jesus as a teacher of infinite wisdom who’d given his life in God’s service but who was, nonetheless, only the greatest of the prophets - much as Muslims believe to this day.
Jesus addresses their doubts head on. ‘All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me,’ he tells them, which is like claiming to sit at God’s right hand, invested with all of his authority. It’s like a prime minister or a grand vizier holding the king or queen’s seal and approving laws and other documents in their name. 
It’s seems a far cry from Matthew 18, where Jesus said that unless his followers became as humble as children they could never be ‘the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’, or Matthew 20, where Jesus says, ‘the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’ Now, instead, like Freddy Mercury, he appears to be claiming to be the champion - not just in heaven, but throughout the universe. His followers are to baptise people now not just in God’s name, like John the Baptist, but in the three-fold names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And it is Jesus, himself, not just the Spirit, who will be with them ‘always, to the end of the age.
And yet, Jesus is only the greatest because ‘he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death,’ - even the especially humiliating ‘death on a cross’. This is the only reason why God has ‘highly exalted him’ and ‘given him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord’, not as a rival to God but ‘to the glory of God’. (Philippians 2.8-11)

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