When the largely White, Anglo folk of German extraction from Lancaster County come to visit our school and take a tour, I typically bring them into my office, which is filled with Afro-Caribbean art. I love to see their faces as I talk with them about their children and their potential educational future. Their eyes wander and look over the Black faces and colorful tableaus. They try to figure me out.
In a sense, my office is a visual representation of my biblical worldview and my concept of race. I want them so see color when they see me, as hard as that may be.
When Jesus died, both the angel and Jesus Himself commanded the women in post resurrection appearances to tell the disciples to return to Galilee where Jesus would meet them (Mt. 28:7, 10, 16).. Why did they do that?
God’s plan was a global plan. The post resurrection solidification of the Great Commission had to be given in “Galilee of the Gentiles” (Is. 9) where people who sat in darkness needed some light.
When God engineered the incipient foundations of a global redemption, he wanted it established in the place of ethnic, linguistic, and social diversity–Galilee. He wanted his Middle Eastern disciples not to forget the Greek and Roman foreigners.
Three times in Matthew, we are clearly told that Jesus wanted to appear to the disciples in Galilee collectively (Mt. 28:7, 10, 16). He had a plan.
We sometimes forget that in our homogeneous groupings of race, that God’s intention was and is, ethnic diversity. He wants us to break down walls. That’s what he did when he came to earth. That’s what he did at Pentecost when he reversed Babel and helped people from different nations understand each other in a unified message. When Jesus came to earth, He went on cross-cultural mission. He also taught this lesson to Paul early on in his Christian walk.
Before Paul was even converted, before the scales dropped from his eyes, God told Ananias that Paul’s mission was to the nations, to the ethnicities outside of Israel (Acts 9:15). It was always God’s plan: “And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising” (Is. 60:3).
Today’s protests about racial inequality serve as a reminder to the church of the dangers of silos. We compartmentalize the message to groupings, to targets, and to our proximity. We often forget that God’s heart is for a racially unified church.
When Paul’s audience refused to accept God’s panorama of racial, ethnic, and linguistic messaging in Acts 13:42-52, they turned to the responsive Gentile audience. As a result, they were fruitful, bold, excited, and filled with the Spirit. Finally, they saw the immensity of God’s vision and cast off the myopia of ethnic privilege (Acts 18:6).
It was clear in Matthew 28, that Jesus had designated a particular mountain on which to deliver the Great Commission (28:16). My guess is that the disciples needed a visual picture of their job. Perhaps the view from that mountain included some of the Decapolis, the 10 Greek-style city states, smack-dab in the middle of Galilee, firmly entrenched there for the previous 300 years.
When Peter was restored after his denial on the shores of Galilee in John 21, it was within view of Tiberius, the city named for Tiberius Caesar. Roman and Greek culture was all around. Jesus did not want his disciples to forget the breadth of the vision. It was about the nations, the peoples, the ethne.
Paul ultimately became crystal clear about his personal goals in this regard. He reported to the Jerusalem elders in Galatians 2:2 that he preached the good news to the Gentiles and had amazing success (2:2). He even had to rebuke Peter because the number one disciple had forgotten the mountain-top commission to disciple all the peoples of the earth without ethnicity glasses.
In the latter years of his life, he clearly tells Timothy that the Lord stood with him in his darkest hours so that “all the Gentiles might hear” (2 Timothy 4:17). When he wrote this, he used the same phrase that Jesus used in the Great Commission, “all people groups” (πάντα τὰ ἔθνη).
Paul was faithful to the end with a consistent dream of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, unified, kingdom church. That is the nature of the Great Commission. It was Jesus’ social justice ethic, lived out among his closest friends and envisioned to us who are expected to clothe ourselves with the same vision.
