Who Is Jesus? Easter Answers

The question "Who is Jesus?" did not get answered during his ministry. If anything, the ministry made the question more urgent and more confusing. The disciples asked it in the middle of a storm in Mark 4, which tells you that three years of proximity had not settled it for them. Herod had a theory. Pilate had a different problem with the whole situation. John the Baptist — who had baptized Jesus, who had heard the voice from heaven — sent messengers from prison asking whether he was the one or whether they should expect someone else. The crowds cycled through options: Elijah, one of the prophets, John raised from the dead. None of them were right, and notably, none of them are options anyone would have chosen if they were manufacturing a resurrection narrative later.

The answer comes at the end of Matthew's Gospel, on a mountain in Galilee, and it comes specifically because of what happened three days after the crucifixion.

The Declaration

Jesus approaches the eleven and says something that nobody says with a straight face unless they mean it. "All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth." We're not talking about spiritual authority in some reduced sense, which is usually how people who are uncomfortable with the claim prefer to read it. This is all authority — over both domains — and the passive construction is doing real theological work. It has been given to him, by God, as a direct consequence of the resurrection.

Romans 1:4 makes the mechanism explicit: Jesus was declared Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead. The word is ὁρισθέντος — defined, appointed, declared with finality. The resurrection isn't a miracle appended to a moral philosophy to make it more compelling. It's God's public verdict on who Jesus is and what his death accomplished. If that's true, the scope of the authority makes sense. If it's not true, it's the most audacious claim anyone has ever made on behalf of a dead man.

This is why the identity of Jesus is the load-bearing question in apologetics rather than the existence of God. Establishing that a transcendent creator exists is a start, but it leaves everything open. The resurrection closes the question the ministry raised. And the claim being closed is not a modest one — all authority, heaven and earth, given by God to a first-century Jewish carpenter from Nazareth who was publicly executed by Rome. You either have to deal with that or dismiss it, and dismissing it requires engaging the historical question seriously rather than just finding it implausible.

The Doubters in the Room

Matthew kept a detail in this passage that a constructed account would not have preserved. "And when they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted." Some of the eleven — people who had been with Jesus for three years, who had heard him predict this, who had the empty tomb reported to them by the women — stood in the physical presence of the risen Christ and still wavered. Not before the appearance. During it.

This is worth noting because it fails the criterion of embarrassment in the wrong direction for a fabrication. If you are inventing a story meant to establish the authority of the risen Lord over his newly commissioned church, you don't write in a note that half the eyewitnesses were uncertain. You write it in because it happened and because it was too widely known among the early community to leave out.

It also shapes what the commission means. The eleven are not sent out after their doubt has been resolved. They are sent out while it is still present, on the authority of someone else rather than on the confidence of their own certainty. That is a very different thing than volunteerism, and it's relevant to how the church has functioned ever since — the mission has never been premised on its members having resolved every question first.

Therefore

Matthew uses οὖν to connect the declaration to the commission — therefore, because all authority belongs to Jesus, go. The primary verb in verse 19 is μαθητεύσατε, which means make disciples. Not announce, not persuade, not add converts to a list. Form. The commission is pedagogical at its core, and it extends across the full range of what formation requires: baptizing into the name of the triune God and teaching people to observe everything Jesus commanded.

The word for observe — τηρεῖν — is the same word used throughout the LXX for keeping Torah. The disciples are not being sent out to disseminate information. They are being sent to form people into a pattern of life ordered around the commands of the risen Lord, which is a slow and embodied process, not an event. The participles that accompany the primary verb — baptizing, teaching — are present tense, indicating ongoing and sustained activity. Acts 2:42 looks exactly like a community that understood this, which makes sense because the people who received the commission implemented it.

Into the Name

"Baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." This is one name with three persons, and the earliest explicit Trinitarian formula in the New Testament appears here not in a theological treatise but inside a missionary instruction. The doctrine doesn't get systematized and then applied to practice. The practice requires the doctrine to be coherent, and working out what the practice requires is how the church arrives at the doctrine.

The preposition εἰς — into — signals incorporation into a sphere rather than mere association with a title. A person baptized into the name of the triune God is being placed inside a set of relationships that restructures their identity, which is why the formula uses the singular name rather than "the names" of three separate beings. One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This is where Chalcedonian christology stops being abstract metaphysics for specialists and becomes a question about whether the formula is coherent. If Jesus is not truly God, the name into which a person is baptized is incomplete. If he is not truly man, he cannot be the mediator between God and the humanity being incorporated, because a mediator has to stand on both sides of what he's bridging. Hebrews 4:15 is explicit on exactly this point — the high priest who can sympathize with human weakness must have been genuinely tempted in every way as we are. You can't fake the humanity and still have a functioning mediator. The baptismal formula requires the hypostatic union to be true, or you're doing a ritual that doesn't mean what it claims to mean.

The Promise That Closes the Gospel

"And look, I am with you all the days until the end of the age." The ἰδοὺ draws attention to this deliberately. Matthew is not wrapping up with a nice closing thought. The promise of presence is the condition that makes the commission sustainable.

Matthew opens his Gospel with the name Immanuel — God with us — before Jesus is even born, referenced explicitly in Matthew 1:23. He closes it with the risen Jesus saying the same thing in his own words. The inclusion is not accidental. The structural claim of the whole Gospel is that the one who came as God with us remains God with us after the resurrection, permanently, until the age ends. The mission the disciples are being sent on is not one they are being sent on alone.

The temporal phrase matters too. All the days. Until the end of the age. Matthew's eschatology throughout the Gospel is built around the tension between what has already been inaugurated and what has not yet been consummated, and the mission occupies that entire interim. The promise of presence spans it. The commission is given to people standing on a mountain with doubts still in the room, on the authority of someone who has just been declared Lord of everything, with the guarantee that he will be present for the duration of everything that follows.

That's what Easter actually is. Not a season, not a feeling, not a cultural tradition that carries forward on its own momentum. A specific historical claim about what happened outside Jerusalem in the first century, what God declared by it, and what the eleven were told to do because of it.

He is risen.

God bless, everyone.

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