Saturday, October 19, 2013

Traveling or Being Traveled

Mat 28:18-20 18 And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “ All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
http://olivetree.com/b3/Mat.28.18.NASBStr

I have a dilemma.  The verb 'go' in verse 19 is a participle, but is passive.  Participles are already 'flexible' in their range of meaning since they are both verbs and adjectives.  But that it is passive adds another complex problem, because 'go' here isn't transitive in nature, at least not here.  Consider how you can be acted upon (passive voice) and the action is to move from one location to another.  As I see it, essentially, you are carried by someone or something without being the one in control.  That's the passive sense of this word as best as it can be achieved in English; and I admit it's not great.

Now the participle piece,  typically the imperative of 'disciple' or 'make disciples' is 'borrowed' by the participle, rendering the participle as a command to 'go'.  This is not required, even though very common.  I think that I lean another direction.  Participles can support other verbs, lending a sense of context of the action, and I think that is what this one does.  The command to make disciples is to be carried out in the temporal setting of going.  But this temporal setting of 'going' is in that passive sense in the previous paragraph; as in 'being carried along.'  So the obedience to the command 'make disciples' happens as we are carried along from place to place.

So, now all sorts of excuses come up.  What if I'm not 'being carried'?  Why do I need to be carried?  I'm waiting to be carried.  My life isn't going anywhere at the moment. I'm going to fast and furious to do anything else.  And so on it goes.  But if my Master is doing the driving in my life, then there's no excuse for me not doing my part in discipling.  The truth is I do way too much of the driving, that's why I'm too busy; I'm too busy doing His job.  That's not life lived in submission.  And therin is my problem.

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