Some Doubted

Matthew almost didn't put it in.

Or maybe he absolutely meant to. Either way, it's there — one of the strangest sentences in the Gospel — tucked into the middle of the Great Commission like a confession nobody asked for.

The eleven go to Galilee. They see the risen Christ. They worship him.

And some doubted.

That's it. No follow-up. No explanation. Matthew doesn't tell us which ones were doubting or how many or whether they got over it before Jesus started talking. He just leaves it sitting there, plain as anything, and moves on.

The church has been trying to move past it ever since.

I get why. It's inconvenient. The Great Commission is supposed to be a triumphant moment — the risen Lord, the mountain, the mandate to go change the world. Doubt doesn't fit the frame. So we read right over it, or we treat it as a minor detail, or we quietly assume it must have resolved itself before anything important happened.

But it didn't resolve. Matthew didn't say it resolved. What Matthew said is that some of them doubted, and then Jesus commissioned all of them anyway.

Those two things exist in the same paragraph. They are not in tension in Matthew's mind. He doesn't see the doubt as a problem that needed to be fixed before the story could continue. He sees it as part of the story.

The people on that mountain were not a group of the spiritually ready. They were the ones who had followed Jesus for three years, watched him die, hidden behind locked doors, and then made their way to Galilee because he told them to. They showed up. They worshiped. And some of them, standing right there in front of the risen Christ, were still not sure.

I find that enormously comforting. Not in a cheap way.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith. It's what faith looks like in a human body. It's the gap between what we reach for and what we can fully hold, and that gap doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It might just mean you're paying attention.

We have built a church culture — and I say this as someone who lives inside it — that is deeply uncomfortable with doubt. We treat it like a symptom. Something to be diagnosed and resolved. You have questions? Here's a class. Here's a book. Here's a framework that will make it make sense.

And sometimes those things help. But sometimes the doubt isn't a problem to be solved. Sometimes it's just the honest condition of a person trying to believe something enormous with a brain that wasn't built for it.

Matthew knew this. He left it in the text.

What Jesus does with the doubt on that mountain is nothing. He doesn't address it. He doesn't wait for it to clear. He doesn't ask who's sure and who isn't before he starts talking. He just — speaks. To all of them. The certain ones and the uncertain ones and everybody in the middle.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go. Make disciples. Baptize. Teach. I am with you always, to the end of the age.

The doubters heard that. The doubters got commissioned. The doubters went.

And the church that exists today — this fractured, resilient, maddening thing that has somehow survived two thousand years — was built in part by people who weren't entirely sure.

That should tell us something about what faith actually requires.

Not certainty. Not the absence of questions. Not a clean resolution.

Just showing up. Making the trip to Galilee. Worshiping even when something in you doesn't quite close all the way.

The commission came anyway. It still does.