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Isolated Together

Luke 17:11-19
Trinity 14

In the name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit

    It would be interesting to know the back story of each of the 10 lepers in today’s Gospel.  The Bible doesn’t tell us much about them, not even their names.  But I’m sure they all had a tale to tell about how they ended up in their current circumstances.  Each one of them had been expelled from the life that they had previously known.  Each one of them were outcasts, cut off from family and friends and society by this contagious skin disease that they had.  Where would they sleep?  How would they eat?  Maybe food was brought out and left for them; maybe they had a way of getting food for themselves.  But the Old Testament Law of God Himself said that they were to live outside of the city and apart from the community.  If anyone came near them, they had to warn them of their uncleanness.  They were isolated and alone.

    But here in the Gospel, we see that they are not alone.  They are isolated together.  They all have the same ailment, so they are drawn to hang out with each other–something that otherwise might not have happened in regular life; even normally estranged Jews and Samaritans are here together.  They are a community of those who are all in the same predicament.  They are a fellowship of outsiders, finding at least some comfort in facing their disease together.  

    It occurs to me that in many ways, this is what the church is.  We all feel isolated in one way or another–sometimes by afflictions of the body or the mind which cut us off from others, sometimes by the duties and the obligations of life that consume most of our time and energy.  Always we are isolated by our sin which alienates us from our neighbor and which divorces us from God’s presence.  We are a motley gathering of people who might not ordinarily hang out together, except for the fact that we all know that we are broken in body and soul, that we don’t really fit in or belong in this fallen world, that we are outsiders looking in from a distance at the life which we were originally created to have.  In that isolation we gather together and are united, a fellowship of those who hope for deliverance from God and a better life and healing in Jesus.

    In the end we are exactly like the lepers in their prayer: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” We’ve already prayed it more than once today, “Lord, have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord, have mercy upon us.”  We’ll continue to pray it later in the liturgy, “O Christ, Thou Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us.”  For that is our only hope.  Who knows how the lepers heard about Jesus, but the good news had gotten even to them.  Their prayer may have proceeded from very weak faith, perhaps little more than a cry of desperation.  But it was directed to the right place, to the One who truly is merciful, to the One who hears our cries and our prayers, and whose mercy endures forever.

    We must learn to be like these lepers, to not give up calling on the name of the Lord for help, but to have confidence that He will answer us for our good.  For the temptation exists for us to grow weary of that and to look for our primary fellowship in places other than His church and to put our hope in something other than the mercy of Jesus.  With the God-given institutions of family and church breaking down, various identity groups have risen to fill that void, people who define themselves primarily in terms of their ethnicity or their sexual proclivities or their political ideology.  The truth is, everyone needs fellowship; everyone is a leper looking for some community to belong to, even if it’s just by sharing a common hobby, or a sports team to root for, or a favorite bar to have a drink together at, or a social media interest group to be a part of, or a child’s athletic event to cheer at with other parents.  But we should never fool ourselves into thinking that those things can give us the deeper fellowship that we need and crave, when they only dull the symptoms of our brokenness for a time.  These worldly fellowships promise a place where we can just “be ourselves,” but so often they can end up being a diversion and distraction from our greater need for divine mercy.

    There is no distracting or pretending with Jesus, no call to just look on the bright side and have a positive mental attitude and “manifest your truth” or whatever the current gobbledygook is.  He deals with us as we are, decaying and dying, and He calls us to live by faith that in Him there is real hope and real healing and real fellowship to be had as His followers.  He tells the 10 lepers, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”  That’s what you do when you believe that your leprosy is cleansed and healed.  

    The thing is, nothing appeared to be any different with the lepers.  Outwardly they looked the same.  But they believed the promise implicit in Jesus’ words that in fact, things were no longer the same.  And it is written that “as they went,” they were cleansed.  As they held to Jesus’ words and traveled  down the road, they were healed.  

    That’s exactly how it is for you and me.  Jesus comes to us with our leprous spirits and declares to us, “You are clean; you are forgiven; you are holy.  Sin and sickness, death and the devil have no power over you.”  And yet it doesn’t look or feel like much has changed.  By all appearances it seems that we’re still dealing with the same old problems and challenges.  But what has changed is that now we have the words and promises of Jesus to hold onto.  And He does not lie; His words are true and powerful to accomplish what they say.  And so we walk by faith, not by sight.  As we journey, believing Jesus’ Word, we are cleansed and saved and made whole.  Down the road, on the Last Day, our faith will turn to glorious sight, and we will see how what Jesus said was indeed true all along.  Our bodies, together with our souls, will be fully restored and glorified in the presence of Christ.

    We know that Jesus’ words deliver these things to us because of the destination of His journey.  Not only did the lepers go to Jerusalem to show themselves to the priests, the Gospel says that Jesus was going there Himself, to be our Great High Priest.  The ten went to get a new lease on life; Jesus, however, went there to give up His life.  His very purpose in coming into this fallen world was to make that ultimate priestly sacrifice to release us from sin and suffering, from death and the devil.  Jesus came into direct contact with our contagion and breathed in our sin-poisoned air; He was afflicted with our afflictions in order to save and rescue us, as it is written, “Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.”  When Jesus comforted someone, He took their sadness on Himself; when He healed someone, He took their sickness on Himself; when Jesus forgave someone, He took their sin on Himself.  And Jesus has done that also for you.  All of the weight of the fallen world was laid on Jesus’ shoulders, and He carried that load to the cross, where it perished with Him.  Your sin and sorrow and sickness have been overcome, left dead and buried in the tomb from which Christ arose in triumph.  

    Believing in Christ, you have everything now.  Through Him you have healing in the midst of sickness, holiness in the midst of brokenness, victory in the midst of things which overwhelm you, even life in the midst of death.  By faith you have it all in Christ–a truth that will be revealed to all creation at the close of the age.

    That’s how Ephesians 5 can speak of giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The Samaritan leper is our example here.  He goes to the true Priest, bowing before Him, worshiping Him, giving Him thanks.  This is what divine service is all about: recognizing the Lord as the Source and the Giver of every good gift, receiving those gifts with thanksgiving, glorifying Him as the leper did with a loud voice–no need for us to be bashful about speaking up and singing out in church.  

    One more thing: Jesus asks a haunting question near the end of the Gospel, “Where are the other nine?”  He might ask of us, “Where are the other 70 who aren’t here this weekend, who didn’t come back to give honor to the Source of their life and healing and joy and hope and every good thing that they have?”  It’s not as if Jesus gets grumpy when He doesn’t get a proper thank you.  But He is saddened by the great harm we do to ourselves when our heart is attached more to the gift than the Giver, more to the creation than the Creator.  You wonder what eventually happened to the other nine.  Scripture doesn’t say.  The one thing we do know is that it’s the outsider who got it right, the one with nothing in himself or his lineage to boast of, the one who was just overwhelmed with thanksgiving for what Christ had done and who bowed before Him as the living Temple of God on earth.

    Let us, then, also bow before the Lord this day; let us kneel at His feet before this altar, where He is truly and bodily present to cleanse leprous sinners like us.  One of the names Christians use for the Lord’s Supper is the Eucharist, from the Greek word for thanksgiving.  For as we receive His life-giving body and blood into our mortal flesh, our hearts are filled with thanks, and our mouths speak out this thanksgiving.  We declare that it is truly good, right, and salutary that we should at all times and in all places give thanks to God for His mercy in Christ Jesus and especially for giving Himself to us here in this Sacrament.  

    This is what binds us together in a true and lasting fellowship: this communion, this receiving together of the medicine of immortality, this flesh and blood of Jesus which restores our flesh and gives us new life.  Here is the fellowship you seek.  Here is your identity group.  You are Christians.  You are those who call out to the Lord Jesus for mercy and who receive it from Him with a resounding “Thanks be to God.”  Listen again to what Jesus said to the Samaritan, for He speaks it also to you:  “Your faith has made you well.”  Your Jesus has saved you.

In the name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit

The Good Samaritan, Jesus and You

Luke 10:25-37
Trinity 13

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

    I imagine that when you heard the reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan, many of you thought to yourselves, “I know this one well enough.  Don’t have to listen too carefully; the meaning of this one is easy: you’re supposed to help out strangers and be nice to your neighbors, even if you don’t like them.  It’s basically the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  We should all try harder and not make excuses and be more like the Samaritan.”  And that is true as far as it goes.  We should be kind to one another and help those in need.  

    However, that’s actually not the main point of today’s parable.  Jesus is doing much more than just telling us to give it more effort in doing good works.  After all, even the unbelieving world can get on board with a message that we should be kinder and nicer, right?  In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons why people stay away from church–because they think that church is basically just about telling you to be a better and more moral person.  And who wants to take a couple hours out of their weekend to have somebody preach that to you?  Besides, there’s all sorts of people out there giving you advice on how to be a better version of yourself that is more along the lines of what you want to hear anyway.  So who really needs “organized religion?”  However, the church, and today’s Gospel parable, is about much more than that.

    We know that because of the reason why Jesus tells this parable.  He tells it to a lawyer, an expert in the OT law, who was trusting in his own keeping of the law to make himself righteous before God.  This is the kind of guy who actually likes church to be all about moral improvement, because he thinks he’s doing really well, and his religion can affirm that he’s a good person.  The lawyer tests Jesus by asking Him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Lawyers almost always ask questions they know the answer to in order to keep the line of questioning under their control.  Jesus goes along with the line of questioning, but responds with a question of His own: “What is written in the Law?  What is your reading of it?”  And the man correctly summarizes it: Love the Lord your God with everything that you are, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus tells him, “If you want to gain eternal life for yourself by your own doing, hey, go for it, buddy.  Do that and you’ll live.”  But, of course, the question left hanging out there is, “Can you actually do that?”

    Just think about what the Law demands of you.  It requires that you love the Lord your God with all of your heart and soul and mind and strength.  It doesn’t say “some” or “most” but “all,” everything that you are, no exceptions, no failures, God at the heart and center of everything.  James 2 reminds us, “Whoever keeps the whole Law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.”

    And then, there’s more.  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  The Law recognizes that we know how to love ourselves; that comes quite naturally.  Of course, some might say that they don’t actually love themselves, that they’re filled with self-loathing.  But the point still remains the same: whether we like what we see in the mirror or not, we are stuck on ourselves.  We’re focused our wants and our needs.  What the Law is teaching here is that we should be focused on our neighbor and stuck on his needs in the same way that we are always doing that for ourselves.  And we should do that freely, naturally, from the heart, even if our neighbor is someone we don’t like at all.

    This summary of the Law is what Jesus presents the lawyer with.  And you can tell that it made the lawyer uncomfortable and a little defensive, because he then tries to justify himself.  Isn’t that what we do when the Law backs us into a corner?  We come up with excuses and exceptions and defenses and justifications. “I did the best I could, a lot better than most people.”  The lawyer tries out a self-justifying question, “Well, who is my neighbor?”  Maybe if that category can be narrowed down a bit, perhaps to just family and friends, he can claim that he kept that commandment.

    It’s only then that we hear the story of the  Good Samaritan.  So it’s important to understand: Jesus tells this parable not to help the lawyer with his own moral improvement, but rather to cut him down to size, to nuke all of his self-justifying thinking, and to get him to see that he’s in bad shape and needs to be rescued and saved.  So don’t get the idea that the Samaritan is primarily a picture of you in this story.  The Samaritan is first a picture of Jesus.

    Our Lord Jesus is saying to the lawyer and all of us today, “Repent.  You are the man laying on the side of the road.  You are the one who has been robbed of the glory in which you were created.  Sin and Satan and world have beaten you and left you in the ditch, physically alive, but spiritually dead.  The Law cannot save you.  It can diagnose your condition, but it offers you no medicine.  Like the priest and the Levite, it passes by on the other side.  Only I, Jesus, your Good Samaritan can rescue you.  I have come to you as a foreigner from the outside, the Son of God from heaven. Though I  am despised and rejected by the Jewish leaders, I have come to show you mercy and compassion.

    “As one who shares in your flesh and blood, I am here to take your place.  For I myself will be robbed and stripped of My clothing; I myself will be beaten mercilessly and left dead on a cross, buried in a grave.  But this is the way I will defeat your enemies.  This is the way I will take away their power over you.  I will take the whole curse into my body, your sickness and sin and hurt and death.  And by My divine blood I will break the curse; through My resurrection, I will give you new and immortal life.  You cannot win this fight by your own strength.  But I am fighting for you.  When death and the devil grab hold of My weak flesh, they will learn all too soon that they have grabbed hold of the almighty God; and I will tear them limb from limb and utterly destroy them.  I am with you.  I am the beast of burden here to carry you.  Lean on Me. You are safe; you are forgiven; there is nothing now that can separate you from My love.”

    The Good Samaritan Jesus comes to you and He cleans up the wounds of your sin in the waters of baptism.  He pours on the oil of His Holy Spirit to comfort you and the wine of His blood to cleanse and purify you in Holy Communion.  He gives you lodging in the Inn which is His holy church.  There you are continually cared for through the preaching of His words of life.  For although your sins are fully forgiven, yet the wounds of sin are not fully healed.  We still live with their effects in this world, don’t we.  The Church is the hospital where those wounds are tended to by the Great Physician, lest they become infected.  The innkeeper is the pastor; Jesus provides the innkeeper with two denarii, so that the Lord’s overflowing compassion might continue to be given to you in His ongoing ministry of the Gospel.  Jesus promises to pay whatever it takes to restore you.  For in fact He has already paid the full price for you by His sacrifice on the cross.

    In particular, those two denarii point us to Jesus’ resurrection.  A denarius would pay for one day’s room and board.  A two denarii stay would mean that the man would be up and out on the third day.  This is what Jesus has done for you.  He paid not with gold or silver but with His holy precious blood and His innocent suffering and death, and He rose on the third day so that you may share in His bodily resurrection and live under Him in His kingdom and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.  It is as we heard in the OT reading: “After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, that we may live in His sight.”

    The lawyer had asked the question “Who is my neighbor?”  And the answer to that is “everyone.”  But notice how Jesus changed the question.  He changed it from the Law to the Gospel.  He said, “Who was neighbor to the man?”  Who is neighbor to you?  The answer to that question is just one; it’s Jesus.  He is the One who had mercy, who loved you as Himself.  He is the One who kept the Law for you, in your place, so that in Him you may inherit eternal life, as the Epistle said, “The Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.”

    Repenting and believing in Jesus, He now lives in you and through you to love and be the neighbor to others.  He frees you to “go and do likewise”–not because you have to in order to be saved, but simply because your neighbor needs you.  In that sense, you actually are the Good Samaritan in this parable.  You do likewise for those who are in need.  For we see Jesus in those who are weak and suffering.  Since Christ became weak for you and bore all your infirmities and sorrows, you learn to see Him in your neighbor.  You show love for Him by loving them.

    So learn the point of this parable: You don’t have to justify yourself; you actually can’t anyway.  Jesus has taken care of that for you.  You are in the family of God by grace.  And so the promised inheritance is yours in Jesus, a free gift, won by His death, delivered by water and the Word, sealed by His body and blood.  As you rest and recover here in the Inn, be strengthened in the certainty that very soon your Good Samaritan will return to you as He has promised.  The risen Jesus will come again to take you to be with Himself in the place that He has prepared for you in His everlasting kingdom.

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

Faith Comes By Hearing

Mark 7:31-37
Trinity 12

In the name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit

    “Faith comes by hearing.”  You’ve heard that many times, but think about what that means.  First of all it means that faith is not a private, individual thing.  For in order for there to be hearing, there has to be speaking, right?  There has to be at least two people involved.  That’s why Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them.”  Christianity is not a solo venture.  The church is defined by preaching and hearing the Word.  

    Even in the beginning, this is how it was.  Adam was the first preacher, Eve was the first hearer.  She wasn’t there, for instance, when God gave Adam the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Adam, her preacher, taught her that Word of God.  Martin Luther once commented that the church is not a pen-house but a mouth-house.  It’s where the Word of God is spoken out loud and heard and discussed and meditated on.  It’s good to read your Bible on your own in private and to keep that divine Word before your eyes.  But the primary way your faith is created and sustained is through your ears.  What you believe is going to be defined by what you listen to and talk about.  Whoever has got your ears has got your heart.  Guard your ears, therefore.  Don’t think that it’s an inconsequential thing the noise you’re hearing from your TVs and radios and devices.  Christian faith can be damaged or destroyed by constantly hearing the world’s false preaching.  Saving faith comes by hearing the Word of Christ.  

    This is especially worth noting today as another school year begins and Sunday School and Bible class resume in 2 weeks.  It is written in Deuteronomy 6, “These words which I command you today shall be in your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”  Talking about God’s Word is to be a normal and regular part of your life, whether it’s in your homes or in your work or here in church.  Having the words of God on our tongues and in our ears is part of how faith is exercised and sustained.  Divine Service is the heart of that.  And Bible study and discussion also need to circle around that.  After all, if you’re going to teach these things diligently to your children and grandchildren as the Deuteronomy passage said, you need to know what you’re talking about.  I’ll never understand why people think Sunday School is necessary for children but Bible class isn’t necessary for adults.  We all need to be in God’s Word constantly, talking about it, hearing it, thinking about what it means and how it connects to our lives.  For Jesus said, “My words are spirit and they are life.”  “Faith comes by hearing the Word of Christ.”

    This verse reminds us, then, that faith is very much a bodily thing.  It’s not just an inward, nebulous, spiritual thing.  It involves a congregation of people that gather in the flesh.  It involves bodily senses like hearing.  It involves vocal cords and tongues and eardrums.  And today’s Gospel really drives that point home.  For Jesus is incredibly hands-on, almost uncomfortably physical, in the way that he deals with and heals this deaf-mute.

    It says in the Gospel that they brought the deaf-mute to Jesus and “begged Him to put His hand on him.”  Be careful what you pray for; you might just get it.  Jesus begins by taking the man aside, privately; this isn’t going to be for show.  Since the man cannot hear, Jesus is going to use some actions to convey to him the nature of what he is about to do, a little sign language.  First, He puts His fingers into the man’s ears.  As the Great Physician, He is not afraid to come into contact with what ails us, the gunk of our fallen humanity.  He knows our problems first hand, literally, so that He can truly fix them.  And then Jesus spits and touches the man’s tongue.  The tongue, too, needed to be fixed.  But why spit?  This all seems a little unsanitary, earwax and saliva–not to mention that Jesus is uncomfortably close to this man, invading his space, right in his face.  But this is how our Lord operates.  In order to help us, He has to unsettle us and make us a bit uncomfortable.  We have to be confronted with our natural deafness toward God, our stubborn inclination to listen to other more entertaining voices.  We have to be brought to realize that only His real, physical presence can help and save us.  Only the fingers of God in our ears, only the working of the Holy Spirit through the Word can open our ears to hear Him rightly and believe.  Only what comes from Jesus’ mouth can restore our mouths to confess the true faith and to speak His praises.

    Jesus looks up to heaven.  As the only begotten Son of the Father, Jesus has the authority of heaven on earth to help this man.  And then Jesus sighs.  He groans.  Jesus is moved with emotion as He deals with the damage that sin has done on the earth.  He feels what this man feels, the groaning of a life of hardship.  It isn’t supposed to be like this, humans with their senses and faculties not working.  Creation is all messed up.  Romans 8 says that all creation groans. People are hurting. All this Jesus takes into Himself.  He is moved with compassion at the human condition.

    Finally Jesus speaks a word, that odd-sounding word, “Ephphatha.”  It means “Be opened; be released.”  And when Jesus speaks, things happen.  The man’s ears are opened; and he hears for the first time.  Imagine the overwhelming emotion the man felt, like those videos where someone gets a cochlear implant and is able to hear the voice of loved ones!  And it’s not just his ears that work now, but also his speaking.  His tongue is loosed and released, and he speaks clearly.  What a joyous and amazing thing!  And when the people seewhat Jesus did for him, they are amazed and overjoyed also: “He has done all things well. He makes both the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

    These miracles are signs from Jesus of what He will bring to all His people.  You also can look forward to the very same kind of healing from Him.  I know there are many among us who have some degree of hearing loss; for many it is very serious.  Hearing aids only help so much; they can malfunction.  Some of you suffer from ringing in the ears, which is its own sort of hearing loss and ailment.  Children sometimes have tubes put in their ears to improve drainage and avoid infections and other issues.  Lots can go wrong with our ears.  And of course, ear, nose, and throat go together.  These things can affect our voice and our speaking, too.  However, at the second coming of Jesus, in the resurrection on the Last Day, none of the faithful will have any of these issues any more.  Jesus is returning to fix your bodies and renew and glorify them.  He’s coming back to redeem all of this damaged and broken creation.  He will raise your bodies, making them whole and perfect, ready to live forever in a perfectly restored creation, a new heaven and a new earth.  This is what we are looking forward to and what is promised to us as baptized believers, not just souls in heaven but bodily resurrection and restoration.  This is our sure hope and what we set our hearts on: the return of Christ, who will fix what is broken, in us and in creation, who will do all things well.

    All this comes about by the implanted word of Christ, the word of the cross and the resurrection. On the cross, Jesus dealt once for all with our brokenness. All the damage in the world, disease and disability and death, all the faculties and senses not working right, all the people not working right or living right or doing right–all of that is a consequence of man’s rebellion against God, man’s shutting his ears to God in favor of other voices that sound better but end up corrupting us and poisoning us. Things are messed up so thoroughly that we can’t fix it ourselves.  But there is one who can, and who does, and who will.  Jesus, the Son of God came down from heaven, took on our flesh and came finger to ear and finger to tongue with the effects of our sin, and He fixed it.  He bore our sins and all their consequences in his body, the innocent bearing the penalty of the guilty.  Jesus is our substitute and our Savior.  He sighs and groans unto death and breathes His last in order to breathe new life into us.  This is the only way our sin could be forgiven; this is the only way the damage could be undone.  Now Jesus’ grave is opened so that you might be released from your grave on the Last Day and share bodily in His resurrection.

     All of this has been delivered to you in your baptism.  The big fixing job of Good Friday and Easter has been applied to you personally at the font.  There Jesus touched you on the forehead and the heart.  There from the mouth of the Lord water and words were splashed upon you.  There He spoke His powerful “Ephphatha” to you.  And so it happened–you are opened up to God again, released from sin and all of its consequences.  Jesus’ word delivers what it promises.  So trust in it.  It’s yours as a pure gift.  It’s your new identity as a baptized child of God.  

    Now you are able to hear the Word of God rightly and believe it. Now you are able to speak and confess the name of the Lord Jesus, your Savior.  Your ears have been opened to hear the voice of your Good Shepherd.  Your tongue has been loosed to speak plainly what God has done for you and to praise His name–and not only here, but before the world, so that their deaf ears may be opened, too, to hear the joyous melody of the Gospel, and their tongues loosed to the confess the truth of Jesus.  Faith comes by hearing.  It doesn’t come from within you; it comes from outside of you, through the Word of God, as a gift.

    So even when it seems like this fallen world, or sinful people, or your own aging bodies are getting the best of you, you are given to say confidently with St. Paul in Philippians 3, “Christ Jesus will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like His glorious body by the power the enables Him to subdue all things to Himself.”  The certainty of that for you is in Christ’s body and blood placed on your tongue this day, for the forgiveness of your sins, strengthening you to endure in the faith to the end.  And so we say with the psalmist, “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”

In the name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit

The Lord Regards the Lowly

Luke 18:9-14; Genesis 4:1-15
Trinity 11

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

    It’s interesting to ponder what life must have been like in the very first family after the fall.  Right from the beginning the relationship between parents and children, between siblings, was deeply affected by the curse.  And we are given insight into that already in the way Adam and Eve named their sons.

    The name “Cain” means “acquired,” for Eve said, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.”  It is likely that Eve believed Cain was the Savior-offspring promised in Genesis 3 who would crush the serpent’s head.  For her words are more literally translated “I have gotten a man, the Lord.”  In other words she thought this boy was the fulfillment of God’s Word, the Redeemer come to set things right again.  So you can see how Cain certainly would have been the favored son.  He was the one in whom the family had invested its hopes.  

    The name “Abel,” on the other hand, means “breath” or “vapor,” like the moisture of your breath on a cold day that just vanishes away.  Ecclesiastes 1 uses this word to describe life in this world as mere “vanity.”  And the Psalmist uses this word to describe our mortality as fallen human beings, saying, “Certainly every man at his best state is vapor” (Ps. 39:5).  With that name, Abel must have certainly felt his second place status in the family.  Cain was the man; he was just the younger brother.  Perhaps this resonates with some of you and how things are or were in your family life in this fallen world.

    And yet, with the Lord, the last are first and the first are last (Mt. 20:16).  For it is written in the Old Testament reading that the Lord had regard for Abel’s offering, but not for Cain’s.  With repentant lowliness Abel the shepherd offers His worship in humble faith, bringing the best of his flock.  As the Lord had sacrificed an animal to clothe Adam and Eve and to cover their shame, Abel brings a choice and unblemished lamb as a sacrifice of blood for atonement.  Abel knew he needed God’s mercy; he needed to be lifted out from under the curse.  His worship was right, for his hope was in the Lord.  It is written, “The Lord raises those who are bowed down” (Ps. 146:8).  “Though the Lord is on high, yet He regards the lowly. But the proud He knows from afar” (Ps. 138:6).  

    That’s why it is that Cain’s worship was not well received.  It is clear from the Lord’s response to Cain’s offering that his was offered faithlessly, as a mere work to be done to try to earn or keep God’s favor.  Cain the farmer came with a prideful heart, full of faith in himself, not in the Lord.  Cain was willing to go through the motions, offering some of the fruit of the ground which he had cultivated.  But it was not pleasing to the Lord, because it was not offered in faith.  Instead of repenting of this and seeking the Lord, Cain became angry both with God and the one to whom God showed favor.  Cain killed Abel, spilling his brother’s blood on the ground.

    However, even in death God has regard for Abel.  For Abel is a picture of Christ, our Good Shepherd, who offers up the choicest sacrifice of His own life for us sinners.  He is the Shepherd who is also the unblemished Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  The world is full of faithless Cains who despise Christ and His people and plot His death.  And yet the very shedding of Jesus’ blood covers us who are made from the dust of the ground.  It restores us to life and gives us a share in His resurrection.  Abel points us to Christ our Brother, who was brutally killed and laid in the dust of death, but who was also vindicated in His resurrection.  And as the ground opened its mouth to receive Abel’s blood, so we now open our mouths in the Sacrament to receive the blood of Christ which cleanses us of all sin (1 John 1:7), including the sins that have been done to us, sometimes violently.  In Jesus the humble will be exalted (Lk 18:14).  For He was raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25) so that we, too, may be raised to share in His glory.

    The Lord regards the lowly.  He justifies the one who humbly relies on His mercy.  He declares the penitent believer to be righteous.  The difference between Cain and Abel, then, is precisely also the difference between the Pharisees and the tax collector.  Both approach God in worship.  But the way in which the Pharisee approaches is radically different from the tax collector.

    Like Cain, the Pharisee is full of faith in Himself.  He does reference God in his little praise service, but he’s really the star of his own show, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.”  The Pharisee, too, would wish his brother the tax collector dead, were it not for the fact that the tax collector makes him look so good by comparison. And please note here: the Pharisee’s problem was not his sense of right and wrong; that’s basically on target.  It’s good not to be an extortioner or an adulterer.  It’s good to fast and to give the 10% tithe of what you possess in offerings.  “The Law of God is good and wise and sets His will before our eyes.”  But, we use the Law lawlessly if we try to turn it into a way to justify ourselves in God’s presence, as if God owes us something now for our good living.  “God, I thank you that I’m not like those people I see on TV and in the news–criminals and weirdos and perverts.  I thank you that I’m much more ethical than those thieving, selfish politicians and corporations.  I thank you that I was raised to be a good person and that I love my family and my country.”  That’s not the worship of God but ourselves.  Such faith is bent away from God back in on the worshiper.  It is the idolatry of the self.  And that sin, the sin of pride and self-righteousness is no better than any of the other sins the Pharisee lists.

    In fact, in many ways the sin of pride is worse and more dangerous.  For it deceives you into thinking that everything is good with you.  However, it is written, “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7), what the heart loves and trusts in.  And if you think you’re doing fine spiritually, if your faith is in yourself, then why would you need and trust in a Savior like Jesus?

    When all is said and done, the Pharisee and the tax collector are in the exact same condition.  Though one looks good and impressive and the other doesn’t, both share the same heart disease called sin.  Both of them are foul and unclean within.  The tax collector is showing symptoms of his sin-disease, whereas the Pharisee seems to have his mostly under control.  But both have the same root disorder; both are just a heartbeat away from death, as the Epistle says also to us, “You were dead in trespasses and sins.”  

    Learn, then,  from the Pharisee and the tax collector.  Believe the terminal diagnosis that the Law has made about you.  Humble yourself before God in true repentance.  Seek His healing, His cleansing, His righteousness.

    For it is written, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart–these, O God, You will not despise.”  The Lord certainly did not despise the tax collector as the Pharisee did.  The tax collector comes not in pride but in lowly penitence and faith.  This is not fake humility.  The tax collector stands afar off from those praying in the temple; for he knows how his sin cuts him off from God and others.  He does not raise his eyes to heaven; for he knows he deserves no heavenly blessing.  He beats his chest when he prays, in token that he is worthy to be punished severely.  He cries out his only hope, “God be merciful to me a sinner!”

    The tax collector places his confidence and trust not in anything about himself but entirely in the Lord and His mercy.  He despairs of his own merits and character and entrusts himself completely to the merits and character of God.  He relies not on his own sacrifice but on God’s sacrifice.  For remember where the tax collector is praying–in the temple, in the place where sacrifices take place!  Therefore, at the very moment in which the tax collector cries out, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” his prayer is being answered right there in the sacrifice which the Lord provided to cover his sins.  The tax collector trusted in the Lord’s sacrificial mercy, and he yearned for the day when the Messiah would come and bring all these things to their fulfillment.

    In the end, it is the tax collector who goes down to his house justified, declared righteous in God’s sight.  And so it is also for each of you who pray with humility and penitent faith, “God be merciful to me a sinner!”  For the sacrifice has also been made for you–in the temple of Jesus’ body, on the cross.  There Christ, the Lamb of God was offered up once and for all.  By His shed blood your sins have been fully atoned for, and you have been put right with God.  As it is written, “You who once were far off (as the tax collector stood far off) have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”  You are justified before God, declared righteous in His sight through Christ.  “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”  It’s all yours because of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.  We boast and brag not about ourselves but Him.

    “He who humbles Himself will be exalted.”  That statement is fulfilled in Jesus, who humbled Himself even unto death for you, and who is now exalted to the highest place at the Father’s right hand.  God grant this also to be true of you in Christ.  Like Abel, like the tax collector, let us offer up true worship, which is faith and hope in the Lord’s mercy.  Humble yourselves before Him, confident that He will lift you up in due time.  And you, too, will go down to your houses today justified and righteous.

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
 

The Things That Make For Your Peace

Luke 19:41-48
Trinity 10

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

    We’re always looking for what will bring us peace and contentment and happiness.  We try to find it in getting stuff, in having that relationship or that experience we’ve always wanted, in our work, in hobbies and trips, in some new philosophy of life or some new medication or some new diet or workout.  But it still always seems to be just out of reach.  Where do you find your peace?

    Our Lord Jesus is approaching the city of Jerusalem.  Within the name “Jerusalem” is the word “salem.”  And “salem” is a form of the word “Shalom,” meaning “peace.”  So there is clearly a sad irony in Jesus’ words in the Gospel when He says, “If you had known, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace!”  The Prince of Peace had come to them.  But the city of peace did not recognize or receive Him.  They were looking for their peace elsewhere.

    And so as our Lord is about to enter Jerusalem for the last time before His death, He weeps over her.  He cries as a parent cries who sees that his child has gone wrong.  He cries as a husband cries over the wife that has rejected him for another.  He weeps out of love for His people who were blind to who He was and what He had come to give them.  Our Lord is not a cold, dispassionate, detached person.  Not only did He take on our human flesh and blood but also our human soul and spirit and mind and emotions.  His heart aches when His people turn away from Him.

    In particular Jesus laments over what is going to happen to them.  In the year 70 A.D., just forty years after this Gospel, Jesus’ prophetic words were fulfilled.  Jerusalem was attacked and laid siege by the Romans.  Tens of thousands were killed or died from famine and plague.  Those not worth anything to the empire were executed, adult and child alike; their dead bodies piled up to block the lanes and the streets of the city.  The strong men were kept alive and forced to work in mines or become slaves.  The Jewish historian, Josephus, wrote that 97,000 young men were taken away as slaves.  He also reports that Titus, the emperor Vespasian’s son, sent a great number of captives into the Roman provinces, as a present to them, that they might be destroyed in their theaters and coliseums by the sword and by wild beasts.  Above all, the temple was utterly destroyed and laid waste.  All that is left of the temple in Jerusalem today is the wailing wall.

    This was the judgment of God.  The Romans were His instrument in executing the sentence.  For Israel had rejected the Messiah.  They did not know the time of their visitation, when God Himself visited them and walked among them.  It was their day, and they missed it.  The things that made for their peace with God were hidden from their eyes by their own unbelief.  The weeping of God eventually becomes the judgment of God for those who will not repent.

    And it’s not as if the Jews weren’t religious.  St. Paul says in the Epistle, “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.  For they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God” in Christ.  They were passionate for God, but they tried to get right with Him on the basis of their own keeping of God’s Law.  They foolishly trusted in their own obedience and holiness rather than humbly and penitently relying on the grace of God revealed to them in Christ and receiving His righteousness as a free and undeserved gift.  And so they ended up rejecting the very one their Law prophesied.  All their religious passion was for nothing.  They wanted something flashier and more glorious than this lowly Jesus.  In fact it offended them to think that’s how God would visit them.  They stumbled at this stumbling stone of the Gospel, and so the stones of the temple and the city were demolished around them.  Their lives were taken from them.

    All of this is a clear and sobering call to repentance for you still today.  For it shows that God’s judgment is real and is nothing to be played around with.  What happened to the Jews in Jerusalem in the 1st century is a miniature picture of what will happen to all the unbelieving world on judgment day.  Consider, then, how things stand with you.  Are you passionate about moral topics or the social decay of our nation, but ho-hum about learning Scriptural doctrine and meditating on God’s Word?  Are you relying on your own religious efforts and spirituality to bring you into God’s favor rather than Christ alone?  Then your religion is like the false, man-centered religion of the Jews, and you must repent.  Do you look for God primarily in mysterious signs and supernatural occurrences instead of in His humble but sure Word?  Is divine service something that has become passe’, that you could do without for weeks at a time?  Then you are like the Israelites who did not know the time of their visitation; you aren’t seeing how God Himself visits you in the scandalously lowly means of preaching and the sacraments, and you must repent.  Are you one who wants to use religion as a means of personal gain or as a way of getting God to bless you financially?  Then you are like those who bought and sold in the temple, and you must repent.

    Turn away from all that, and turn to Him whose heart still weeps out of love for His people.  Trust in Him who continues to cry out, “If you would know, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace!”  Christ Himself is your Peace.  He is the One who brings reconciliation between you and God, who brings you back into fellowship with God and gives you that peace that passes all understanding.  This is your day, the day of your visitation, as it is written, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.”  This is the moment in which Christ is coming to you in His Gospel sounding in your ears.  Believe in Him; trust in what He has done; seek His righteousness.

    For our Lord has cleansed the temple.  When Jesus drove out the moneychangers in righteous anger and purified the temple as a house of prayer, that was a sign of what He was about to do at Calvary.  For there on the cross Jesus Himself experienced the righteous anger of God against the world’s sin and drove it out in the temple of His own body.  Jesus made Himself unclean in your place.  He took all of the greed and the self-righteousness and the pollution of every sin that you’ve done or that has been done to you, and He made it His own dirty mess.  By His holy suffering and death He took it away from you and cleansed you forever.  

    Jesus had said of His body, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  Though the temple in Jerusalem remains destroyed, Jesus could not remain in the grave.  He is now bodily raised in glory and honor, the new and eternal dwelling place of God for you.  Jesus is your temple.  You have entered into the temple of Christ through baptism, and so His holiness and cleanness and righteousness are all yours.  In fact Scripture says that you yourselves are now the body of Christ.  And therefore you all together are the temple of Christ’s Spirit, who dwells in you through your baptismal faith. You are safe from divine judgment.  For you are in Him who took the judgment for you.

    The full meaning of the name Jerusalem means “He shall see peace” or “He shall provide peace.”  2000 years earlier on this same mount, before the city was built, Abraham had said, “The Lord will provide.”  Now on this mount, just outside the city gates, the Lord provided peace for you with God.  His holy tears have washed you clean; the blood He shed purified you to be own treasured people, the holy Church.  In Christ Jesus, you have shalom, peace, completeness and wholeness that will be revealed to all people in the resurrection when He returns on the Last Day.

    Brothers and sisters of Christ, God is indeed coming to visit.  That is bad news for the unrepentant.  To those who want something more than Jesus and His undeserved grace, God’s visitation means judgment.  But for you who believe, God’s visitation is the greatest good news.  “If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace!”  This is your day; right now is the time of your visitation!  Don’t miss out.  Here are the things that make for your peace, the body and blood of Christ, offered up for you for the forgiveness of your sins, for your peace, for your rest, for your restoration to the Father.  God grant you always to be like that faithful remnant in the Gospel that were very attentive to hear Jesus, so that by His grace you may be brought to dwell eternally in the new Jerusalem above.

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

The Garden and the Wilderness

Genesis 2:7-17; Mark 8:1-9
Trinity 7

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

    One question that even long-time Christians will sometimes struggle with, or at least wonder about, is why did God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden?  It’s one of those things that can crop up every once in a while in our skeptical minds as an unresolved issue.  If everything was good in the beginning, why did God put in an opportunity for man to mess it all up?

    God certainly wasn’t foolish or evil for doing this.  Nor was He playing games or toying with us.  Rather, this has to do with the very nature of why God made man and what it means for man to be in His image.  For the other creatures, it was sufficient that they lived primarily according to instinct, simply by virtue of the way they were made.  But the Lord created man higher than the animals.  He created us to have a unique relationship with Him.  He is the God who is love, and who desires us to receive that love and return that love freely.  And in order for love to be truly given and received, there also has to be the opportunity for that love to be rejected.  If there were no choice in the matter, it wouldn’t be love but coercion, something forced, or at least something mechanical.  But God did not create Adam and Eve to be robots or machines, but to be human.  And to be human does not mean to be sinful; it means to reflect the very nature of the God who is love in their relationship with Him and with each other.

    And so the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was there in the Garden that there might be the opportunity for such real love.  Refraining from eating its fruit was a key way Adam and Eve showed love for God and honored Him as their Maker.  Our first parents knew only good.  God alone knew what evil was, how His goodness could be corrupted and turned against Him.  We didn’t need to know that.  For us, to know evil is already to be affected and tainted by it.  You know how that is, with a movie, for instance, that has a graphic scene of sex or violence that you can’t unsee, or some traumatizing experience in your life that you can’t undo, and how those evils negatively color and affect the way you look at the world and how it diminishes life.  God didn’t want that for you.  He wanted you to be innocent of that.  He simply wanted human beings to trust in Him and His words and to enjoy His good gifts.

    The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then, was the place reserved for God alone, where our first parents would worship Him. It would have been treated with the same sort of reverence as we treat our altar.  Martin Luther said, “This tree . . . was Adam’s church, altar, and pulpit.  Here he was to yield to God the obedience he owed, give recognition to the Word and will of God, give thanks to God, and call upon God.” Luther continues, “This tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . would have been the church at which Adam, together with his descendants, would have gathered on the Sabbath day” (AE 1:95,105).  To cross that boundary that God set would be to enter into the realm that belongs to God alone.  

    So then, one point we should understand clearly is that this tree was not some evil thing meant to trip up human beings.  To be sure, there was a curse attached to its misuse–just as there are consequences to the misuse of any good thing.  But above all, it was a place of worship, of hearing and honoring God’s Word, and of praising Him for His great goodness to them.

    Beware, then, when you are tempted to use your human reason and thinking to call into question why God did things the way He did, as if our limited understanding could critique the depths of the mind of God, as if we were over Him in a position to judge Him.  For whoever does so is engaging in the same sin that Adam and Eve did–putting themselves on the throne as judge of good and evil, trying to be God in place of God.  Is it not utter foolishness to use our intelligence and mental faculties against the very God who gave them to us?  

    Of course, in one form or another that’s exactly what has happened.  We’re often tempted to think like fools that we know better than God.  Disregarding His Word and commands, we find ourselves under the curse He pronounced, “In the day you eat of it you shall surely die . . .  Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”  The free will that man had in the beginning has been lost, just as the image of God has also been corrupted and polluted in us.  No longer are we free in spiritual matters; rather we are in bondage to corruption.  Ephesians 2 says that we are dead in our sin, spiritually stillborn.  And dead people don’t make choices or exercise free will.  We can’t do anything to bring ourselves to God or to get right with Him.  The wages of sin is indeed death and separation from God forever.

    However, the God who is love did not leave us to perish forever in our fallen state.  For the Epistle reminds us, “The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  God’s love is all about the giving of His free, undeserved gifts to us.  And that was shown most fully and perfectly in the giving of Himself to us in the incarnation of Jesus.  

    What a contrast the setting of today’s Gospel reading is to Eden.  Things have gone from a lush garden to a barren wilderness, from an abundance of food to the rumbling of empty stomachs.  But notice that Jesus is right there in the wilderness with the people, enduring all of the effects of sin’s curse right along with them.  Jesus said, “I have compassion on the multitudes.”  His heart goes out to us in our need.  Jesus entered into the bleakness and the harshness of this world in order that He might undo the curse and restore you to paradise.  He went so far as to make your problems His problems.  He knows what you’re going through right now, whatever it is–not just from a distance, but first-hand.  In His great mercy Jesus came into the world to suffer with you and to suffer for you in order to take your suffering away forever.  He made Himself a part of your life, with all the troubles and mess that it is, in order to redeem your bodies and souls and renew the fallen creation in which you live.

    We see little foretastes of that renewal in miracles like this feeding of the 4000.  Remember, the curse on Adam had been, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”  But here the second Adam, Jesus, reverses the curse and produces bread in abundance apart from any sweaty or tiring labor.  In this moment He restores the bounty of the Garden of Eden, where food is received in overflowing measure from the gracious hand of God.  Here you see God the Son beginning to break the curse of decay and death and overcome the fall into sin.  You see a small glimpse of how it was in the beginning and how it will be even more so in the new creation of the age to come.

    Jesus completed His work of breaking the power of the curse on the cross.  Since the wages of sin is death, Jesus took those wages you had coming and died your death for you.  Sin’s deathly curse was broken and undone in the body of Christ the crucified.  And notice the change in terminology–it’s no longer wages, what you’ve deserved and earned; it’s a gift, free love and grace.  Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, the gift of life now flows to you and to all who believe in Him.  For if sin has been undone, so also are the wages of sin undone.  Death and hell have been taken away from you through the cross.  You have been released to a new life, free and full, through the resurrection of Jesus.

    That’s why it’s a key fact that it was on the third day that this miracle was performed in the Gospel.  Jesus had led these people on a three day journey into the wilderness to teach them.  So also Jesus leads you on a journey into the wilderness, into your daily callings in this desert world, so that as you serve your neighbor with all the difficulties that can bring, you may learn ever more deeply of your desperate need for Jesus’ mercy, so that you may learn to hunger for His Word and His righteousness.  And then on the third day, that is, here in divine service, He fills you with manna from above.  We bear his cross in the world, fasting in spirit with Jesus, often enduring affliction and trouble.  But then the fast is broken and here we take part in the feast of the living and resurrected Christ, the Bread of Life.

    Jesus took the seven loaves and gave thanks, broke them, and gave them to His disciples to set before the people.  In the same way still today, Jesus speaks His words of thanks and consecration,  and His ministers distribute the blessed Sacrament of the Altar on His behalf.  The seven loaves were multiplied to feed and fully satisfy 4000 people.  In the same way still today, Jesus uses seemingly insufficient bread to multiply His grace and feed and fully satisfy the church with His very life-giving body.  Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven.  If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”  “He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.”

    When all had eaten there was more left over than when they started.  Seven small loaves became seven large baskets.  That’s how it is with the Lord.  The more He gives, the more He has yet to give.  His mercy toward you, His gifts don’t run out.  There’s always more; there’s always better.  The seven loaves stand for the seven days of creation.  The seven large baskets stand for the even greater creation to come at Christ’s return.  The Lord isn’t simply restoring you to the deathless perfection of Eden, He is exalting you to a status even greater and better than Adam and Eve.  The place being prepared for you in heaven far surpasses even the Paradise of Eden.  For by sharing fully in your humanity, Christ has lifted you up to the very throne and glory of God.

    So, you may sometimes wonder whether or not God’s creation of man was worth it, with all that has gone so terribly wrong since the fall, with all that God knew He would have to do to save and restore us.  But that’s not for us to dwell on.  What we should dwell on is that you are worth it to God, worth the price He would have to pay to have you in His love forever.

    Baptized into Christ, you are now given permission to come into God’s presence to eat.  There is here for you the tree of life, the cross bearing Christ’s body and blood.  From it you are given to eat and never die, never to be separated from God.  As you receive this living bread that came down from heaven, you are being given a taste of paradise.  For heaven is where Christ is, and Christ is here for you.  “The poor shall eat and be satisfied.”  “For the Lord fills the hungry soul with goodness.”

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

Judge Not

Luke 6:36-42; John 8:1-11
Trinity 4

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

    Jesus teaches us in today’s Gospel, “Judge not, and you shall not be judged.”  So what exactly does that mean?  Unlike what the world thinks, Jesus does not mean that we should be OK with false teaching or ungodly living and never speak against such things.  After all, He also teaches us to beware of false prophets (Matt. 7:15), which means we have to judge what they say and avoid listening to them.  And He also tells us not to be ashamed of confessing His Word “in this adulterous and sinful generation” (Luke 12:8; Mark 8:38).  Speaking the truth of God’s Word sometimes requires saying that what is contrary to it is wrong and false.  Christians should never give in to the ridiculous notion that no matter what our family or friends do or believe, we should “support” them.  We should still love them and bear with them.  But we uphold and support God’s living words above all.  1 Corinthians 13 reminds us, “Love does not rejoice in iniquity but rejoices in the truth.”  We are given to speak the truth in love.  So “Judge not” never means ignoring or minimizing what is good and right and true.

    No, what Jesus means is this: there are two ways of dealing with others–in a way that finds fault, or in a way that explains everything in the kindest way.  Especially with those whom we are closest to–spouses and children, co-workers and relatives and friends–it can be easy to fall into a pattern of judging and fault-finding.  For since we’re close to these people, we know them very well.  We see their weaknesses and failings.  And over time, those things can become bothersome and annoying.  Then we get this narrative running in our head that they’re uncaring or lazy or frigid or greedy or impatient or selfish.  And then we start looking for things which prove our point and fit that narrative.  And before long that’s all we can see about the other person.  We view everything through that judgmental lens.  We look for reasons to condemn them and prove we’re right and justify our withholding of mercy.  All of this breeds resentment which kills relationships.

    But Jesus here calls us to turn from those old, fallen ways and to follow His higher ways.  Not only does He want you to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  In this Gospel He’s taking it a step further, “do unto others as you would have your heavenly Father do unto you.”  Do you want God not to judge and condemn you?  Then don’t be judging and condemning others.  Do you want God to forgive your sins and give you richly all things to enjoy?  Then let go of your grudges, and stop being stingy.  That’s the gist of Jesus’ words.

    Our old Adam rages against those words and resists them.  He thinks that if you don’t look out for yourself, who will?  He doesn’t trust that vengeance belongs to the Lord or that what others mean for evil God can work for good.  The old Adam thinks it’s foolish to believe the Lord’s words that it is better to give than to receive.

    However, you have been claimed by Another, haven’t you?  You have been marked with the sign of the cross, and you now belong to the New Adam, to the crucified and risen Lord Jesus. You’ve been baptized into Him.  You now get to share in His life and live it.

    This life of Jesus which you’ve been given to live is not one of judgment and condemnation.  For Jesus came to rescue you from the judgment of death which you deserved.  It is written in Romans 8, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  Think about that!  Through your baptismal faith in Jesus, there’s nothing left to condemn in you.  Not a single thing.  Jesus didn’t come to pay you back for your countless rebellions.  He came to pay the price for them, bearing them Himself under His Father’s judgment as He hung on the tree.  “Father, forgive them” is the prayer that rings out from the cross to the end of the age.  All who take refuge under His cross are just that: forgiven.  Jesus came not to take from you but to give to you–rich measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over–pouring into your laps abundant mercy and acceptance.

    And I think a perfect example of our Lord’s mercy is the account of how He dealt with the adulterous woman.  Do you remember that account?  “The scribes and the Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman caught in adultery.  And when they had set her in the midst, they said to Him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act.  Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned to death.  What do you say?’ . . .  But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear.”  

     Isn’t that wonderful?  Even though this woman did indeed deserve to be stoned to death for her sin, to return to the dust that Jesus stooped down to write in, yet Jesus does not listen to the accusation of the Law against this woman.  For He is the fulfillment of the Law.  He silences the Law’s accusation against you.  He is deaf to its judgment for the sake of His own mercy.  “So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, ‘He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.’  And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground.  Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last.”  Jesus’ words brought these men to see that in their eagerness to condemn this woman, they were also condemning themselves.  Judge not, and you shall not be judged.  The older ones especially knew that they were not without sin, that they, too, needed God’s mercy.  

    But let us be clear that God’s mercy is never a license to sin or a condoning of sin.  Unfortunately, that is what many people think “Judge not” means, that we should affirm sinful behavior and false beliefs and accept all sorts of sexual perversity.  But they are wrong.  That’s certainly not what Jesus ever did.  For notice how Jesus calls this woman to a new life and to leave her sin behind: “When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, ‘Woman, where are those accusers of yours?  Has no one condemned you?’  She said, ‘No one, Lord.’  And Jesus said to her, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.’”  This woman was forgiven, released and freed from her sinful way of life.  For Jesus Himself would stand condemned for her.  He would be lowered to the dust of death, for her sin and the sins of the whole world.  He would lie dead on the cold stone of His tomb.  Just as Jesus here raised Himself up from the dust, so also He raised up this woman to a new life.  He gave her His own life.

    And that’s the same life He has given also to you in your Baptism.  As Jesus defended and delivered the adulterous woman, so also He speaks up on your behalf and delivers you from the death you deserve for your sins.  Jesus is your Advocate with the Father, who protects and defends you and saves you.  The devil and even your own conscience may accuse you.  But Jesus Himself is the atoning sacrifice for your sins.  Jesus says to you, “Where are your accusers?  The devil’s head has been crushed.  Your sins have all been answered for.  There are no stones left to throw.  You are free.  Be at peace.”

    The Christian life, then, is this pattern of drowning your old Adam with all his desires, confessing that you have a plank in your eye, and then receiving absolution from Jesus who took and carried away that plank when He bore the wooden beam of the cross up to Golgotha.  When you see yourself rightly as one who has been rescued like that, who has been given an undeserved pardon and reprieve, then you are someone who is ready to be of some use to your neighbor!  Once you’ve dealt with your own issues before God, then you’re better prepared to help your neighbor in a way that truly flows from love. You get to carry the good news of Christ and give His free pardon to others.  And instead of finding fault, you get to find ways to cover up one another’s faults.  For it is written, “Love covers a multitude of sins.”  

    The love of Christ has covered the multitude of your sins forever.  That love is given to you here and now in the holy supper.  Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over is put into your bosom in the grain which is Christ’s body and in the cup that runs over with His mercy, His holy blood poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins.  Such is the generosity of our God.  It’s beyond measure.  It’s always spilling over, so that you may be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful.

✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

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