Sermons

What is Jesus’ answer to St. Peter’s system, and, of course, our little systems too? Well, He takes the Hebrew number for completeness (seven) and puts it with another seven as a poetic way of saying ‘infinity.’ Jesus looks at St. Peter, He looks at us, and sees whatever amount of forgiveness we think is appropriate and raises us to infinity. It is a shocking pronouncement. But why speak in this poetic manner? Why not just say, ‘You must always forgive?’ Well, just as the Gospel is not our story, the forgiveness we offer in the name of Jesus Christ is not about us. By forgiving all those who have hurt us, we are connecting ourselves into the God/Man’s reclamation of human nature from the dark rebellion of our forefathers. As we hear on the lips of the evil and terrible Lamech all the way back in Genesis 4, ‘…hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is seventy-sevenfold’ (Genesis 4:23-24). Here is the battle cry of fallen man: ‘I am the one who determines what is the just punishment for wronging me; I will judge and punish because that is the only way in which my pain can be healed.’ Christ’s command today is the courageous and terrible antidote to Lamech’s poisonous revenge. It is the reversal of the pain he wanted to cause; it is the taking of that pain upon ourselves: the offering up of that pain to the God who knows what it means to be a sacrifice for the forgiveness of the world. Despite all his murderous posturing, Lamech was a coward because he couldn’t take the pain which inevitably follows true, sacrificial forgiveness; Jesus is our Savior because He can.

In today’s second lesson, a powerful man learns the limits of his power when his son begins to die. The illness murdering the nobleman’s son doesn’t care about his money or status because it answers to a higher power than him or the governor or the emperor. This young man on his deathbed is feeling the sharp edge of mankind’s rebellion against his Creator; he is experiencing the grim penalty for a human people living in suicidal conflict with the natural order and its author. We can still hear a faint echo of this truth when both theist and atheist alike refer to sickness as a ‘disorder.’ The poisoned fruit of living in a chaotic, fallen world is that our very bodies are coming apart at the seams—rebelling against our wills just as we have rebelled against the perfect will of our Creator. This real decay and death besieging us are the daily reminders that a creature who doesn’t have full control of when he uses the bathroom can’t possibly be in a position to rule himself. Or, more relevant to today’s reading, a creature who can’t save his son from death can’t possibly be able to save himself. This truth hits our faithful nobleman in the face, and so he humbles himself before a man who has none of the power people hoard and kill for, but who possesses all of the power which actually matters when the lies and distractions of this world are pulled away, and we see how naked and disarmed we truly are.

This wedding garment then, this sign that we are ready to enter the feast today, and at the beginning of the new world, is not something for which we can buy or barter; no guru or life coach has it; no pretty face or wise heart can whisper it into our ears. There is no earning it; there is no selling it; there is only the gracious gift of the Lord who was bound for our sake and cast into the outer darkness for our sins only to shine His light even in the pit of hell and break the chains of death forever. We are either in the darkness, or we are with the king who defeated it. Just as God covered the nakedness of Adam and Eve with a sacrifice after the first sin of man, God covers our nakedness in the righteousness of the victorious victim, Our King and Savior Jesus Christ. As St. Paul tells us, again and again, we must cast aside the old garment of our wickedness and clasp tightly the garment of Christ. The internal rebirth of our heart, soul, and mind cannot but be seen by the fruit we bear for the Kingdom of God. Our outward life, seen by God and man, is the outward sign of the new heart death cannot silence. It is not our riveting testimony or emotional conversion or whatever other markers we use to designate ourselves as saved that reveals what garment we wear; it isn’t our identification on a form as Christian or even the number of years we have attended church that shows our true colors; no, it is the lively faith which cannot but express itself in faithful prayer and sacrificial love.

This humble focus we are called to bear explains the commands St. Paul lays upon us today. If we are not the ones who will save the world, we must become the pure instruments of Him who has and is and will. When we, through Word and Sacrament, become more and more united with the true Savior of the world we can actually experience the righteous anger He feels towards sin but stop that anger from causing us to fall into the sin we hate. As the pure instruments of God, we can flee from sloth and greed so that our work is transformed from soulless drudgery or gluttonous hoarding into the means by which God helps those in need. As the pure instruments of God, our very words move from gossip and useless small talk into a conversational pathway by which the grace of God unlocks the hardened heart of another. Every day the Holy Spirit is moving us farther and farther from the purposeless waiting the heathens call ‘life’ into the mighty, rushing currents of the glorious purposes of God. Each moment, including the moments of our greatest pain and sadness, is another blessed opportunity to further and further align ourselves with God’s saving activity in the world. When we walk in this manner, when we walk as Christian men and women, we become the living ambassadors of God’s forgiveness and love to a lonely and desperate world; we live in the forgiveness that costs and changes and saves.

But thankfully, we are not saved by our ability to keep this law. No, that is why we beg for mercy every Sunday when we repeat along with the justified publican, ‘Lord have mercy upon us; Christ have mercy upon us; Lord have mercy upon us.’ We are saved by the only man who ever actually lived out these commandments in their beauty and rigor. The life, ministry, trial, and death of Jesus Christ are the great moments in the history of human love; it is the only time that these commandments were ever perfectly lived out on the stage of human experience. All other attempts to love God and Man must be measured against the innocent Lamb of God allowing His creation to murder Him in our greatest act of self-loving idolatry. Again, there was plenty of tragic love in the hearts of the callous men and women yelling, ‘Crucify him, Crucify him,’ but it was the constricting self-love which makes men proud and cheerful sinners. When we recognize that this same self-love still resides in the darkened chambers of our hearts, we begin to realize the enormity of the Trinity’s salvation project; we begin to realize just how much we need the sacrificial love of Jesus to be our only template for true love; we begin to realize that we don’t just need something called ‘love’ in our lives; no, we need God to reach into our chests and pump our dead hearts back to life, so we can be even the faintest echoes of the reverberating triumph love won forever on the cross. And when those faint echoes come together to worship in this building and live every moment for Christ, our combined voices resound in the court of heaven and terrorize the pit of hell; our love makes the Evil One tremble and know that he has but a short time. So let us then love God and neighbor, and thank Christ every day for showing us that true love is always in the shape of the cross.

The actions of Jesus, interrupting this ritual of mourning, are then quite terribly cruel if not for the fact that He is the One who created life in the first place, and further, He has come to birth the new world from His own body and blood. Telling a grieving widow to ‘Weep not,’ while pushing past her to touch the unclean death box being purged from the village; thereby, making Himself unclean in the process—all because he had compassion on this grieving widow—gives us a window into God the Son’s entire mission to save the world. As St. Paul tells us in his 2nd letter to the Corinthians: Jesus, who knew no sin became sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God. Jesus embraces death itself so that we can be freed from sin and death in a transformation just as shocking and incredible as compelling a dead boy to return to his mother’s side. Through the Cross, our Lord covers Himself in the unclean death acts of the world, for on the first Good Friday, Jesus will literally take this boy's place in the tomb and cause His own blessed widowed mother to grieve as humanity rips her precious and perfect son apart. Here is the great and terrible price of the end of death—the price of wiping away all tears, the price of saying ‘Weep not.’ Justice demands a sacrifice; Love provides a Savior.

The second complaint goes like this: ‘I have earned everything I have through hard work, I define myself by that hard work against the lazy good for nothings who surround me, so I will ignore this part of Christ’s sermon.’ Do we imagine that Jesus doesn’t understand hard work? His father was a tradesman; Jesus Himself was a carpenter for decades before He started preaching on this mountain. God the Son, by whom the entire world was created, intimately understands what hard work is about because He lived the human experience from the ground level. So, it is not that Jesus doesn’t understand hard work; no, it is that we don’t understand our position within time and the universe. You and I are currently living on a providentially placed planet which is hurtling through space at 67,000 mph as it spins around an enormous burning star; we were providentially made alive in the wombs of our mothers, protected while we were more vulnerable than a chicken’s egg; we live, every day, breathing God’s air, eating God’s food, walking on the feet and legs God has given us. We could say that all that we have is ours because we are smart or clever or hard working, but we would be telling ourselves a ridiculous science-fiction story while God’s amazing natural creation swirls all around us. The idea that people are not on their knees thanking God every day for all that they have is nothing less than a pulsating symbol of our self-delusion.

Blessedly, every part of our universe, from the greatest evils to the most pure goods, is allowed to exist because it drives all those whose eyes have been opened to see our desperate need for a Savior. St. Paul today calls the law of God a teacher and a jailer because even the holy law of God was not the end of the human story, not the end of our great redemption and becoming. The law, like pain and death and suffering, is necessary because of our selfishness and sin; they are all necessary to drive our broken hearts to seek the cure for our woundedness. When we put our lives, our confused and messed up lives, up against the standard for humanity, up against the life and love of Jesus Christ, we suddenly realize that we are not even the priest or the levite in this story: we are the naked, dying man in the gutter. We are the ones who have nothing to give except our pain and loss, nothing to give but our broken bodies and hollowed out souls. And yet, we are saved. The God of heaven and earth binds our wounds and makes us whole; He heals us with the tears and blood of His own body because it is only a love which gives unto death that can save anyone, only a love which can look at the broken bodies of the children of men and say, ‘Here are my sons and daughters; here is the beautiful family through which I will save the world.’

Blessedly, the fate of the world does not lie in the hands of paper pushers and bureaucrats or kings and congressmen for that matter. St. Paul tells us that ‘our sufficiency is of God,’ and we see just that in today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus Christ, God the Son and Lord of Creation, heals human infirmity with the same creative power He used to spread forth the firmament of heaven. This public display is real power reshaping a world marred by our sinful rebellion. It wasn’t some law or rule which removed the silence imprisoning today’s deaf man; no, this fallen creature was healed by the recreative work of the God whose air we breathe, whose image we bear, and whose world He will not let us destroy. Jesus Christ embodies this greatest of news when He joins His image bearers in our suffering through the death of the cross. He shows His everlasting solidarity with all those mistreated by a fallen, evil world by fighting it with the weaponry of sacrificial love. God the Son doesn’t say, ‘I feel your pain,’ and move on to the next reward for the rich and powerful; no, He lived in our pain and sorrow until we killed Him, and then He rose from the grave to show us death’s pathetic weakness. He revealed a resurrected glory to live for rather than a condemnation to fear. It is His sacrifice which today gives meaning and hope to all those suffering under the boot of evil; it is His sacrifice which will soon bring everlasting peace and justice to all who seem crushed and forsaken—especially to those who seemed crushed or forsaken.

But how? How can we possibly keep fighting in our weakness and our fear, keep fighting as more and more pieces fall off of us and the losses pile all around us; we can keep going because of what St. Paul says next, ‘..I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own’ (Phil. 3:12). It is, once again, the One who tells today’s parable who makes all things new and possible; it is Christ who transforms the cries of the truly penitent man into the first words of one truly free: a new creation finally able to raise his eyes to heaven as he carries his own cross to the next battle, the next sacrifice, the next chance to show thanksgiving for the One ‘whose property is always to have mercy.’