One of the teachings of the Bible that our flesh wishes
would be different is the way that God only deals kindly with those who are in
great need. The Bible says almost
countless times that God is near to those who fear him. St. Mary in her Magnificat says that the Lord
casts down the mighty from their thrones (because they don’t need God) and
raises those who are of low degree (because they do). He fills the hungry with good things, but the
rich he sends empty away.
Jesus also confirms this way of God’s gracious dealing with
only those who are in great need when he says, “Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
All of this—and there are many more passages that could be referenced—shows
that God is good to the poor, wretched, needy, outcast, and so on, but his eyes
are on the proud, rich, haughty, and so on, to bring them down.
Our flesh does not like this. Our flesh likes to be proud, rich, haughty
and so on because it likes to be comfortable.
It does not want to be poor, or to mourn, or to be hungry. It wants to be mighty, sitting on thrones. It wants to be righteous and honorable and
capable. It wants to be
self-sufficient. How can I sum up all
these things? Maybe I can sum it all up
by saying that our flesh wants to be god.
That is the primordial temptation from the Garden. The reason why the fruit started to look
attractive is that offered Adam and Eve power for themselves, all by
themselves. They would have the praise,
honor, and glory. They would mount up on
eagles’ wings and everybody would be so impressed with their knowledge of good
and evil.
If it were true that we were godlike, then maybe there would
be little harm in believing this about ourselves. But we don’t even need to wonder about that
because it’s not true. We are
creatures. Furthermore, we are fallen
creatures. We are sinners. We are poor and needy. We are subject to failure and death. But part and parcel of our rebellion and sin
against God is that we will never truly acknowledge this about ourselves unless
God himself impress it upon us against our will. If we could admit our sinfulness and humility
and wretchedness, then we would be in a much better spot. But as it is, we all only want to think the
best about ourselves. We only want other
people to say the best things about ourselves.
If someone points out our faults—even when this is true (or perhaps
especially when it is true)—we resent it terribly and even if they are our dear
friend we find it very difficult not to count them as our enemy. We’d all like to look in the mirror and tell
ourselves what fine specimens we are.
And so it is necessary that God himself teach us
otherwise. He must impress upon us that
we are not as good or as strong or as likeable or as moral as we’d like to
think of ourselves. Sometimes God must
use very, very strong measures to break stubborn wills so that we are shown the
truth about ourselves. It’s like God
wrestling with us until we cry “uncle.”
But this isn’t just a game. And
it is very, very bitter for us to cry uncle because we want to believe that we
are something other than what we really are.
We don’t want to believe that we are sinners. We want to believe that we are good and
strong and capable and that we don’t really need God. That doesn’t mean that we reject the idea of
God, it only means that we want God to act only according to our own terms and
conditions. We only want him to act
according to our thinking. But if God
only acts according to our thinking then we won’t allow God to show us our sins
and show us how pathetic, poor, and needy we are, because we don’t want to
admit that about ourselves.
Right at the heart of our existence with God, then, is the
need for God to break us—to break our pride, to make us fearful, to make us
lose hope in other things. Really what
is going on here is that God has to show us that we are not God. He is.
Once we realize the truth about ourselves, then God will be gracious to
us, but not before then. But once God
has broken our pride, then he is more gracious to us than we could imagine. In fact, it’s a little over the top the way
God deals with us creatures once we are made sad, poor, and needy.
Consider the dramatic turn of events in our Old Testament
and Gospel readings today. Our Old
Testament reading is from Ezekiel.
Ezekiel was a prophet who lived while God’s people were at low
tide. The Babylonians had come and
destroyed the Temple and carted away the best and the brightest of the Jewish
people to Babylon. God’s people were
left in disarray. There’s no going back
to the good old days.
This is why they are referred to as being bones. And not only are they bones, they are
exceedingly dry bones. That means that
they are bleached and brittle like bones that have been left out in the
weather. It is hard enough to make freshly
killed bones live. What are you going to
do with old dry bones? Surely, they
can’t live. God’s people were so bad off
that this was their state. They were
dead and decomposed and nothing was left.
They used to be proud and powerful and think that they could manage
anything, but now the Babylonians have made it impossible for them to be a
nation, a church, anymore.
But God tells Ezekiel to preach to the bones. When Ezekiel preaches to the bones they come
together, bone to its bone. Flesh and
sinews are laid upon them and skin covered them. They become corpses again instead of moldered
bones, but there is still no breath in them.
And so God tells Ezekiel to preach to the wind, to gather the Holy
Spirit, and send it into these corpses so that they will breathe again. And that is what happens. They get up and stand on their feet and lo
and behold, there is an exceedingly great army. Not only are they alive, but they are ready
to fight and live vigorously.
This is a very encouraging word for these poor people who
are either scattered like sheep without any shepherds in Judah or who are in
captivity in Babylon. They couldn’t see
how on earth they were going to ever be a distinct people again. They had no money, no power, no leadership. There was no hope for them. But by this picture that God gives to Ezekiel
he shows that these outward things are not a hindrance to God. They still had the Word of God and the Holy
Spirit in that Word, and so they would still rise again and live. The people of God had been taught to fear God
and his wrath, for it was God who had brought about their downfall, but now
they are also being comforted by God.
It is a mission of comfort that also motivates Jesus in our
Gospel reading today too. Our reading
records what happens on the evening of that first Easter. These poor, sad losers were huddled together
behind locked doors. They were
miserable. They had not met the
challenge of the hour when Jesus was arrested.
Although they all promised that they would never leave him, they all
did. They had nothing to be proud of as
far as courage was concerned.
Their faith also was in terrible shape. Although the women told them what the angels
had said to them and that Jesus’s body was nowhere to be found at the tomb and
that Jesus had spoken with Mary Magdalene and all of this was already told to
them beforehand by Jesus who said that he would suffer and die and three days
later rise again—even though they had all these messages of truth, they still
were unbelieving. And so these disciples
stink from one end to the other. There
is nothing good or noble about them.
They are a bunch of hard-hearted cowards who thought their dreams of
Jesus being the Christ were over. And so
they all sit there feeling sorry for themselves.
The way that Jesus greets these miserable men shows us that God
does not wait around for us to make the first move. God does not wait for us to make a decision
for him. He does not wait for us to
shape up or clean up our act. In the
midst of sin and unbelief and disgustingness Jesus comes and says—not “shape
up!”—but, “Peace be with you.”
And it is very important that you understand that Jesus really means it when he says, “Peace
be with you.” There is not an
asterisk or a condition that has to be met in order for the peace to be
authentic. Since the disciples are such
losers I think it is natural for us to think that they have to somehow clean up
their act in order to receive the peace or to keep the peace. How can Jesus love them when they are
unlovable? Don’t they have to somehow
become lovable? But that is not how God
works. God does not scan the horizon,
looking for somebody good enough to meet his approval. He finds miserable wretches and loves them
the way that they are.
This report of Jesus’s first encounter with these disciples
is very important and we have to pay very close attention to it. These are not throw-away words. Jesus is not chatting about the weather. These words are at the very heart of what
Jesus is all about. With all of Jesus’s
words after his resurrection from the dead we have words that are dripping with
importance. They are the distillation of
all that Jesus has done and what he desires with his disciples in the
future. So what is it that Jesus tells
these disciples that is so important?
He breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy
Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any,
they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” The thing that Jesus is sending out his
disciples to do is to forgive sins. That
is the endpoint. This is different from
Jesus telling his disciples to make the world a better place, to teach good
morals, to promote healthy living, to get rid of poverty, racism, and other
social evils. What the disciples are to
do is exactly what Jesus had already done to them. In the midst of their sadness, sin, failure, unbelief,
they are to announce the forgiveness of sins in Jesus’s name. The Christian life in this world is not
getting rid of sins altogether, but to hold onto the forgiveness of sins in the
midst of sin. Christians do not quit being
sinners. So long as we have this maggot
sack of a flesh of ours we are going to have sins crawling through it until it
is dead in the grave. Christians do not
quit being sinners. They are instead
forgiven sinners. The forgiveness of
sins is to be urged upon God’s people to be grasped by faith while they pretty
much remain desperate losers.
But Jesus also tells us Christians that sins are to be
retained, that is, not forgiven. Why or
when? Sin is not to be forgiven, but
rather all the more vigorously imposed, when people are not afraid of God, when
they are not needy, when they are doing very well on their own (thank you very
much). Supermen and superwomen have no
place in the Kingdom of God. They are
liars. They should be able to realize
this about themselves because they are going to die, but we shouldn’t
underestimate the foolishness and stubbornness of the flesh. So long as they keep believing that they are
little gods and goddesses they remain hitched to the devil’s wagon with all his
lies. The truth—that they are poor and
needy—must be urged upon them with the greatest power and insistence that we
can muster so that they become terrified of God and his wrath. Then they can be comforted. But if they are never brought into the fear
of God they will have very little esteem for the forgiveness of sins. It will be like casting pearls before
swine.
Have you ever tried to impress upon a hog how valuable and
beautiful pearls are? It takes a lot of
talking, let me tell you. And after all
the talk you’re not very sure that they understand anything more than when you
started. So it is when you talk to
people about the forgiveness of sins when they do not fear God.
On the other hand, those who are soiled in their conscience
and are afraid of going to hell gladly hear Jesus’s words, “Peace be with
you,” and “I forgive you all your sins.” This is what makes God’s people praise him even while they are feeling quite
low about themselves.
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