Sermon manuscript:
We Christians live in the time of the New Testament, the new
covenant, the new arrangement between God and us. The nature of this New
Testament is that Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world. By the redeeming sacrifice of the Son of God, all people have been
reconciled to God, even though they have disregarded and even actively fought
against God’s will. Therefore, through faith in Jesus we are justified before
God. That means that God accepts us and welcomes us and blesses us for Christ’s
sake.
There have been previous covenants, previous arrangements
between God and his people, before the fullness of time came with Jesus. There
was the Abrahamic covenant where Abraham and his descendants were given the
sign of circumcision. There is also the much more extensive covenant that was
given at Mt. Sinai. This covenant included the tabernacle and temple, all the
sacrifices and festivals that went along with that, the distinction between
clean and unclean food, and so on. Today we will be talking about one aspect of
this Sinai covenant, the third commandment, which requires the people of God to
not work on Saturdays. This, like many other aspects of the old covenant, set
apart the people of God from all the other people on earth.
As you know, we Christians do not observe the Sabbath. We do
not forbid work on Saturday or Sunday. The application that we make with the
third commandment is that we should not despise preaching and God’s Word, but
hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it. But we can do that on any day of
the week if we so choose. It is an ancient custom, going all the way back to
the apostles, that Christians meet on Sunday, the day the Lord was resurrected
from the dead, but theoretically we could meet any day.
We also do not observe the distinction between clean and
unclean food. We are allowed to eat pork, shellfish, and whatever else, for
what Jesus has made clean we ought not call unclean. Neither do we have the
Levitical priesthood or the services and sacrifices and festivals of the temple
in Jerusalem. These were prophesies and foreshadowings of the one great
sacrifice of the God-Man Jesus Christ on the cross, the only sacrifice that is
capable of atoning sin.
Now all Christians are royal priests. We declare the excellencies
of God who has called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Our
sacrifices are not goats and rams, but our own bodies as living
sacrifices—offered up in love for God and for our neighbor. Christians are
being conformed to the image of the crucified Christ, being glorified, just as
Jesus was glorified on the cross in such a way where it is only visible through
faith.
So it is not possible for us Christians to go back to the
old covenant. The new has come. The old has passed away. If we seek to
establish our righteousness by observing the Sabbath or the distinction between
clean and unclean food, then Jesus does us no good—for we are no longer
believing in him but in our keeping of the Law.
This is what Paul writes about at length in his letter to
the Galatians. Either we are justified through faith in Jesus or we are
justified by our own works and laws. The righteousness that we receive through
faith in Jesus is greater than any righteousness we can work up on our own. And
so we must not let people trouble us with any failure to keep the
Law—especially those temporary, ceremonial laws of the Sabbath and clean and
unclean foods that applied only to the Jews from the time of Sinai until the
death and resurrection of Christ. This was the beginning of the New Testament
that we now live in of Jesus’s blood that is shed for you for the forgiveness
of all your sins.
So this is how things are for us. The apostles have made
this clear to us, even though it took them some time to understand it too, as
we can easily see in the writings of the New Testament. It was hard for them to
understand how any of God’s commandments could no longer be applicable in
Christ. Those laws served their purpose for the people of God at that time. Now
God’s people know him in Christ the crucified and resurrected.
Since it was a hard lesson for the apostles to understand
how God’s commandments could pass away (indeed, it is still a hard lesson for
us too), Jesus was already teaching them and preparing them before the New
Testament was fully put into place. This is how we should understand what is
going on in our Gospel reading today. Jesus is teaching them the limits of what
the Law can do on the one hand, and on the other, what is possible with the new
life that was opening up in Jesus. This is very applicable to us too. We are
Jesus’s disciples. We need to learn what the Law can do, and, on the other
hand, what the Holy Spirit can do.
In our Gospel reading we hear how Jesus went to a dinner
party with a large number of people who were very concerned with keeping the
Law. They were from the group of Jews called Pharisees. This group of people
cared a great deal about what the Bible said. They wanted to keep whatever Laws
God might have made.
At the dinner party there was a man who was suffering from
edema. Edema is a medical condition where fluid is able to enter some tissue in
the body, but it has a hard time getting back out. Therefore the fluid
accumulates and that part of the body swells up until it is like a balloon. The
skin gets tight and stretches. It might get infected. It is an unsightly and
painful condition. When Jesus saw the man he felt sorry for him. He wanted to
heal him. But first he asked the people present whether it was lawful to heal
on the Sabbath or not.
Nobody said a word. How come? Here we see one of the effects
of a preoccupation with the Law. What these people cared about was being right.
They didn’t care about the man who was suffering. They wanted to have the right
answer. And yet, how could they totally ignore him either? That would leave
them open to the charge of being unloving. Therefore, out of love and concern
for themselves and the case that they wanted to keep intact for their own
righteousness, they thought it was best not to say anything.
Jesus has no such need to establish his own righteousness.
He already is righteous. He has no need to prove it to anybody. Therefore he is
free to turn all of his attention to the man who was suffering and attend to
him. It was an easy decision for Jesus. If only the Pharisees would allow
themselves to forget about their own justification for a minute, it would be
easy for them to understand as well. That is what he tries to bring out for
them by his examples.
Suppose your son or an ox falls into a well on a Sabbath
day, wouldn’t you immediately sweat and huff and puff, that is to say, work
your tail off, until you got him out? Or would you let your son sit there in
the cold wetness for a day? Or would you let the ox bellow away from a day,
scared out of its mind? The answer is obvious. The right thing to do is to love
and help.
This, in fact, is the real content and meaning of God’s Law.
Paul says that all of the commandments are summed up in this one word of love.
God himself says that the Law is to love God with your whole being and to love
your neighbor as yourself. But the problem is that we don’t use the Law
correctly. We are always trying to use it to justify ourselves. We are always
wanting to judge ourselves as being good, or good enough, or that we’ve done all
that can be expected of us.
Because we are evil, this always turns into a selfish
endeavor. We want to be able to check the Law off the list, and then do
whatever we want to do—to love and serve ourselves with the balance of our time
and energy. This is a great boon for our flesh. In this way we feel good about
ourselves, that we are righteous, while also not having to care about or love
anybody else one inch more than the Law that we’ve made up for ourselves
requires. Having done our chores we suppose that the rest is all ours that we
can do with as we please.
That there should be anything wrong with thinking and living
this way is very difficult for us to see, because this is the way of thinking
that comes naturally to us. We are all born as selfish as can be. Then we are
all taught some laws. We have to follow these laws, but we are always looking
forward to that time when we can just live for ourselves again, not worrying
about anything or anyone else. So long as we have lived according to our own
code of ethics we imagine ourselves to be wonderful people, but the truth is
that we are not only selfish, but proud as punch to boot. This is how all
people will necessarily be—our flesh is capable of nothing other. It is what
comes naturally to everyone. The only alternative is if a person be converted,
that is, brought to repentance and to faith in Christ.
Christianity has a lot to it that is not “natural” if
“natural” is understood to be the way that we all are after being born in sin.
Jesus says that we should love our enemies. That we should do good to them.
That is highly unnatural. In fact, it is impossible to do it in a genuine way
without the Holy Spirit accomplishing it in us.
Another thing that is unnatural is that we should be humble,
that we should take the lowest place, as Jesus talks about in the second half
of our reading. Everybody naturally looks out for himself or herself. Some do
it by aggressively going after the top spots. Others do it by pretending that
they are humble so that they look better to other people. Only the Holy Spirit
can bring about a humility that is not self serving.
The way that this humbling happens is by God opening our
eyes to the way that we really are. When we see how we are really supposed to
love, and how our bodies are supposed to be living sacrifices, poured out for
the good of others, then we will no longer think that we are justified, that we
are good. The way that we should be is to be filled with love from the top of
our heads to the soles of our feet. There should be no job too low or degrading
that we wouldn’t be thankful to do it. Our love should be such that we wouldn’t
live very long, because we would burn up like a spark, pouring ourselves out
for others.
Note how different this is from the fellow who uses the law
to prop up his own righteousness and wants to be judged as good. Instead of
looking to the needs of other, such a fellow is looking to himself, demanding
to be recognized for the good job that he has been doing.
Here you can see how severely limited the Law is for
bringing about righteousness. When it is used in the natural way—the way that
comes naturally to us—it is a way to excuse ourselves from loving others while
feeling good about ourselves for doing so. This is not God’s will. God’s will
is that we should love genuinely, sincerely, and selflessly. No laws or
commandments can do this because of the way that we inevitably misuse them with
our sinful flesh. God has to create something new, a new birth by the water and
the Holy Spirit. Paul says in Galatians that neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision can really do anything, but only faith in Christ working through
love. Again, in the next chapter he says, neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision is able to do anything, but only a new creation.
So for us to be righteous we are dependent upon God, and fortunately
this is the very thing that he does for us. We are crucified together with
Christ and raised together with him. When Jesus died, we died together with
him. When Jesus was raised, we too were raised, justified before God on account
of Christ’s sacrifice. Therefore we are free from having to establish a
righteousness of our own. We don’t have to be searching for some worthiness in
us. We are already righteous because Jesus has made us so.
So when we see someone who needs help, we can help him. When
someone asks us to go one mile, we can go two. When someone asks us for our
jacket, we can give him our coat as well. To be sure, flesh and blood is not
capable of this life. Neither is hammering on the law ever going to bring it
about. We will always be looking for a shortcut. Only a new and good heart,
created by the Holy Spirit, can do it. And he does do it. That which is
impossible with man is possible with God.
No comments:
Post a Comment