Grace, mercy, and peace will be with you all from God the
Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and
love. (2 Jn 1)
Who speaks to you today in the Gospel, saying,
“Can a blind man
lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?”
Of course the answer is yes. One who is blind can not see
for one man, let alone two. This leads us to an obvious question: who leads us?
The banter of politicians has always been “trust me more than that other guy”
and the polemic from the people is always, “my guy is better than yours” and “I
don’t trust your guy”.
The people are then played like a fiddle. They are fed the
fear of mistrust of everyone and yet they are tricked into trusting those
feeding them fear, as if they were somehow different from those others. A never
ending cycle of hypocrisy.
The children learned this lesson this past week at VBS, when
they encountered Jesus calling His Apostles. At first, hearing the Calling of
Sts. Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Matthew it seems as though at one word
from Jesus, they just up and leave. With no thought to house or home, they
disregard family, friend, and finance and just follow Jesus.
In one sense, there is truth to that, and we appreciate
their conviction to stand for something true. It is noble and strong to drop
everything for what you believe in, even the world will teach this. The
difference is the world never goes all in. It always says stand up for
yourself, but it will never allow you to give up everything for yourself.
In fact, the world shames and demonizes true believers,
calling them cultists and bigots.
However, when we return to the Call of Jesus, we see that
blind courage is only a small part of what is happening. The Apostles must find
the courage to leave everything, but we know better than to just follow anyone
who comes up to us and says, “follow me”. That raises the red flag of “stranger
danger”.
No, when the Apostles followed Jesus, they did so in a well
informed manner. For Jesus had been preaching and baptizing for a while
beforehand. On top of that, the prophet John the Baptist, had endorsed Jesus as
the Lamb of God. In other words, the Apostles were not blindly following a
stranger, but following tradition and doctrine.
“Follow me” implies that we know who “me” is. And from the
beginning, God has not stopped telling us Who He is. Everything He said and did
reveals these things to everyone, even to blind people! Jesus teaches us this
lesson in St. John 21.
I will call it the third week of Easter, when the Apostles
could no longer stand being blind, hiding in fear of their lives behind locked
doors, they escaped their self-imprisonment, and went fishing. In this account
there are several things that happen to the Apostles that should have triggered
a “how could we have been so blind” moment.
The first thing that happens is that they fish all night and
catch no fish. Sound familiar? It should. This happened when Jesus first went
around calling Sts. Peter and Andrew, heard in St. Luke 5. “Master, we
toiled all night and caught nothing,” St. Peter says, “but at your word
I will let down the nets” (v. 5). In John 21, Jesus asks if they caught
anything. They say “No” and He tells them to cast the nets again. Lo and behold,
fish fill the net.
Again, when speaking of there being no fish and then fish
appearing out of nowhere, what Jesus wants the Apostles and us to recall is
Creation. For in the beginning, there was God and nothing else. Then God said
let there be fish, and where there was no fish, now there were fish.
St. Peter then jumps out of the boat when he is told by St.
John that it is Jesus. Again, this has happened before when Peter jumped out of
the boat to walk on water with Jesus. Then, when the Apostles get to Jesus on
the shore, they find Him with loaves and fishes, similar to the loaves and fish
that fed the 5000 and 4000 and similar to the bread He broke with them at the
Last Supper.
Jesus goes through such lengths to pull out a confession
from them. A confession that says, “I have been catechized by God’s Word, I
believe God’s Word, and now the Word is made flesh and He is dwelling in front
of my face”. Jesus is proving to them, once again, that He is both God and Man
in order that they say, “I believe”. Jesus reminds them all that their faith in
Him is not blind, but solid, well-reasoned, intelligent, and taught.
This past Friday, we marked, or missed, the 491st
anniversary of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession, June 25th 1530. Is
this the blind leading the blind? The Reformers didn’t think so. They stated
thusly:
“…it is our intent to give witness
before God and all Christendom, among those who are alive today and those who
will come after us, that the explanation here set forth regarding all the
controversial articles of faith which we have addressed and explained—and no
other explanation—is our teaching, faith, and confession. In it we shall appear
before the judgment throne of Jesus Christ, by God’s grace, with fearless
hearts and thus give account of our faith, and we will neither secretly nor
publicly speak or write anything contrary to it. Instead, on the strength of
God’s grace we intend to abide by this confession” (FC SD, XII, 40).
This is our heritage and teaching. This is what we have been
handed down from the Apostles. Not just a creed pointing out which God it is
that we follow, but a confession that we determine “not to depart even a
finger’s breadth either from the subjects themselves, or from the phrases which
are found in them, but, the Spirit of the Lord aiding us, to persevere
constantly, with the greatest harmony, in this godly agreement, and we intend
to examine all controversies according to this true norm and declaration of the
pure doctrine” (BOC Preface:23).
And yet Jesus’s words about the blind still sting, because
it is this tradition that we first give up. How often does the inspired apostle
Paul dogmatically affirm, “I know,” and “I speak the truth” and I am
persuaded”! (2 Tim 1:12, Rom 9:1, Acts 26:26, etc.) Sounds like a bigot
to th world. For the sake of peace with the world, we willfully turn a blind
eye to the noble stance of believing in something.
Repent. Jesus says “Follow me” and your heart drops into
your stomach. You watch Him perform miracles, show great signs, and comfort
people and you become jealous. He shines so much brighter than you. He is so
much better at life than you. Those people with Him are so lucky, too. He says,
“Follow me” and He begins to defy government, family, and religious leaders. He
takes on their anger and says “follow me”. He receives beatings and capitol
punishment from them and says “follow me”.
He reveals your mercilessness, your judgment, and your
unwillingness to forgive, all the while being shown no mercy, being judged, and
being unforgiven Himself on the cross. Certainly Jesus deserves the “good
measure” that overflows, from St. Luke’s Gospel, but He only takes suffering
and death. The specks and logs of your sin are taken out of your eyes in order
to build the cross which kills God.
To all this we can say, “I repent! I believe” and lament the
sufferings of this present time, looking forward to the Last Day, when we will
be free from this bondage of decay. But Jesus is not content with us just
waiting. He is not in the business of remaining idle when His children cry out
to Him and it is not just His commands of “not judging” that we are to busy
ourselves with.
For among those is the command to not be blind. It is to not
be blind and follow Jesus. To not be blind means to let Jesus do His work for
you and not muck it up with you focusing on being a “good Christian”. To follow
Jesus means to see where He goes, not where you go.
And we already know where He has gone, because He has told
us, taught us. He has given us truth to stand on and stand up for. He has gone
from the nothingness of the beginning, to waters teeming with life. He has gone
from empty, clay jars of sinners to baptized communicants full of His life. He
has gone from walking on water to walking with His people. He has gone from feeding
5000 to feeding all who hear and believe the words “given and shed for you”.
We follow Jesus, not to show how great we are, but to watch
Him make us greater than we could ever imagine ourselves to be, that is
forgiven and reconciled to God for eternity. We keep our eyes on Christ and see
Him march down between our pews, sanctify all brought to the Font, forgive all
who eat and drink with Him, and take His place on the Altar as the Crucified
God, for you.
It is with this “Gospel Sight” that we move through the
Church Year again and again. It is with this “Gospel Sight” that we follow
Jesus. It is with this “Gospel Sight” that we see that there is only the God-man
Who turns a blind eye to our sin, for His own sake, and opens our eyes to His
work of salvation.
Following this “Blind God”, no matter how many sins
accumulate in our eyes, we will not fall into the pit of hell. This is because
God sees us, judges Himself in our place, and restores in us such a spirit of
faith and belief, that not even the gates of hell stand a chance.
So now, you get to be merciful, because you have been shown
mercy. You get to “judge not” because you have not been judged. You get to
forgive, because your Crucified, living God has given such power to men (Matt
9:8).
Dear Christians, your Blind, Resurrected God is not
ashamed of you and neither will He deny you in front of anyone, in Christ. The
judgement of your sins is laid on Christ and He opens your eyes to all the
glory that awaits you. To prove it to you, He brings His glory with Him to His Church
on earth in that the First-fruits of the Spirit, as Romans says in 8:23, are
presented to you on a silver platter in Word, water, bread and wine.
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