READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Isaiah 12:1-6
James 1:16-21
- St. John 16:5-15
May grace and peace be multiplied to you. (1 Pet 1)
Who speaks to you today, saying:
“when the Helper
comes, He will convict the world…concerning righteousness, because I go to the
Father, and you will see me no longer;”
The Lord includes His righteousness in His Word because it
is directly a part of Him. Jesus is His righteousness incarnate. What this
leads us to is to search for righteousness outside of ourselves, even though
there are many examples of righteousness in life. We should take this Word from
the Lord and pursue righteousness, first by receiving it gladly from Jesus
alone, then practicing it in our own lives to benefit our neighbor.
When the Lord speaks of righteousness, He is speaking of
justification. Usually, theologians will spend all their time on “courtroom
language”. As in righteousness, or justification, is a word you’d hear in a
courtroom to indicate acquittal, or a declaration of innocence. And that is all
well and good. Jesus is our mighty Judge, after all.
But is that all there is to this life of faith? We live and
then die, only to go in front of the Judge to be judged? It is a nice thing, to
be declared not-guilty in front of God, but the problem is that that would only
be according to the Law. That is, you can be justified by the Law, but that
doesn’t mean that you accurately reflect that proclamation as a person.
This is what the last two Commandments aim at: having only
an outward appearance of righteousness, but inwardly are entirely sinful.
Think of it this way: since tax season has recently left us,
imagine a world where no one likes taxes, or the IRS, or the jail time
associated with choosing not to pay this voluntary taxation. Everyone complains
about it and you would be hard pressed to find someone saying, “I love not
being able to keep my own money!”
Now, one day, a man decides to follow through on everyone’s
sentiment. That is, he decides that he’s not going to pay anymore, probably
because it steals care from his family. Of course, the authorities come
knocking and he is taken away to be punished.
Who stands up for him? Who complains about taxes when the
authorities come? No one. Well, its the law, they say. Don’t break the law if
you don’t want to go to jail.
That is righteousness according to the Law. Where the
outward matters more than the inward and even more than mercy and honor.
Repent. Everyone wants to be right. In other words, the
whole world is pursuing righteousness. It is the goal of every keyboard
warrior, armchair warrior, and weekend warrior. To be the only righteous one in
the room is sought after by every social media influencer, virtue-signaler, and
online bot. It is also an easy topic to broach with neighbors to lead others to
Jesus.
The allure of righteousness is in the name: being right. The
sports fanatic wants to be right. The political devotee wants to be right. Even
the theologian wants to be right. But they only want the appearance of being
right in order that they become popular or to “lord it over” others. Our sin
makes a hypocrisy of righteousness.
The Law always accuses. As Romans says, “They show that
what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also
bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them”
(2:15). Meaning, our sinful nature always takes the law and either breaks
it outright or schemes to make things appear right in other’s eyes.
“Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to
everyone who believes” (Rom 10:4). For the reason of our hypocrisy, Jesus
took away righteousness so that we could not destroy it. As our Gospel reading
has declared, Jesus has placed righteousness with the Father. More precisely,
true Righteousness is in Jesus’s going to the Father.
Pfft! Whoever heard of such nonsense? That a man can be made
righteous and pious just because Christ has ascended to heaven or goes to the
Father and we see Him no more? There we must say that a fool has spoken, and no
wise, Son of Man. Righteousness is a virtue, to be practiced, in order to teach
man what he owes others.
We know no better.
Therefore, true righteousness must come from outside of
ourselves. It must be given to us, taught to us. But before that, it must be
brought to us by faith alone.
Jesus, in going to the Father and us no longer seeing Him,
secures our righteousness in a place that we can not screw it up: Himself. In
other words, God declares sinners righteous for Christ’s sake alone. Our sins
have been charged to Christ and His righteousness has been credited to us.
Righteousness is in the Blood. “The Blood of Jesus, His
Son”, says 1 John 1:7, “purifies us from all sin.”
In the shed Blood of Jesus, our unrighteousness is paid for.
This rescue, this redemption is called Atonement. There is a wrong to be
repaired, a debt to be paid for you and it is only True God and True man in one
Christ that can accomplish such a thing. In sin, you are always wrong. In
Christ, you are right.
How is it possible for an eternally and always-right God to
declare sinners righteous?
From 2 Corinthians, “God made Him Who had no sin to be
sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21)
And Romans, “He was delivered over to death for our sins
and was raised for our justification” (4:25).
Righteousness is more than just being right. Its even more
than just being right about God. Righteousness focuses on the acquitted
penalty by receiving Christ. Meaning, you, as a person are moved from
eternally "condemned" to "divinely pardoned" at
conversion.
Conversion is true righteousness. When you first believed,
you were converted, that is when the Holy Ghost first Called you by the Gospel
of Jesus Christ, enlightened you with His gifts, and sanctified and kept you in
the faith.
In other words, you cannot convert yourself. You cannot find
the righteousness that leads to Faith on earth or within yourself, if only
because your sinful nature always works against it, turning you to the right
and left each time you get close. This leads to your second, continuous,
conversion that is when you daily sin much and daily need much forgiveness.
Jesus keeps your righteousness for you, not that its your
own, but it is yours by faith in Christ. Faith alone. This is an important
point, because the other “half” of Righteousness is presented today in an
equally odd way. That is, that righteousness comes when you can see Jesus no
longer.
That is, now, after Christ’s ascension to the right hand of
the Father, we must seek righteousness. So do it. Do it by practicing true
Righteousness, that is communing with the hidden God in His Supper. The true
art of righteousness is practiced by first communing with Righteousness, for He
desires it to be this way.
Our being right is secured and found only in Jesus. If you
want to be right in life, you must find your life in Christ, that is in Faith
and in Communion. With those two things secure, then you can face the world in
the joy of the Gospel. The wrongs are Jesus’s to right. The evils are Jesus’s
to avenge. The Faith is Jesus’s to hand out in Word and Sacrament.
Alleluia!
Amen.
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