READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
1 Samuel 16:1-13
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
- St. Luke 18:31-43
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ. (Phil 1)
Who speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard, saying:
“And Jesus said to
him, ‘Recover your sight; your faith has saved you.’”
I see said the blind man to his deaf wife as he picked up
his hammer and saw.
What we do not “saw” is our sin. Even less, we do not see a
way to fight against sin, when we do see it. What we think is our sin is what
everyone else sees in the public. Our public persona becomes how we gauge where
our sin-o-meter is at and that is not why Jesus died on the cross.
Now, while it is extremely important to be at peace with all
people if possible, it is also extremely important to confess your sins (Rom
12:8). For if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not
in us (1 John 1:8). And since Jesus’s main message is “Repent, the kingdom of
heaven is at hand”, maybe we should take that a bit seriously.
And it starts with understanding our outward appearance. As
we said, loving our neighbors, who are in public, is eternally important, but
maintaining that is no great cross. It is not hard to fool people into thinking
you are a nice person. We can put on our suit, we can put on our hat, we can
put on our mask and be ready for God’s Will.
Except for when the mask slips. One of the times it slips is
when we are sick. Even then we are given the benefit of the doubt to those
around us. “Oh he’s dealing with a lot” or “he’s just exhausted from being
sick”, they’ll say and we’re absolved from whatever we did. But we are not sick
all the time.
Another time it slips is when we are angry. They say you see
who a person truly is when they are under pressure. Then there is no time to
hold the mask on. You must act, you must speak, and you must do it yesterday.
The public understands this and so, just a little bit, you can control
deadlines, meetings, and decorum.
However, the closer our sins come to our obsessions and
compulsions, the more difficult it is to say no. There we get into
relationships where resistance compounds desire. I say, "I'm not going to
sin." Then I start thinking about sinning. Then I'm thinking about
thinking about sinning.
And pretty soon I'm on my way to the cupboard and once I've
gotten past that point, it's easy for me to go past that point again, and
again, and again, and again. We get into our own compulsions and the law is
useless. I can say to myself over and over again, you shall not, you shall not,
you shall not. But it just makes me thirsty.
And so the commandment is not going to be sufficient. What
good are the commandments doing for this blind man in today’s gospel? The
commandment will teach you to cheat. It'll teach you hypocrisy. It'll teach you
deceit. It'll teach you to get what you want all the while fooling everyone and
fooling God.
And so one of the ways we fight back against sin, sin,
death, and the devil, is by learning habits that are helpful. Looking at the
4th through 10th commands, the Second Table of the Law, we can find there study
habits, habits of hygiene, habits in relationships, habits that serve us. And
that's all helpful because when issues like that come up, you're not sitting
thinking, well, I guess I have to make a choice all over again.
I mean, do I really want to brush my teeth? Can I brush my
teeth with godly integrity? Or am I being a hypocrite again? And should I leave
my teeth unbrushed today so that I can at least be honest and let everyone know
I’m a sinner? None of that malarkey. Brush your teeth. That's enough to fix my
problems. There you go.
However, the First Table of the Law is where we encounter
our bondage. Commands 1 through 3 do not provide habits or behavior solutions
which we can easily practice. When God says there’s only one of Him, we have to
wait on Him to fill in the rest of the blank and answer questions like, well
who are You then?
When He says to not take His Name in Vain, He has to answer
what that Name is and how it compares to other names. When He says Remember the
Sabbath, well what is the Sabbath, how is it remembered, and what’s the big
deal, anyway?
The temptation is enthusiasm. The temptation is to treat the
law as though it's been conquered so that I can do that which I please. This is
because the Law is placed in flesh and blood. God chooses to use our neighbor
to embody His Law so that we can see right away our failures.
“If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother,”
declares St. John, “he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom
he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). Now we are
moved from public to private, for when we face our wife or husband, there we
find the cross. In those family faces we find our God staring at us, killing
us, as we fail to stand up to even one of His commands.
Repent, O fearless man, full of righteousness. How will you
fight against that? How will you fight against the sins and temptations dealing
with spouse, children, and kindred? You can blame God, as Adam did, for giving
you such a family or you could blame others, as Eve did, for making you do such
things.
In both cases, Jesus is passing by and you have three
choices, per our Gospel reading. You can be like the Twelve and have no
understanding to what is said, fall into despair, and curse God. You can be
like “those in front” who judge their neighbor as “less”, curse him, curse God,
and despair.
The third choice is no better, according to the sinner.
There we must be vulnerable and admit our weakness in front of everyone. This
blind man shouts and begs all day, which is embarrassing, so to have him shout
and beg now, we see no difference. He just wants a handout. He just wants
attention. He could care less about the words Jesus is speaking.
The third choice is to deny ourselves and admit that we
cannot choose it. We do not have the strength, the reason, or the fortitude to
refuse sin and temptation. No more can this blind man make himself see, than we
can rid ourselves of our sins. And for our struggles, the Lord gives us the
cross.
Jesus doesn’t just heal this man in order that he can go
home and start writing his memoirs of “How Jesus healed me”. Jesus brought this
man back from the dead to follow Him. He lifted him out of his sins, forgiving
him, and let his will be done in giving him what he asked for, seeing eyes. And
then the Holy Spirit continues to work, in calling the man to follow Jesus.
How does one follow Jesus? To best understand, let’s go to
when Lazarus died, in St. John 11. The news came to Jesus that Lazarus was on
the verge of dying, yet He did not go to him. The news finally came to Jesus
that Lazarus had died and Jesus says, Now, let us go to him.
St. Thomas gives us our answer, “Let us follow him that
we may die with Him” (Jn 11:16).
4 days later, Jesus finally arrives and raises Lazarus from
the grave. To follow Jesus is to dog His steps to see what He will do, not to
show off our Bible skills. To follow Jesus is to follow to the cross, where we
die. To follow Jesus is to be given the Holy Spirit that we might hear His call
from our own grave of sin and death, and be raised with Him.
Jesus is not here as our coach or our Santa Claus. He does
not write His own book that we may find there “self help”. He does not go about
raising the dead and performing miracles just for us to implement socialism and
call it God’s Will.
Jesus goes to the cross. It is His habit, though He only
needed to do it once. The purpose of preaching morality and a new life before
God is to be delivered over to the Gentiles, mocked, shamefully treated, and
spit upon. The purpose of giving the blind man his sight is that He would be
flogged and killed.
On Jesus hangs all the Law and the prophets and Jesus hangs
on a cross. Not that He is still there, but that it is there that He
accomplished all the work He set out to do from Genesis 1. On the cross we see
the Law fulfilled, completed, finished. It is in the Lord’s innocent suffering
and death, that we find our redemption. It is in His holy, precious Blood that
we find our new life.
Everything we have dies at the foot of the cross, because
nothing we have lives through such an act. For who is as righteous as Jesus,
Who lives a perfect life to God? And who is as sinful as Jesus, Who bears the
sin of the world on the cross, though not His own?
In faith, we pick up that cross, because we have been called
out by the Gospel. “Jesus alone” leaves no room for “change of life” to have
any say in the matter. However, “Jesus alone” does give us new habitats and new
habits.
The new habitat the baptized, forgiven sinner sees himself
in is the Church. The Church of what Jesus is doing now. The blind man was
brought back to the world of sight to see the Crucifixion and the Resurrection
and then the Apostolic work after that. The blind man was not set free to go do
what he wanted. He was set free to live his life of faith.
Faith that wants to hear the story over and over again. His
own story, sure, because now he was in the Way of Jesus. Jesus did heal him, in
order that he go and worship Him. Just as Israel was freed from Egypt to make a
“three-day journey into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to the Lord our
God” (Ex 3:18), so too are we freed from our sin to worship.
To follow Jesus to His betrayal, crucifixion, and
resurrection. To follow Him as He sets His Apostles over us to teach, to pray,
and to break bread. To follow today as He continues that work baptizing,
communing, and forgiving.
To follow God is to go where He is working and He is working
in Word and Sacrament.
Thus, we have been gifted a new habit, in this habitation of
our Lord’s work for us. The habit of Church. That is the yearly readings of the
Word to attend and hold sacred. The preaching to gladly hear and learn. The
work of God, given and shed for you, habitually offered at this Altar to
receive.
All this activity gives little room for sin, because the
Lord is working and you must be still and be silent to receive it. Though daily
we continue to be assaulted by our temptations and sins, we can now replace it
with God’s own Work, for us.
So we give up. We give up trying to fight. We give up trying
to resist. We give up and give to Jesus. “We demolish arguments and every
pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take
captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”, says St. Paul in 2
Corinthians 10:5. Before we take action, we give it to Jesus to see what He
will do with it. And He will always kill it at His cross.
And to be raised again with Jesus, we don’t look to
ourselves for proof, but see if we have confessed our sins. He continues in 2
Corinthians saying, “You are judging by appearances. If anyone is confident
that they belong to Christ, they should consider again that we belong to Christ
just as much as they do” (10:7).
That is, can your neighbor belong to Christ just as much as
you do? Can your wife, husband, son, daughter, father, mother, brothers,
sisters be loved by Jesus just as much as you can? Can your enemies?
Those who set at naught and sold Him, pierced and nailed Him
to the tree, deeply wailing shall their true Messiah see (LSB 336). Jesus sits
us at the cross and doesn’t let us leave. Not that He is still on it, but that
we still need that sacrifice every second of every day or we will go astray. We
need the habitus of His Church, His Bride, that we might hold the forgiveness
of sins sacred, not as a license to sin, but as a condemnation and a
resurrection in His Body and Blood.
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