Historic Jesus [Easter 5; St. John 16:5-15]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.

Who speaks to us today, saying,

“All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

What this verse basically states is what St. John records Jesus saying in 14:26, that the Holy Spirit teaches us by reaching into the past and causing remembrance. In this way, the Holy Spirit’s realm is the past for this is where all Jesus said and did dwells.

In our recent conversations about Church art and aesthetics, we see this important factor come into play. Our art is not new or innovative, but a retelling of the past. In this way, Church art and decoration is a work of the Holy Spirit, guiding us to the events of the past where Jesus suffered and died for us.

But Church history does not end with what happened for us in the past, but what happened to us through the past. Thus, it is of vital importance to the Church of Christ and to the Christians that dwell in it and live through it, to remember the past, for even the promises for our future with Christ were made in the past.

You can begin to see why history becomes so important in the Church throughout the ages. Why monks painstakingly record history and attendance and why the arguments for the true Gospel, in the Reformation, did not come from new ideas, but from appealing to those from the past; those who had gone before.

Author G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

This past week, you have been witness to history. The USA is, even now, stepping onto grounds it has never trespassed before and written furiously against so that it never would. But that all ended when New Orleans city council decided it was time to erase history and remove Civil War monuments in the name of tolerance.

We will now be numbered with the totalitarian governments of the past who eradicated any and all opposition for the sake of their vision of the future. We will be numbered with the masses that violently silenced all opposing views because they didn’t fit the narrative.

But it isn’t really about monuments. It’s really about the devil severing any and all ties with God. So he cuts off the past because that’s where God is, in the past. God is in history. Erase history and you erase God. Whoever controls the past, controls the future. If God was there, then the past was about salvation. If He wasn’t, then its dog eat dog.

This is played out over and over again in history. A Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany wrote this
poem:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—

and there was no one left to speak for me.

Jesus is the One who remembers all His people. Jesus is the one who speaks up for all His people. Jesus is then the one, for His troubles, who is forgotten, whom His enemies come for, and no one speaks up about.

This is the perfection of the holy Trinity. The Father speaks up for the Son, the Son speaks the Father’s words, and the Spirit speaks up for the Father and the Son. The unity displayed between the three Persons of the Trinity is a perfect union with no need for anyone else to remember or speak for them.

But now that God has stepped into human history spiritually and bodily, everything changes. Now the perfect unity is made more perfect at the inclusion of you. Now, the Christian does not wait to be spoken up for, because Christ has already spoken up for and marked them as one redeemed.

All that the Father has is mine, Jesus says, and now you are a part of that. You are not to regard yourself as separate, or alone, or forgotten. You have also been brought to the Father and are joined eternally to Jesus, through faith and hope.

And what we are to hope for, the Lord, Who fulfilled this, has shown us in His own flesh; in His own history in which He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, as it is written, “He was handed over for our sins and raised for our justification.” (Rom. 4:25)

The world is now convicted of sin in those who do not believe in Christ and His history; and of justice in those us who will rise again in Christ, for He said, “That we might be made the justice of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). For if justness is not in Him, then it is in no one.

But if it is in Him, He ascends, complete with us (Head and Body) to the Father; and this perfect justness will be completed in us. We have risen with Christ. He takes us to the heights. Being risen with Him then, our final resting place is in heaven.

Jesus praises tradition and history, not just through the work of the Holy ghost, but He also says, “This do in remembrance of me.” Here we see the purpose of all of history come full circle and present itself to the present.

In Christ’s Church, all times collide. We remember the past and it is brought into our hearing. We live in the present and yet are promised a future. We hope in the future and find comfort and peace in the past and the present.

This space-time collision of all of time then is given to you to take, eat, hear, and see. All of Salvation History (a.k.a. the Bible) is compressed into tiny, little St. Luke and you are no longer a rebel or a nobody in sin. You are a somebody in Christ, because now God’s history is your history.

Jesus creates history for you and gives you history not in order for you to go searching for God in it, but so that you find God searching for and finding you.