READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Isaiah 40:1-8
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
- St. Matthew 11:2-10
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Cor 1)
Jesus speaks to us today, through His Gospel and says,
“And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear
and see:”
What is going on in our Gospel reading for today? A game of telephone with disciples running hither and thither, getting their lines crossed? No. What you are witnessing in today’s Gospel reading is Historic Faith in action: how it is given and how it is passed down.
Jesus tells the Apostles that in following Him, He will make them “fishers of men”. That has so confounded pastors and laymen alike, through the centuries, that we simply take it as a metaphor. Ok, we know what fishing is, but fishing for people with hook and bobber is kind of a strange picture.
But sending out a message and capturing men’s hearts, that is easier to understand. That is what Jesus was doing, anyway, not using hook, line, and sinker. Jesus was preaching and teaching. Changing minds. Spreading ideas and justice. Peace and love. That is why so many followed Him.
That is why everyone still follows Him today…or not.
Because they don’t. Justice, peace, and love are ideas anyone can have. You don’t need to be Jesus to spread those thoughts and you don’t need to believe in Jesus to champion those ideas either. Jesus says, “Blessed is the man who is not offended by me” not “blessed is the man who is not offended by my ideas”.
Couple that with the fact that St. John does not make it out of prison alive, and you have a recipe for something bigger going on than what we first suppose.
And there has to be something bigger, because this world has gone mad with hubris. It is all the rage to dismantle history, tear down statues, and rewrite how we are to speak and live our lives.
Repent. You are no better. You also wish to rewrite others’ lives, yet because they’re your ideas you call them “good”. You declare yourself the island of all that is good and right and demand that others think and do as you think and do. You even dare to use God’s holy Word in your quest and throw the book at others, as God’s one, true representative on earth.
But this is not what “fishers of men” means. Coercion and tricks have no part to play. There is no hook, line, sinker or any other fishing metaphor that smacks of lies and deceit. There is only the Truth and that Truth comes to us through history, bodily.
See what is happening in our Gospel. Jesus is not simply making decrees and giving out some sort of fantasy-like knowledge and insight through dreams or golden plates. He is using Creation. He is using what He has already made because it is good enough. He is using the thoughts and words of men to do His Will on earth as it is in heaven.
Though these disciples, who are going back and forth between Jesus and St. John, look like simple go-fers, they are performing a divine task: that of handing over the tradition of God’s Word. This is the “line [that] has gone out to all the earth”, from Psalm 19:4.
The Psalm continues: “Their line has gone out through all the earth, And their words to the end of the world.” Romans 10 quotes this Word saying, “So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. But I say, have they not heard? Yes indeed: ‘Their line has gone out…’” (v. 17-18).
So Faith comes by hearing this “line”, this Word from God. This line, our Lord has attached to the man who is more than a prophet in today’s Gospel, who is the messenger before the Lord’s face and your face. As a loose string on a sweater, if you pull on this line, you find it is attached to something else.
Going down the line, you find Malachi pop up, among the other Minor Prophets. Pull some more and you get to Isaiah and the Major Prophets. Keep on going through these men, and you will eventually find your way to Adam and then to the Lord.
The funny part is, if you go back to St. John the Baptist and go past him, you also find the Lord. Keep going that direction and you go through all 12 Apostles and each pastor they ordained, and each pastor those ordained, ordained, and so on and so on. Up until you get to little ole me.
And that is the belief behind Ordination and Apostolic Succession. That in God’s man, we find an unbroken line in His Church that reaches through history, with its beginning and ending in the Lord. In order that He might speak to us and all generations.
The Book of Concord puts it this way:
1] If the bishops would be true bishops [would rightly discharge their office], and would devote themselves to the Church and the Gospel, it might be granted to them for the sake of love and unity, but not from necessity, to ordain and confirm us and our preachers; omitting, however, all comedies and spectacular display [deceptions, absurdities, and appearances] of unchristian [heathenish] parade and pomp. 2] But because they neither are, nor wish to be, true bishops, but worldly lords and princes, who will neither preach, nor teach, nor baptize, nor administer the Lord’s Supper, nor perform any work or office of the Church, and, moreover, persecute and condemn those who discharge these functions, having been called to do so, the Church ought not on their account to remain without ministers.
3] Therefore, as the ancient examples of the Church and the Fathers teach us, we ourselves will and ought to ordain suitable persons to this office; and, even according to their own laws, they have not the right to forbid or prevent us. For their laws say that those ordained even by heretics should be declared [truly] ordained and stay ordained [and that such ordination must not be changed], as St. Jerome writes of the Church at Alexandria, that at first it was governed in common by priests and preachers, without bishops. (Smalcald III:X:1-3)
Long story short: the Church Calls and Ordains pastors to speak God’s Word. In Acts 13 we hear, “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off” (v. 2-3)
And also Acts 6 where the Apostles specifically call for the ordaining of men other than themselves to work as they work. “And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty…These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them” (v. 2-3, 6).
And St. Paul teaches in Titus 1:5, “This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you.”
Jesus, our Example, is sent by His Father and He also ordains. In Luke 24, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And you are witnesses of these things. Behold, I send the Promise of My Father upon you” (v. 46-49).
He is sent by His Father and your Father to cleanse the world of sin. He opens the eyes of the blind to see their sin and see their Savior. He heals the lame that they might follow Him to where His Gospel is preached in its purity. He purifies the diseased of their death, opens the ears of the sin-filled, and raises the dead from the grasp of the devil.
John the Baptist and his disciples call on this “line”, this Gospel of the God Who is made man, Who speaks to His creation face to face, and Who serves them with the powerful words of salvation, allowing them to speak it and do His will of redeeming sinful man.
This is the laying on of hands, we heard of in Acts 13. In the case of today’s Gospel, John the Baptist laid on hands, ordained his disciples to speak his message, which is God’s message of repentance and the coming Messiah.
He then sends his disciples to Jesus, not to simply confirm His Messiah status, but to receive from Jesus true Ordination, true authority to preach the Gospel and Administer His sacraments. John sends them to Jesus, and Jesus then authorizes them to go back to John and preach the pure Gospel.
The Gospel that the Messiah has come and He has come with great power and might. Not to kill, but to make alive. To preach that the war is over and iniquity has been pardoned. That the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world has been sacrificed and peace with God once more is made.
Such that, His Word, that Almighty power that creates all things and sustains all things, might be placed into the hearts and mouths of men in order that they be made more like Him and that they gather more for Him, just as He gathers all men to Himself, having been lifted up upon the cross.
So it is that God Himself calls men to the ministry and qualifies them with His gifts (Acts 20:28; Ephesians 4:11). The Church recognizes God’s clear leading by His Word and embraces it. With prayer and fasting, the Church lays hands on these men, through Her pastors, to prove their commission (cf. Acts 6:6; 1 Timothy 5:22).
Ultimately showing that God works through His Church, gives such wonderful gifts to men, and through both the Church and the Spirit, utilizes that “fishing line” to capture men alive in order to receive the Kingdom.
For there is not just a “now” to our faith. There is a now, there is a then, and there is a will be. There is a long line, a great cloud of witnesses, that now we see increased with each Baptism, with each “yes, yes it shall be so”, and with each “amen”.
This is because the mystery of faith is that the Word, the Line, has been made flesh and must be handed over to the gentiles, suffer, die, and rise again. And this Line must then be handed down to all generations through pastors, by His Word and Sacrament.
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