Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father
and from Jesus Christ the Father's Son, in truth and love. (2 John)
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His
Church, saying:
“And the next day
he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of
him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’”
When we are made to hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan,
our teachers usually follow Jesus's apparent leading and talk about mercy.
There is good morality to be learned there. But is the mercy you have or show
the same mercy Jesus is talking about? So we will learn today how to read the
Bible to find this mercy.
We are alive. So, we expect our God to be alive as well. But
not alive, “just as we are”. Alive in a much more alive way. As in the most
alive you can be. Our Samaritan needs such a God, because if His God is not
Alive, then, half dead is going to turn into all dead.
Most especially when we find ourselves half-dead or moving
towards all dead. At that point we wonder what it all was for or even if there
is life after death, if only because we can’t see past that shadowy curtain we
call death. For the Christian, then, three days becomes extremely important.
Why are three days important? Its not from us. Its Jesus. He
says in St. Mark 8, “And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must
suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the
scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again” (v.31).
Jesus sets us off on this “three days” path, primarily to
get us to His resurrection, secondarily so that when we read His Word and
encounter “3 days” in it, we are reminded of His resurrection, and tertiarily
so that we look for our own “three days” when we fall victim to the robbers of
this world: sin, death and the devil.
First, Jesus’s resurrection is not a New Testament idea
only. It was the plan from the beginning. Resurrection is literally and
prophetically in the Old Testament. Literally, Elijah raises the widow’s son at
Zarephath from the dead (1 Ki 17:17ff). Prophetically, Jonah sat in the depths,
which always means death, for three days and brought out again.
Second, there was always going to be a resurrection of the
dead, but how was it going to be accomplished? It was going to be by and
through God’s Holy One, His chosen. Psalm 16:10, “For you will not abandon
my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.”
And our favorite from Isaiah 53:10, “when his soul makes
an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand”, teaching that after death,
His days will be prolonged. How?
There was always to be a resurrection and Jesus was going be
the first.
For this reason, there are three days involved in the story
of the Good Samaritan. The first day is the incident. The second day is the
payment made to the Innkeeper. The Third Day is the “when I come back” day.
Jesus admits that the two denarii paid is still insufficient to complete this
healthcare. There must be a Third Day where complete payment can be made and
perfect healing given.
This means that something more than just earthly healthcare
and money is needed to show mercy to this unfortunate man from our Gospel
reading. As in, understanding this parable means not stopping at you showing
mercy to your neighbor in need, as if that’s all there is here to hear.
Repent. All of creation screams death and resurrection to
you, but you still doubt. Day turns into night, only to turn into day again.
Plants continually “die” and are “reborn”, and yet you still can’t quite come
to terms with a bodily resurrection from the dead. Spiritual? Sure. Bodies?
Won’t the worms have eaten them?
We trust in each and every thing, before we trust Jesus. He
is our back up plan. When we make poor decisions and put our life in danger,
then we seek Jesus. When we don’t think we’ll make it out of medical
situations, then we seek Jesus. When we want to show off our mercy, then we
seek Jesus to pat us on the back.
Psalm 3 says, “Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God! For you
strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked.” We
hear this “arise” cry all the time in the Bible and we think it just means,
“get up and do something”.
It does. But God’s “get up and do something” is “get up from
the dead and do something”. It is working out His perfect mercy in and through
His death and resurrection. When the men who wrote down God’s thoughts and
words in Psalm 3, they were writing of Christ.
In desiring mercy not sacrifice, Jesus teaches that in His
sacrifice He will be the one to perform true mercy. He will show mercy to His
enemies who hate Him and to those who oppose Him, by suffering for all sins of
all people. His care will be medicine, doctors, nurses, and money to pay for
it.
But that is just the first and second days. The third day
will be resurrection day. It will be the cap on all suffering and inability to
show mercy. For Jesus’s mercy on the cross extends beyond the earthly and moves
into eternity.
The mercy needed to completely heal is the Mercy that lasts
forever and in Christ, that is what is purchased and won on the cross. The
third day is the day when there is no more need for medicine or care
facilities. The third day is when the cause of all that is defeated.
Sin. Death. The power of the devil. All of this moves
towards one end: the end of faith in God. To that end, suffering and death are
used against God’s people. Since that is the case, God chooses to use that
against them. Suffering on the cross purchases infinite mercy and the death of
Jesus Christ opens the door to eternal life.
Jesus rises from the dead to secure mercy for the time when
bandages, oil and wine, and money will not do the job. Jesus will raise all the
dead in a show of His victory over death and hell. He will then take me and all
believers in Christ to live under Him in His kingdom forever.
Jesus raises Himself and in turn gives that resurrection to
you. He baptizes you into His resurrection so that you get the right one and so
that you are with Him and no one else.
And proof of that is His own resurrected body: flesh and
bone. Not something new, something old regenerated. A body powered by spirit
instead of cursed biology. A body tempered for eternity with God. A body
purchased and won by Mercy.
Jesus is so alive that death no longer has a hold on Him. He
walks by you on His journeys. He comes to you, seeing you dead in your sin,
waylaid. The Resurrected Christ carries you into His Church and hands you over
to the pastor. The Word and Sacrament is paid for in Body and Blood and you are
cared for.
You are shown mercy in Christ and His third day is brought
to you today. Yes, you wait for His return as He promised you, but your waiting
is done in the beginning of that promise. For you taste and see that His
salvation is good today and in those signs, have faith and hope in the Third
Day to come.
St. Irenaeus of the 2nd century teaches us,
“Elijah, too, was caught up [when he was yet] in the
substance of the [natural] form; thus exhibiting in prophecy the assumption of
those who are spiritual, and that nothing stood in the way of their body being
translated and caught up. For by means of the very same hands through which
they were moulded at the beginning, did they receive this translation and
assumption.” (Irenaeus V:V:1)
No comments:
Post a Comment