READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Isaiah 55:10-13
2 Corinthians 11:19-12:9
- St. Luke 8:4-15
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 … a great
crowd was gathering and people from town after town came to him”
The crowds, the crowds. Whether its Palm Sunday or any other
time Jesus is walking about, there is always a crowd coming after Him. They
like His bread. They like His miracles. They like His words. Whatever it is, a
great crowd gathers around Jesus. Even today, there are no end to people
claiming to follow Jesus. Can they all be telling the truth?
Why do people follow Jesus and can we hope to do the same,
but better because we want to be believers and followers??
St. Luke begins chapter 8 with many people being close to
Jesus. He lists the 12, some female disciples, and many others who provided for
the cause. Next is the parable for today where St. Luke tells of a great crowd.
All have come to see and hear Jesus, hoping for a miracle of their own, and
there are many of them.
As the chapter continues, Jesus begins to make divisions. It
starts with the 4 types of ground, described, and moves on to His family, where
He declares His real family are those who hear and believe, not necessarily
flesh and blood. What we thought, on the Last Sunday of the Church Year, was
just a 50-50 division between sheep and goats, has become a 75-25 division,
with only one out of the 4 soils making the cut.
He embarks on a boat with only the 12, after this, and calms
the storm. It is here Jesus calls the disciples’ faith into question. “Where is
it?” He asks. Where is your faith? Suggesting that the size of the in-crowd is
now less than 12.
He then goes on to exorcise a legion of demons from only one
man, heal only one woman with a flow of blood, and raise only one daughter that
had died. Now, in order to be with Jesus we must have one of these experiences.
If we don’t, then how can we be sure of authentic faith being in us?
The real deal-ender here, is that no one has these
experiences anymore because Jesus is not among us any more, as He was then. And
because we know and believe that, we have replaced Jesus’s work with “good
enoughs”.
Its good enough that I have A/C in the summer and heat in
the winter, those are types of miracles right? Its good enough that we can have
or are having children. Its the miracle of birth, right? The sun rises, the
seeds grow, and there is kindness in the world. Good enough. Those can be
miracles.
Because, as we well know, even a miracle needs a hand. We'll
help our Maker to make our dreams come true. You hope and I'll hurry, you pray
and I'll plan. We'll do what's necessary. You love and I'll labor, you sit and
I'll stand, get help from our next-door neighbor, 'cause even a miracle needs a
hand.
This is all of us working together. This is the world,
coming together, to do good. And this is the promise Jesus made, right? To
gather us, to unite us to Himself, but since you can’t literally be united to
someone, what He meant was doing the same things as Him and calling “good
enough”.
So we are gathered to Jesus, but with whom are we gathered?
His spiritual allies who work with Jesus in spirit only? His political allies
who seek to gain a heavenly kingdom on earth? His cultural allies who live by
murder and deceit in God’s Name? His religious allies who only give lip
service, but don’t actually believe His mumbo-jumbo?
“What are we to do?”, say the chief priests and the
Pharisees gathered together in council, John 11. “What are we to do? For
this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will
believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our
nation.” (John 11:47-48)
What happens to our loyalty when Jesus doesn’t lend us a
hand anymore, when He appears to go against our dreams and efforts, and when He
takes the “other side”?
Being the descendants of Abraham, the chief priests and
Pharisees knew best and felt this alleged betrayal from God. No glory cloud in
Temple worship, after the return from Babylon. No pure line of David on the
throne, at the time of Jesus. No rewards for being faithful to the Law. Now God
has come down in the flesh and we are spoken against and offended.
“What are we to do?”
We will follow Jesus. “So from that day on they plotted
to take His life”, John 11:53 continues. And not just Jesus, but everything
He touched. They plotted to kill Lazarus, whom He raised from the dead. They
plotted to pay Judas, who follows Him, to betray Him. They plotted to send the
world after Jesus, in order that the world find Him the betrayer and crucify
Him.
“For”, St. John records in chapter 12, “they loved
the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God” (John
12:43). What is the glory that comes from man and what is the glory that
comes from God?
The glory that comes from God? Isn’t that Abraham glory?
Success, large family, and many people serving him? Isn’t it Noah glory, being
given the whole world all to himself? Isn’t it Solomon glory, victory over
neighbor, conquest, and riches? That’s all biblical so it must be God’s glory,
if only we follow after it.
We don’t know what the glory of the Lord is! No one does. If
the “good enoughs” are good enough, then glory is not so much heavenly as it is
humanly: riches, wealth, fame. If the “good enoughs” are good enough, then the
Way of the Lord is not so divine, as it is human. Even the Muslims back
political morality, agreeing with the “right” on many issues.
The Glory of God is in the Sower’s hands and that’s what we
miss. The “good enough” from the parable is that Jesus has revealed some deep
truth about hearing the Word, some prescription that if we just follow that, we
will be following the Lord and be able to gain His glory, the right way.
But Jesus is not content with “good enough”. Jesus is
gathering, but when He gathers, not every one likes it. For example, John 6 is
where Jesus tells all His followers that to truly be a part of Him and share
His glory, you must eat and drink His flesh and blood. “After this many of
His disciples turned back and no longer walked with him” (Jn 6:66).
When Jesus proclaims that He is the fulfillment of God’s
Word, specifically in Isaiah’s words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to
proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set
at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor”
(Lk 4:18-19), they intend to kill Him and drive Him off a cliff.
From this we see, that the offense and the glory are the
same and it is the cross. There is no food for the ravens or the devil, if it
isn’t handed out by the Sower. There is no root to shrivel if the rocks are not
given the seed. There is no sprout to throttle, if the thorns do not receive
it. There is no hundred-fold fruit, unless the seed is buried and dies.
And if the glory of God is the Cross of Christ, then there
is no room for earthly glory, even though we perceive it as heavenly glory. And
we are not to look for it either or trust in anything else but God’s own Word.
So when we gather in Jesus’s Name, we do not get to self-declare that simply
because we gather, that we are Church.
In fact, we do not even gather on our own. Just as how we
don’t know the Glory of the Lord until He reveals it to us, neither do we know
the Church to gather at, until He reveals it to us. And He promises to reveal
it to us. He does not leave us grasping at the air to come up with “church” on
our own.
He reveals it first in His 3rd Command: Remember the Sabbath
Day by keeping it holy. We remember not as a date on a calendar, but by giving
our attention and heart to preaching and the Word. That means something is done
to us. Something and someone outside of ourselves, is acting on us, using a
voice to form words that register in our eardrums and head straight to the
heart.
The Holy Spirit promises to work faith through the Word
only, thus we find Jesus in His Word. We find Him, hold Him sacred, and gladly
hear and learn Him. It is not on a whim that Jesus divides. His division is at
His Word. Of such is the Word of God, that it waters the earth, gives seed to
the sower, and bread to the eater, says our Old Testament reading.
How? By scattering it purposefully. By handing it out,
mercifully. By preaching it, with His own voice. The seed is the Word of God
and the Word of God is flesh and blood, Jesus Christ. “By this you know the
Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the
flesh is from God” (1 Jn 4:2).
We cannot escape the great crowd that follows Jesus. We
cannot escape the fact that we are just another face in the crowd, so to speak.
We are no different than any other in this crowd, either the devoted or the
sincere, because the crowd that follows Jesus is a crowd of sin, death, and the
power of the devil. Even the devil himself, is there.
And yet, we are different. Though we retain our sin, we have
been sown by the Sower Himself. Sown heedfully. As in, not just tossed and
scattered, hoping for a harvest, but planted, watered, and given increase on
purpose.
And Holy Scripture plainly saith, “I planted”, says
St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:6-9, “Apollos watered, but God gave the
increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he
who waters, but God who gives the increase. Now he who plants and he who waters
are one, and each one will receive his own reward according to his own labor.
For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, you are God’s building.”
God’s own Temple, He goes on to reveal in that epistle.
Baptized into the Temple, the Body of Christ, you are not like the crowd. At
one point you were, rebelling and not caring for the Word, but now you are
washed, you are sanctified, you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and
by the Spirit of our God. (1 Cor 6:11)
So we stay in the crowd, awaiting His return. We move
through the crowd in the Spirit of Jesus, trusting our Baptism, incensed with
the Body and Blood of Jesus. We stay where we are planted: His Church. And we
grow where we are planted: His Word and Sacrament. The true miracle revealed is
that God dwells with man, in Jesus, and justifies them in His Name.
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