READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Isaiah 25:6-9
Ephesians 6:10-17
- St. John 4:46-54
May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of
God and of Jesus our Lord
(2 Pet 1:2)
Who speaks to you today, only through His Gospel, saying,
“When this man
heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him
to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.”
In God’s first three commandments, we have been living on
“easy mode”. That is, we have been told to only have one God, Him. To use the
Name He gives us, and to keep His holy day. So easy to do with our lips and
even more so, since God is spirit, we just honor His Name and Day in the spirit
and we can live life to our pleasure.
Every once in a while we use His Name for a prayer. Every
now and then, declare publicly how our God is the real God, and on the proper
day, give the proper offering, with the proper words, at the proper time and
place.
We cruise through life like this, barely even perceiving God
in all of it. Just in those places He said, because that is good enough.
However, when we get to the 4th Commandment, God begins to
interfere with said life. Often called the hinge of the Commandments, God
introduces father and mother into the mix, instead of remaining in the spirit
realm. He brings His commands out from our imagination, into the very lives we
were trying to live without Him.
The Official in today’s Gospel teaches this. Let’s assume
stereotypical royalty here. That his success is his own, his prosperity is his
own, and yet he pays lip service to his God or gods and they appear to leave
him alone. In this worst case scenario, they also leave him alone when he cries
out in need.
The 4th Command goes: “Honor your father and mother”.
What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we
do not despise or anger our parents and other authorities, but honor them,
serve and obey them, love and cherish them.
Our sinful nature causes us to hate God, now, because He
ties up His honor with earthly honor and that is impossible to accomplish, for
us. However, Pop Christianity is all too eager to teach us these things and it
is always by works righteousness, without the need for Jesus.
To honor God, they’ll say, you need to place a higher value
on Him than other things, you need to be generous, live a life devoted to Him,
seek Him in everything YOU do, and make choices that reflect the place He has
in your heart. You’ve got a long list, apparently…
They will also say that serving God means you loving others,
you obeying His word, and using your unique skills in daily life. Many would
say that obeying God means simply “giving Him what He wants”, reading His Bible
to learn the rules and instructions.
Loving God means choosing to obey His commands, spending
time in prayer, and caring for other people. And cherishing Him is thinking
about Him, telling Him I love Him, spend time in His presence, and choosing to
do everything out of love for Him.
But, they are just going in circles here: to love God is to
obey Him, to obey Him is to pray, to pray is to be devoted to Him, and to be
devoted means to love Him and to love Him is to obey Him. Like a hamster wheel:
around and around and around and around. We call this the fallacy of circular
reasoning.
Here in Christ’s Church we call it God’s Law. Yes, it is
circular because these things of God have no end. If you are in charge of
honoring God, then you need to figure out how to do it for eternity, before the
resurrection of all flesh. If God’s service, obedience, love, and cherishing
are all dependent on how well you do, then you will quickly find yourself in
the Official’s shoes.
What kind of shoes are those? The kind that stand before a
silent god in the face of suffering. The kind that stand in the presence of all
the praying, tithing, and fasting you did that now returns nothing. Turns out,
all that effort, work, and lip service were not enough.
Because the 4th Commandment is the one that God appears in
flesh and blood. He accepts worship from His first three commands, but then
places His honor and His Name on earthly parents and other authorities. In
other words, in order to get to God, you have to go through man.
This begins with Jesus being made man. Jesus Christ fulfills
the 4th Commandment in two profound ways: His Active Obedience (perfectly
keeping the law in our place) and His Passive Obedience (suffering the
consequences of our failure to keep it).
It is divinely necessary for our Savior to be true man in
order to act in our place under the Law and fulfill it for us. God keeping His
own Law is redundant and doesn’t mean anything. But when a man does it, then it
has fulfilled its purpose. Thus God is made man, in Jesus Christ.
As Galatians 4:4-5 says, “When the time had fully come,
God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law,
that we might receive the full rights of sons.”
Two examples of this from Jesus’s life are from Sts. Luke
and Matthew. First His submission to His parents, Joseph and Mary, from the age
of 12 when He appeared in the Temple until He is baptized. And second, when He
tells us to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”, that is when He
honors father and mother and other authorities. (Lk 2:51; Mt 22:21)
That is His active obedience as a man. It is also divinely necessary
that He passively obey, as a man. That is, to be able to suffer and die for our
guilt because we failed to keep the Law. This is passive because His guilt and
death are not self-imposed. Taking our sin and guilt, He deserves death for
those transgressions. And as our substitute, also allows the ruling class and
other authorities to condemn Him publicly and crucify Him.
Colossians states (1:22), “He has reconciled you by
Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without
blemish and free from accusation.”
And Hebrews 2:14, “Since the children have flesh and
blood, He too shared in their humanity so that by His death He might destroy
him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil.”
That is not the end of Jesus, however. For, it is also necessary
for our Savior to be true God in order that His fulfilling of the Law, His
life, suffering, and death might be a sufficient ransom for all people in any
case! “No man can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for him”
(Ps. 49:7). Yet, Jesus came to serve, and as God He serves in an eternal
way, making propitiation by His Blood, holy and precious Blood, that no one
else has.
He also has to be able to overcome death and the devil for
us. Only God can do this and our Official with the dead son knows this today,
which is why he comes to Jesus. Life is hard. Life is impossible, with death
stalking everyone. But with God, life is not just possible but certain.
The Official comes to Jesus in faith, honoring Jesus as God.
Faith is the only true way to honor God. First because faith only comes from
God and second , because faith trusts that God’s Way is the only Way. In the
case of the Gospel today, the Way that is shown goes through death. The Official
honors God by trusting Him, even though his child dies.
And, instead of the false and external Worship of inventing
human traditions, experiences, or special clothing to merit God's grace, Faith
believes and rests in the completed work of Jesus Christ. That is, His
suffering, death, and resurrection.
Our service and obedience, then, is only possible within this
perfect service and obedience of Jesus. We do not get to obey God in our own
way. We do not get to serve Him in any way we see fit. We only approach Him by
His rules, that is, with a clean conscience through the forgiveness of sins, in
Jesus’s Name.
Hopefully, you remember how to love and cherish God, as the
4th Command teaches. That our love is giving His love back to Him.
He first loved us, then we love. And that goes for the whole thing. He first
cherished us, He first served and obeyed us, He first honored us.
Because Jesus was walking around in His own flesh and blood,
this Official was able to find Him, beg Him, and receive an answer to his
begging. If Jesus had not, then there would be no point, no meaning. But since
the Father wills the resurrection of the dead, Jesus comes.
This is where our part comes in. To honor father and mother
is to honor the heavenly Father. To honor the heavenly Father is to Honor the
Son. To honor the Son means trusting in His work, His Word and Sacrament, in
which He promises to serve us the forgiveness of sins, faith in Him, and
eternal life.
True service and obedience is hearing the Word, believing
it, and communing the way God is communing with you, in bread and wine. True
love and cherishing God, is not you inventing new and exciting ways to worship
and experience God, but submission to His Way of doing things.
We get to fall at the feet of Jesus, in His Church, in His
Liturgy today, because He promised to be working for us. Not in our old dusty
ceremonies, but in His Word and His Sacrament. For true faith trusts in Christ
and centers around two things: Justification by grace, through faith, for
Christ’s sake, and the true presence of Christ’s Body and Blood.
In Whose presence we then get to approach and pray that
Jesus come down and heal our own sin and death. And His answer is the medicine
of immortality: His Body and Blood.
Amen.
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