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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
Well‑before I moved to Canada, where I completed my seminary studies and served my first parish, I was a fan of the Canadian rock band Rush. Rush’s 19-80 hit “Freewill” is one of my favorites, and some of you may know it, too, as classic‑rock radio stations still play it today. Since that song explores the philosophical topics of free will and responsibility, I even used it when teaching a “Survey of Western Philosophy” class at Concordia University Texas. The song’s lyrics in some cases describe extreme views on free will that are not quite right in regards to either spiritual or earthly matters. For example, the view that everything happens by necessity is described by the lines: “All preordained / A prisoner in chains / A victim of venomous fate”.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus speaks of some things happening by necessity, though the truth Jesus speaks is quite different from the view described by that Rush lyric. Today’s Gospel Reading comes from St. Luke’s divinely inspired Gospel account, which together with its sequel, Acts, gives us nearly half of the Bible’s uses of the common Greek expression for “necessity”. In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus says that it is necessary that all that is written about Him in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms be fulfilled. Jesus’s statement gives us the opportunity this morning to ask and answer the question, “What is necessary?”
Today’s Gospel Reading gives the third resurrection event narrated by St. Luke, and the necessity of Jesus’s suffering and rising to fulfill His own words and those of Holy Scripture figures prominently in each of the three. Though we last week heard from St. John a later and in some ways more‑detailed account of the events of that Easter Evening in Jerusalem, St. Luke alone includes this statement about “what is necessary”. Jesus says that fulfilling all that is written about Him is necessary, and so it is necessary that He suffer and rise, as well as that repentance and forgiveness of sins in His Name be proclaimed to all nations. Holy Scripture recorded that those things would happen because God willed to do them. And, because God willed to do them, they came to pass.
The Christ’s suffering and rising and its proclamation came to pass, but not everything “willed” by God necessarily comes to pass. For example, God with the Fifth Commandment wills that we not kill, and we, with the Small Catechism, believe, teach, and confess that that Fifth Commandment means that “We should fear and love God that we may not hurt nor harm our neighbor in his body, but help and befriend him in every bodily need.” God wills those things, but do they come to pass? Do we do them? We may not “hurt or harm our neighbor in his body”, but do we “help and befriend him in every bodily need”? The sinful human natures we inherited from our first parents lead us to sin not only against the Fifth Commandment but also against the other nine. For those sins, we deserve death now and for eternity. But, God in His great, unfathomable love freely resolved to save us from eternal death and so willed that His Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, suffer and rise on our behalf. That Son, in human flesh, Jesus Christ, freely obeyed His Father’s will and did suffer and rise on our behalf. And, also, the proclamation of repentance and forgiveness of sins in His Name, like that in today’s First Reading, has, in keeping with God’s will, come down to us so that we might repent, believe, and so be saved.
Even though God’s will, according to His essence, cannot be divided or classified, we nevertheless sometimes divide and classify His will, in order to better understand what would otherwise be contradictory statements of Holy Scripture. Let me illustrate some of those divisions or classifications. God wills that all people repent, believe, and so be saved. Yet, some people refuse to repent, believe, and so be saved. So, we say that God’s first will of saving all, in effect, becomes a second will that condemns those who refuse His free gift of salvation. We say that those so condemned, who resist God’s will to come for salvation now, will not be able to resist God’s will to come for judgment on the last day. We say that they in part can resist because God wills to call them to salvation through means, even though at other times God works without any intervening means. We might say that God’s will that condemns those who resist is conditioned by their failure to believe, while God’s will that saves believers is unconditioned by human effort. And, we say that God’s will that elects some to salvation is revealed, while His will that does not elect others to salvation is in some sense hidden. Such are some of the divisions or classifications of God’s will that help us answer the question “What is necessary?”
With those divisions or classifications in mind, what we want to do most of all is let God’s first will to save us have its way with us, to not resist it, and we in part do that by looking to His means of grace that effect that same unconditioned, revealed will to save us. Jesus Himself told Nicodemus that it was necessary for Nicodemus to be born from above by water and the Spirit in order to see the Kingdom of God. Similarly, in his book of Acts, St. Luke tells us about the jailer in the Greek city of Philippi who asked Paul and Silas what was necessary for him to do in order to be saved, and they told him to believe, they spoke the Word of the Lord to him and all who were in his house, and they baptized him and his whole family. In Holy Baptism, God makes us His children, so that we can, in fact, be called children of God, as today’s Epistle Reading describes. In his books of Acts, St. Luke also tells us how Peter and John healed a lame beggar in the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and, later, when asked to explain that healing to the Sanhedrin, they witnessed that the Name of Jesus is necessary for salvation. In Holy Absolution, we who repent are spiritually healed as our sins are forgiven in that same one Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As the disciples in today’s Gospel Reading ate with Jesus Who was present with them yet in a different way than before, so we from this altar and at this rail eat with Jesus present in bread that is His body and wine that is His blood, given and shed for you and for me for the forgiveness of our sins. In a sense, such eating and drinking is also necessary for us to have eternal life. In Baptism, Absolution, and the Supper, Jesus continues to work towards the same purpose for which He suffered and rose: our salvation.
A friend and I this past week were discussing what God’s will might be in regards to such things as girlfriends, graduate schools, and jobs. Ultimately, in some sense, we simply do not know. Neither having a girlfriend, attending a particular graduate school, nor taking a particular job is God’s will or necessary in and of itself, though admittedly some choices may be more or less pleasing to God. Unlike that view represented in the Rush song “Freewill”, God has not willed and so fatalistically pre‑determined every single aspect of our earthly lives, though He certainly foreknows them and cares about them. St. Paul tells us that we do not know what is necessary for us to pray, so the Spirit Himself intercedes for us. However, we do know Christ’s suffering and rising were necessary and have been completed to save us from our sins. So, we live each day with sorrow over our sins and faith that God forgives our sins for Jesus’s sake. Since our own suffering is also necessary before we rise to eternal life, we pray, as we did in the Collect, that God grant His faithful people that perpetual gladness and those eternal joys.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +