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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.
Abraham Lincoln was only the Republican nominee for U‑S Senator from Illinois when, on June 16 of 18-58, he famously said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” One of the best‑known speeches of his career, Lincoln’s “house divided” speech launched his unsuccessful campaign against incumbent senator Stephen A. Douglas, and the speech gave a lasting image of the danger of the country separating over slavery, though Lincoln himself said he did not expect the country to fall, but he expected the country to cease to be divided, either making slavery extinct or legal in all states—old and new, north and south. Lincoln had used the “house divided” phrase some fifteen years earlier in another context, but the phrase certainly was not unique to him. Sam Houston, then a U‑S senator from Texas, similarly used the phrase in 18‑50, between Lincoln’s uses. First Lady Abigail Adams used the phrase to describe the British hopes during the war of 18-12. Propagandist Thomas Paine used it to describe the British Monarchy in 17-76, and British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes used it in his book titled Leviathan published in 16‑51. Of course, the phrase was first found on Jesus’s lips, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading and as we find in its parallel accounts. In the Gospel Reading, the phrase is part of a series of questions Jesus uses to lead up to His statement about entering a strong man’s house and plundering his goods. Given the whole of the Gospel Reading, our theme this morning is “A Strong‑er Man in the Family”.
For this morning’s Gospel Reading, we are back to St. Mark’s divinely‑inspired account, with which we now stay, with few exceptions, through the end of this Church Year. We last heard St. Mark’s account in the Divine Service on Easter Day, though that day’s Reading was from the end of the account. If you think back to the Sundays of the Epiphany season in January and February, you may recall that, in the beginning of the Gospel, Jesus was repeatedly casting out demons, who sometimes confessed Him as the Son of God. Immediately before today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus went up on a mountain, called the Twelve, designated them apostles, and gave them authority to cast out demons. Then, they went “home”, apparently to Peter’s house in Capernaum, where the crowd gathered again, so much so that they could not even eat. Jesus’s relatives were saying that He was out of His mind and came to get him, and scribes from Jerusalem were saying both that Jesus was possessed by Beelzebul and that by the prince of demons He casted out demons. Casting out demons especially characterized Jesus’s work, and, since the scribes could not deny the miracles themselves, they tried to cast doubt on their divine origin by saying that Jesus did them by the power of Satan. Jesus called the Scribes to Him and asked them this series of questions that leads up to Jesus’s statement about entering a strong man’s house and plundering his goods.
What comes to your and my minds when we think of a strong man? Do you think of the circus strongman—the one with a handlebar moustache, leopard‑print costume, and the hundreds of pounds written on the ends of his barbell? (My personal trainer Victor is good, but I am not lifting hundreds of pounds over my head with one hand, not yet, anyway.) I think of General Manuel Noriega, called “Panamanian strongman” for the enormous political power he exercised over that country even though he was not its formal head of state. In the Gospel Reading, Jesus casts Satan as the strong man whose house gets entered and whose goods get plundered.
You and I are to think of ourselves as those goods or vessels that get taken out of the strong man’s house. Household goods can be all that one has, any vessel serving any purpose. In this case, the goods are literally utensils, jugs, drinking vessels and the like, but the Bible also uses vessels figuratively of human beings—fragile, temporary, and, in many ways, worthless. We are under Satanic power: sinful and sick, sometimes possessed, and ultimately dead. Even if we do not sin by saying that Jesus is out of His mind, that He is possessed by Beelzebul, or that by the prince of demons He casts out the demons, we sin in countless other ways. God is the Potter, and we are His clay vessels. He originally made us for noble purposes, but we by nature are corrupt. In order for Him not to destroy us eternally, He calls us to repent: to turn in sorrow from our sin and to trust Him to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake.
Jesus is the Strong‑er Man. The Strong‑er Man enters the strong man’s house and plunders His goods. Only Jesus, the Strong‑er Man, can bind the strong man and plunder his house. Jesus is, in fact, the Strong‑est Man, the God‑Man, Who comes to destroy the devil’s work. Jesus is the Seed of the Woman, first told of in today’s Old Testament Reading. On the cross, Satan bruises Jesus’s heel, but, on that same cross, Jesus bruises (the New International Version helpfully paraphrases “crushes”) Satan’s head. Jesus not only with the exorcisms one‑by-one picks off Satan’s demons, but He plunders the whole house, including us. He liberates all the captives and wins the victory. Our Lutheran Confessions in some sense endorse a then‑current picture of Jesus’s victorious descent to hell, which picture draws on the Gospel Reading’s strong‑man imagery. In that picture, Jesus comes as a hero—with His standard, army, and weapons—to a firm castle. As The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther describes it, Jesus takes the standard, breaks open the gates, and causes such a stir among the devils that one falls out of a window and another through a hole. Jesus destroys the castle and seizes and binds the enemy. Then, Jesus plunders the house.
As household vessels, you and I are rescued in that plunder. When we turn from our sin in sorrow and trust God the Father to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, He does just that: He forgives our sin, whatever our sin might be. We who believe do not have to worry that we have blasphemed against the Holy Spirit, for by believing we show that we have not. All our sins and whatever other blasphemies we utter are forgiven us, and we receive that forgiveness in the ways God gives for us to receive it: His Word in all its forms, especially the Word connected with visible means.
In this case, chief among those forms of the Word connected with visible means, the Sacraments, is Holy Baptism. At the Baptismal Font, water comprehended in God’s command and connected with God’s Word works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe. There, God makes us His children, putting His Triune Name upon us and calling us by name, bringing us into His family. Those so baptized privately confess to their pastor the sins that trouble them most and receive individual absolution, forgiveness as from God Himself. Today’s Gospel Reading is rich with the language of the Office of the Keys, binding and loosing, retaining and forgiving. Those so absolved are admitted to the Lord’s Table to receive the Sacrament of the Altar. In the Gospel Reading the crowd kept Jesus and His apostles from eating bread, but at this rail, in the meal of God’s family, we eat bread that is Jesus’s body, and we drink wine that is Jesus’s blood, given and shed for you and for me for the forgiveness of our sins, life, and salvation. In these ways—Baptism, Absolution, and the Supper—our inner nature, as St. Paul puts it to the Corinthians in today’s Epistle Reading, is being renewed day by day.
In the Gospel Reading, Jesus’s own relatives were saying that He was out of His mind. They came to seize Him and stood outside the house Jesus was in. Some of your and my relatives may think and even say that you and I are out of our minds on account of our faith. They might not even set foot in this House of God. Jesus did not go out to His relatives but looked about at those who sat around Him and said, “Here are My mother and My brothers”. Jesus does not disparage His family ties and their importance per se, but He makes clear that one’s relationship to God and His family of faith are more important, even as there is an almost overwhelming temptation to put human relationships with family and friends above our relationship with God. Despite what our human family thinks about our faith and does to isolate us, we are never alone. For, as I pointed out in my article in our May newsletter, you and I have new kinship ties through the water of Holy Baptism and the blood of the Sacrament of the Altar. God is our Father, Jesus is our firstborn brother, and our fellow believers are also our brothers and sisters, as we all “do” the will of God and let Him lead us each and every day to repent and believe, so that we live together in the forgiveness of sins.
I remember being bullied a little—at a minimum teased by older children—when I was a young boy. You may have similar memories. I remember on more than one occasion when my older sister came to my defense and the bullying from a particular individual or individuals stopped, at least for a while. In some ways she was “stronger” than I was. You similarly may have been helped by an older sibling or helped a younger one. As we have seen this day, we have not just a Strong‑er Man but the Strong‑est Man in our family. He has already triumphed over the prince of demons and freed us from our bondage to sin. The devil, the world, and our own sinful flesh still clinging to us does still bully us, but, God helps us to stand firm against every assault of Satan, enables us to do His will, and, as we repent and believe, continues to forgive us when we fail. In the words of our Epistle Reading, such light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory behind all comparison.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +