Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + 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.
C-S Lewis may be best-known among us for writing the fictional Chronicles of Narnia, which have sold more copies than any of his other books and have been made popular on stage and screens, big and small. But, Lewis was also a Christian radio broadcaster and apologist, and one of his radio addresses on the British Broadcasting Company that later became a chapter in his book Mere Christianity identifies three alternatives about Jesus, and Jesus’s being “a great moral teacher” is not one of those three alternatives. Lewis writes:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.
So, Lewis says that your alternatives for Jesus are Lord, lunatic, or liar. (One of my former colleagues at Concordia University–Texas was a bit of a C-S Lewis scholar, and he added a fourth “L”: legend, but, for anyone like Lewis who takes Scripture seriously, Jesus’s being a legend is not really an option.)
As it was in C-S Lewis’s time, the question of Who Jesus is a very real and significant question in our time, and it was a very real question at the time of Jesus, too. In today’s Third Reading, the Jews essentially ask Who Jesus is, and Jesus answers, identifying Himself as one Person of the Triune God. So, as we consider the Third Reading on this Trinity Sunday, we do so under the theme: “Knowing the Triune God”.
At first glance, today’s Third Reading may not really seem appropriate for Trinity Sunday, although as we look more deeply we realize how Jesus teaches both His unity with God the Father and His distinction from Him. Today’s Third Reading comes in Chapter 8 of St. John’s Gospel account, as Jesus continues controversial conversation in the Temple courts at the Feast of Tabernacles, with the official leaders of the Jews as His primary opponents. The topic of conversation was, as it also is in today’s Third Reading, the question of fatherhood. Leading up to the Reading, the Jews claimed to be descendants of Abraham and God and made negative inferences about Jesus’s birth. Jesus said the Jews did not hear the words of God and so were not children of God but of the devil. In today’s Third Reading, the Jews not only call Jesus names, but they also radically reject and dishonor Him and so also God the Father. The Jews had called Jesus such names before, but this time, by the end of the Third Reading, the Jews are, for the first time in St. John’s Gospel account, trying to stone Jesus so that He hides Himself and goes out from the Temple, as He similarly would do on other occasions later in St. John’s account.
Earlier this month one of my friends told me about a Roman Catholic friend of hers who felt that too much emphasis on Jesus takes away from God the Father. Such a feeling fails to consider that Jesus is sent by the Father, sent as the Father’s revelation of Himself. So, Jesus can say elsewhere in St. John’s account that to know Him is to know the Father (John 8:19) and that whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father (John 14:9). As Jesus points out in today’s Third Reading, the Jews claimed God as their Father but dishonored and rejected Jesus. The Jews wanted to reduce Jesus to something less than true God. So, too, do many people today. As C-S Lewis said, they may want to make Jesus only “a great moral teacher”. Or, instead of Jesus’s being Lord, people may think Jesus is a lunatic or a liar. Or, perhaps people reject the authority of Scripture and think He is just a legend. Many people in our time, perhaps even some of us, reject Jesus’s identity as one Person of the Triune.
By nature, all people do not know God. In today’s Third Reading, Jesus said the Jews had not known Him, and, by nature, neither do we. We sang in today’s Opening Hymn that “the eye made blind by sin [His] glory may not see” (Lutheran Worship, 168:3). In the Third Reading, the Jews’ dishonoring Jesus and so also the Father led Jesus to warn them about judgment and the death all people deserve on account of their sins. Jesus said earlier in Chapter 8 of St. John’s account that everyone, including you and me, will die eternally in our sins unless we individually believe Jesus is Who He says He is, specifically true God (John 8:24). Through Jesus and His Word, God the Father seeks Jesus’s and His Own glory by judging and condemning those who do not recognize Him. By Jesus’s warning the Jews—and so also warning us—God the Father calls us to repent. He calls us to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to do better. When we so repent, then God the Father forgives our sin, whatever it might be. God the Father forgives us for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ.
In today’s Third Reading, Jesus said that the Jews did not know God the Father, and Jesus also said that He Himself does know Him and keeps His Word. Jesus knows the Father most intimately, for, though they are distinct divine Persons, They share one divine substance. Their glory and majesty are the same. Jesus is God in human flesh, and so He can use the Divine Name “I am”. Like Wisdom in today’s First Reading (Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31), Jesus as God existed before creation, but, as the Jews in today’s Third Reading thought, Jesus as man had existed at that point for less than 50 years. Jesus was and remained eternal God, but, He appeared to be and permitted people to treat Him as ordinary for us and for our salvation. Jesus was true man in order to die on the cross for us, and He was true God in order for His death on the cross to be a sufficient sacrifice for all people. His resurrection from the grave shows God the Father accepted that sacrifice for us. (The Second Reading [Acts 2:14a, 22-36], with its continuation of Peter’s Pentecost, sermon similarly declares the significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection.)
In today’s Third Reading, Jesus said that the Jews did not know God, and, by nature, neither did the disciples, nor do we. Jesus sent the disciples the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, for them to know God, and so Jesus sends us the Holy Spirit for us to know God. So, we asked the Holy Spirit as we sang in the Office Hymn: “Teach us to know the Father, Son, / And You, of both, to be but one …” (Lutheran Worship, 157:4). Our knowledge of God in faith and love are not the result of our own investigation, observation, or speculation but of God’s calling us to faith by the Holy Spirit working through His Word in all its forms. Without the inspired and so inerrant Word of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through the apostles, there is no victory over death for us. Through that Word and only through that Word—through the preaching of that Word, with water and that Word in Baptism, by that Word spoken by a pastor in Absolution, and with bread and wine that is Christ’s body and blood in the Supper—God creates and sustains faith and thereby forgives us our sins. That faith God creates and sustains is the “catholic” or “universal” faith, faith both in the Trinity and in the incarnation of God in the flesh of the man Jesus. That faith is the same faith that enabled Abraham to see Jesus’s day and rejoice in the forgiveness of sins, and that faith is the same faith that enables us to see the glory of Jesus on the cross and similarly rejoice in the forgiveness of sins. By that faith we know and recognize Jesus as our Savior and so are united with Him and so also with God the Father.
By the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word in all its forms, we are enabled to believe and worship one God in three Persons and three Persons in one God, neither confusing the Persons nor dividing the substance. By the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word in all its forms, we are enabled to let no one tamper with that Word and to obey that Word. By the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word in all its forms, we are enabled to love others as we are loved by God. And, those deeds of love serve as the evidence of our individual faith when Jesus returns to reveal the judgment He has made already even now.
Before Jesus returns, you or I may experience physical death, the kind of temporal death that the Jews in today’s Third Reading rightly said Abraham and the prophets experienced as a consequence of their sin. But, those Jews misunderstood what Jesus said about the one who keeps His Word never seeing death. Jesus was speaking about spiritual or eternal death, the kind all people deserve on account of their sin but that He experienced for us on the cross. That separation from God we who believe will never see, taste, or experience in any way. St. John repeatedly makes clear that, already now, we have passed from such death to life (John 5:24; 1 John 3:14).
Lord? Lunatic? Liar? Legend? By nature we do not know the Triune God, but He reveals Himself to us and by grace through faith forgives our sins. As we this Trinity Sunday celebrate the richness of His being, we also thank and praise Him for the salvation He accomplishes for us, that the Second of those three Persons took on human flesh to die on the cross and rise from the grave for us so that we might be united and live forever with Him. With the ancient liturgical text, let us say, “Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the undivided Unity. Let us give glory to Him because He has shown His mercy to us.”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +