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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.
Think of someone you know who, more than anyone else, lives as people should live. (You may or may not be thinking of yourself.) Think of a person of integrity, virtue, and purity of life—a person of correctness in thinking, speaking, and acting. Then, think of your need to exceed or surpass that person, to be or show yourself as much better than that person. Now you may have a better idea of what Jesus means in today’s Gospel Reading. The people at the time who may have been regarded as (or at least who thought of themselves as) the most‑righteous people around were the scribes and Pharisees. And Jesus says our righteousness needs to exceed or surpass theirs, overflow theirs, as it were. This morning we consider today’s Gospel Reading under the theme “Overflowing Righteousness”.
Today’s Gospel Reading is an excerpt from near the beginning of Jesus’s so‑called “Sermon on the Mount”. Seeing the crowds from all over that were following Him, Jesus went up on the mountain, and, when He sat down, His disciples came to Him, and He opened His mouth and taught them (Matthew 4:25-5:1), with others likely listening in. If we had not observed The Purification of Mary and The Presentation of Our Lord last week, we would have heard then, as we did on All Saints’ Day, the opening verses of the Sermon, The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12). Those Beatitudes had ended with Jesus’s speaking about the disciples being blessed, rejoicing, and being glad in persecution. Immediately following is what we heard today: Jesus’s description of the disciples as salt of the earth and as light of the world and His speaking about fulfilling the Law and the Prophets, including His statement about “Overflowing Righteousness”. These seemingly‑disconnected sayings in today’s Gospel Reading are actually closely related.
As followers of Jesus, disciples who have come to Him, we are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We are to retain our flavor as followers of Jesus and to let our light shine before others, so that they may see our good works and give glory to our Father Who is in heaven. Despite all of their claims of correctly interpreting and keeping God’s teaching of the Old Testament, the scribes and Pharisees actually relaxed or eased God’s demands. (We will hear how they did that in the weeks to come, as we hear the verses that follow today’s Gospel Reading.) Now, we may not know any scribes or Pharisees, but we probably know people who relax or ease God’s demands; perhaps we even do so ourselves. Like the people of today’s Old Testament Reading who hypocritically fasted and prayed (Isaiah 58:3-9a), we also fail to love our neighbors as we should, and we may make excuses for not doing so. All such sin limits our usefulness as salt and light. If we lose our taste, we are good for nothing, except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet—figures of speech the Bible uses of God’s eternal judgment.
Realizing that our righteousness does not even exceed that of someone we know who lives as people should live (much less that we keep all of God’s demands), we repent. We turn in sorrow from our sin, trust God to forgive our sin, and want to do better than keep on sinning. God’s law oppressively shows us our sin and condemns us, but His Gospel shows us our Savior from sin and forgives us. When we repent, then God forgives our sin. God forgives our sin, whatever it might be. He forgives it all, for our Savior Jesus’s sake, because of His “Overflowing Righteousness”.
In today’s Gospel Reading we heard Jesus say that He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, in effect, the entire Old Testament, all of Holy Scripture. The Jewish leaders searched the Scriptures and knew they could not be relaxed, but the Jewish leaders relaxed them anyway and failed to see how the Scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus (John 5:39; 10:35). Jesus not only perfectly does and teaches all of God’s demands, but He also completely embodies all of God’s promises. Out of love for God and neighbor, Jesus does all of those things for our benefit. He keeps God’s demands and suffers for our failure to keep it. He satisfies every claim and is executed for every condemnation. In the flesh of the man Jesus, as our Opening Hymn put it, “Christ the Lord has entered / Our human story; / God in Him is centered … See how He sends the pow’rs of evil reeling; / He brings us freedom, light and life and healing. / All men and women, who by guilt are driven, / Now are forgiven.” (Lutheran Service Book 825:1-2) Jesus’s righteousness overflows to us.
As my Mom and I this past Tuesday drove from Houston to Hot Springs Village, in Arkansas we saw saturated fields and creeks and rivers that had overflowed their banks. Such images are behind Jesus’s statement in the Gospel Reading about “Overflowing Righteousness”. As St. Paul describes in today’s Epistle Reading (1 Corinthians 2:1-12), we have received the Spirit Who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God, how His righteousness overflows to us in Baptism, Absolution, and the Supper. Jesus Himself was baptized to fulfill all righteousness (Matthew 3:15), and as we are baptized, born of water and the Spirit, we are enabled to enter the kingdom of God (John 3:5). At the Font, we enter humbly like little children, called great by His Name, and having our names written in His book of life. After privately confessing the sin that troubles us most, we receive individual absolution. Through the pastor, as from God Himself, in the words of today’s Hymn of the Day, God’s “strong Word bespeaks us righteous” (Lutheran Service Book 578:3). We who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied (Matthew 5:6), and we have a foretaste of that satisfaction already now in the Lord’s Supper. On this altar is bread that is Christ’s body and wine that is His blood, given and shed for you and for me, and at this rail we receive it for the forgiveness of sins and so also for life and salvation. His cup of salvation makes our cups overflow (Psalm 116:13; 23:5). To paraphrase our first Distribution Hymn, Jesus’s “blood and righteousness” are our “beauty” and our “glorious dress” (Lutheran Service Book 563:1). The glory of the New Testament ministry of righteousness far exceeds the ministry of the Old, and it leads all people to do the good works that others see and so give glory to our Father who is in heaven.
Most of us probably know the children’s song, ostensibly based on today’s Gospel Reading, that begins, “This little Gospel light of mine / I’m gonna let it shine”. (There are more versions of the song out there than I ever thought existed!) When I was a boy, I thought the second verse began, “Hide it under a bush, oh no!” Of course, the words, based on the King James Version, were “Hide it under a bushel, no!” (The English Standard Version of our Reading has “basket” and is perhaps better for it, as the Greek word seems to refer not to a full bushel measure but to one‑quarter of a bushel, known as a peck.) Regardless, the point is we do not hide but rather let our light of “Overflowing Righteousness” shine before others, although we do not do good works in order for others to see them (Matthew 6:1). We do and teach God’s whole Word, not relaxed or diminished in any way. As our Old Testament Reading said, when we share our bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into our house, and cover the naked, then our light breaks forth like the dawn. As we are in Christ, God’s righteous requirements are fulfilled in us (Romans 8:4); we love our neighbors and so fulfill them all (Romans 13:8; Galatians 5:14). Our good works do not make us righteous but are evidence of our righteousness by grace through faith in Christ, and our good works lead others to give glory to our Father Who is in heaven and Who ultimately is working through us.
I do not know who you thought of at the outset of this sermon—someone who, more than anyone else, lives as people should live. Maybe some of you even at that point already thought of Jesus, Who, as we have realized, perfectly does and teaches all of God’s demands and completely embodies all of God’s promises. In Him we have forgiveness for all of our failures, as His righteousness, through Word and Sacrament, overflows to us. May God grant we always receive His “Overflowing Righteousness” throughout our lives, for His sake.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +