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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.
What astonishes and amazes you? Does anything? Oh, we might say that something astonishes or amazes us, but is anything really so unexpected and extraordinary that it leaves us overwhelmed (see Arndt, 143)? When I was producing television news, we often reported things that at least some people found astonishing and amazing, not only such things as new Guinness world records but also such things as horrible crimes and dramatic rescues. And, after seven years in broadcast journalism and my various experiences since, I know that I for one am a little cynical, and sometimes I think that I have seen everything and that nothing can faze me. In today’s Gospel Reading, the people of Capernaum were astonished at Jesus’s teaching and amazed at His deeds because His Word was with authority. This morning we consider that Gospel Reading under the theme “The Astonishing and Amazing Word”.
In a sense like the photographic book series produced by David Elliot Cohen and Rick Smolan, today’s Gospel Reading might be said to give us a holy day in the life of Jesus. After Jesus passed through the midst of the crowd in Nazareth that wanted to stone Him for saying He was the Messiah, the One anointed to proclaim, which we heard the Divinely‑inspired St. Luke tell us about in last week’s Gospel Reading (Luke 4:16-30), Jesus went away, down to Capernaum, and was likewise there in a synagogue on the Sabbath Day, teaching and rebuking an unclean demon. Afterwards in Simon Peter’s house before the main Sabbath meal, Jesus rebuked a fever for Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, and, after sundown ended the Sabbath and people could bring to Jesus the sick, Jesus laid His hands on them and healed them and rebuked more demons, before leaving Capernaum the next morning. Jesus had been and continued going through all the surrounding country of Galilee in the land of the Jews, teaching in their synagogues, and being glorified by all (Luke 4:14-15, 23).
Yet, today’s Gospel Reading, even with its general statements about Jesus’s successful ministry of the Word, also gives us St. Luke’s first detailed account of His successful ministry of the Word, including St. Luke’s first explicit account of Jesus’s miracles, fittingly two miracles of Jesus’s further triumph over the devil, whom Jesus, led by the Holy Spirit, had resisted in the wilderness for forty days not that long before (Luke 4:1-13; Schürmann, cited by Marshall, 192). Not only Jesus’s exorcism of an unclean demon but also Jesus’s healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law showed Jesus’s power over the devil, to whom the bondage of illness was attributed (Luke13:16). And, St. Luke, the beloved physician (Colossians 4:14), among the Gospel writers uniquely mentions both the fact that the man who had the spirit of the unclean demon was not harmed and the fact that Simon Peter’s mother‑in-law had a high fever, but most important is St. Luke’s joining St. Matthew and St. Mark in mentioning how the people reacted to “The Astonishing and Amazing Word” (confer Matthew 7:28-29; Mark 1:21-22, 23-28).
The people in Capernaum that day were astonished at Jesus’s teaching and amazed at His deeds: the extent of the credit they gave Jesus (Bertram, TDNT 3:6) is evident in their reports about Him into every place in the surrounding region, and the extent of the credit they gave Jesus may also be evident in their attempts, unlike the people of Nazareth, to keep Jesus from leaving them. Are you and I here today astonished at Jesus’s teaching and amazed at His deeds? Do we report the credit we give Jesus into every place in our surrounding region? Do we want to stay eternally in the presence of Jesus? Whether or not we fail in those ways, we sin in countless others. We may not have the spirit of an unclean demon, but, apart from the Holy Spirit, we are certainly sinful and unclean, with a foul nature that lacks “every trace of moral purity” (Lenski, 264). Sickness and death in the world point to the corruption of original sin, and we compound the problem with sin of our own. For our sin, we deserve not annihilation but everlasting punishment in the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his evil angels (Matthew 25:41).
Yet, “The Astonishing and Amazing Word” speaks to us, reaching our conscience and heart (Lenski, 262), and calling us to repent: to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust God to forgive our sin, and to want to do better. So summoned and enabled by God, we call out to Him, as we did in today’s Psalm (71:1-11; antiphon v.12), “O God, be not far from me; O my God, make haste to help me.” And, as through Jeremiah in today’s Old Testament Reading (Jeremiah 1:4-10), the God not only with His law plucks us up and breaks us down, destroys and overthrows us, but He also with His Gospel builds and plants us. When we repent, then God forgives our sin. God forgives all our sin, whatever it may be, for the sake of His Son, Jesus, the Christ.
In the Gospel Reading, the clearest statements about Who Jesus is and what He came to do are made, somewhat surprisingly, by demons. They, like all people by nature, are unclean, but Jesus is the Holy One of God (confer Marshall, 193). The man Jesus is the Son of God, the Christ, Who came to die on the cross for all people and so to destroy the demons and all of the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). Even as, anointed by the Holy Spirit to proclaim (Luke 4:18), Jesus’s preaching the good news of the kingdom of God to towns other than Capernaum was divinely necessary, so also divinely necessary was Jesus’s suffering many things and being rejected by the leaders of the Jews and being killed and on the third day being raised (Luke 9:22; confer Luke 17:25; 24:7, 26, 46 and Just, 199). Jesus’s preaching throughout the region even was the basis for a charge the Jewish leaders made against Him in His trial before Pilate (Luke 23:5). Jesus worked through all that He did to save all people. Jesus is the Stronger Man Who defeats and plunders the devil’s domain, casting out demons by the finger of God (Stauffer, TDNT 2:626; confer Matthew 12:29; Mark 3:27; Luke 11:20-22). The demons knew Who Jesus was and what He came to do, but the knowledge did them no good (confer James 2:19). Neither does that knowledge alone do us any good, unless we also repent and trust God to forgive our sins for Jesus’s sake. Likewise, trust in some undefined God does not save us: we must know Who God truly is in order both to trust in Him and to receive His benefits rightly.
To some extent, today is a typical holy day in our lives. We enter into God’s presence by virtue of our baptisms, by which we received forgiveness of sins and were rescued from death and the devil, who was cast out of us as we were cleansed by water and the Word. We hear God’s Word read and preached by one He has sent (confer Acts 16:17). Maybe we, having privately confessed the sins we know and feel in our hearts, have had our pastor’s hands laid on us in individual Holy Absolution. And, with the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar, we eat Christ’s Body and drink His Blood in the main meal of our holy day, and so there we receive forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Although through humble means, the same “Astonishing and Amazing Word” is successfully ministering here today, with the same authority and power (compare Matthew 4:29; Mark 1:22; see Arndt, 142), doing deeds that may be more astonishing and amazing because of How He is doing them.
Such modern miracles, like the miracles in the Gospel Reading, are given to create and sustain faith in those who believe, but such miracles are not given upon demand to those who refuse to believe. We who do believe spread our reports about Jesus into every place in the surrounding region, for we are not commanded to be silent about Him (although sometimes you might not know that from what we say and do). As we love and serve God in the person of our neighbors, like Simon Peter’s mother‑in‑law did, we also, as today’s Epistle Reading described (1 Corinthians 12:31b-13:13) grow up and know more and more until we are fully known. “The Astonishing and Amazing Word” saves us by bringing us into the Kingdom of God, the one holy Christian and apostolic Church. In time, either with our deaths or our Lord’s return, God will end our suffering and, on the Last Day, resurrect and glorify our bodies.
Those last things will be more astonishing and amazing than anything the people of Capernaum saw and than anything we see now. From our horrible sins, our Lord Jesus Christ dramatically has rescued us, by His “Astonishing and Amazing Word”. As we in the Collect of the Day prayed for Him to do, our Almighty God, Who knows that we live in the midst of so many dangers that in our frailty we cannot stand upright, will grant strength and protection to support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +