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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.
Who do people today say that Jesus is? Do people answer like some Jews, who say that Jesus was a Jewish teacher but not the Messiah nor raised from the dead? Do people answer like the Roman Catholics, who say that Jesus died only to get us started on salvation but did not do enough to save us? Do people answer like the Muslims, who say that Jesus was only a prophet and precursor to Mohammed? Do people answer like some so-called “evangelicals”, who say that Jesus is a kind of God-man but not one who has all the attributes of God working through His human nature? Do people answer like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who say that Jesus is only a god and created son of Jehovah? Do people answer like the Mormons, who also say that Jesus is only a god and that we, too, can be gods like Him? Who do people say that Jesus is?
In today’s Gospel Reading, in some ways unique to St. Matthew’s account and the only record of this incident that we hear in our series of Gospel Readings, we heard Jesus Himself, having journeyed into the district of Caesarea Philippi, a pagan area at the northern-most end of Galilee, ask His disciples Who people said that He was. We heard His disciples answer with some people’s false confessions, that Jesus was one prophet or another resurrected from the dead. We heard Jesus ask Who the disciples said that He was, and we heard Peter give the right confession, the first time in St. Matthew’s account that someone said that Jesus was “the Messiah”. And, we also heard Jesus say how the Father’s revelation of that right confession leads to forgiveness. This morning we consider today’s Gospel Reading under the theme “The Father reveals the Son for forgiveness”.
Earlier, after Jesus had walked on the sea, as we heard in the Gospel Reading two Sundays ago, the disciples in the boat worshiped Him, confessing that Jesus truly was the Son of God (Matthew 14:22‑33). Later, Martha, the sister of Jesus’s then-dead friend Lazarus, like Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God (John 11:27). Each of those confessions of Jesus seems to have been sufficient for its time and place, but a lot has changed in nearly two‑thousand years! Over time, in response to inadequate and otherwise false confessions of Who Jesus is, the Holy Spirit led the Church to confess Jesus more precisely, as is done in the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, as well as in the Augsburg Confession, Small Catechism, and other Lutheran confessional writings.
Do you and I make those confessions of Jesus our own? Who do you and I say that Jesus is? Are our confessions of Jesus sufficient for our times and places? Do our thoughts, words, and deeds always confess the truth about Jesus and who we are in relationship to Him? Do we really think that Jesus is ruling all things for our benefit? Do our words indicate our belief that Jesus will provide all that we need? Do our actions towards our neighbors reflect our fear and love of God? Do we truly trust Jesus to save us from our sins? The human flesh and blood we inherit from our parents lead us to sin, not to make adequate confessions of Who Jesus is. Like Peter, we need the Heavenly Father to reveal Jesus, the Son of Man and Son of God, to us, so that we can confess Him and so be forgiven of our sins, which apart from faith in Jesus merit us temporal death and eternal damnation.
However, God calls us to repent. When, enabled by the Heavenly Father, we turn in sorrow from our sins, trust Him to forgive our sins, and want to do better than to keep on sinning, then God forgives our sin. God forgives our sinful nature and all our sin, including our previous inadequate confessions of Jesus and whatever else our sin might be. God forgives all our sin. God forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake.
Not only the Father, but also the Son Himself, and additionally the Holy Spirit reveals Who Jesus is: the Son of Man and the Son of God, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading. Jesus the Christ is true God, begotten of the Father from eternity and in time, as we sang in the Introit (Psalm 2:6-7; Psalm 117; antiphon Psalm 115:18), and He is also true man, born of the Virgin Mary. The Triune God enables us to receive Jesus as our Lord, Who has redeemed us, lost and condemned people, purchased and won us from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death. In the trial that led to His death, Jesus confessed Himself as the Christ and the Son of Man (Matthew 26:63-64; confer Daniel 7:13), and, hanging on the cross for your sins and mine, He as the Son of God was derided by those who passed by and the leaders of the Jews but truly confessed by a Roman centurion (Matthew 27:40, 43, 54). As we so believe in the heart and confess with our mouth that He is our resurrected Lord, we are justified and saved (Romans 10:9-10).
Such saving faith and the resulting forgiveness of sins come to us by God’s working through His Word purely preached and His Sacraments rightly administered—not by Peter alone, but also by the other apostles and their successors, pastors today. The ministry confessing Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, is the rock on which Christ builds His Church (Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, 25). The ministry is not about a personality cult (compare 1 Corinthians 1:12) but about God’s Word and His three Sacraments. First, “Here stands the font before our eyes, / Telling how God has received us” (Lutheran Service Book 645:4). At the Font, the Father in Heaven reveals Jesus even to little children (Matthew 11:25). In Holy Baptism we are born not of the will of flesh or blood but of God (John 1:13), for that which is born of the flesh is flesh, but that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (John 3:6). Second, the Sacrament of individual Holy Absolution is especially in view in today’s Gospel Reading, as Jesus promised to give to His disciples the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, the exercise of Jesus’s own full authority to bind or forgive sins (Revelation 1:18; 3:7), which He did give to them on the evening of the first day of the week on which He rose (John 20:21-23). The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther wrote that people adequately understand those Keys “when they seek and receive absolution in simple faith” (“Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses” [1518], AE 31:103). Third, “The altar recalls Christ’s sacrifice / And what His Supper here gives us” (LSB 645:4). From this Altar, Jesus gives His Flesh with bread and His Blood with wine, true food and true drink, for the life of the world; unless we eat of the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood we have no life in us; whoever feeds on His flesh and drinks His Blood has eternal life, abides in Jesus and Jesus in him or her, and Jesus will raise him or her up on the last day (John 6:51, 53-56). So, by our hearing God’s Word read and preached, being baptized, absolved, and communed, we are, forgiven and, as today’s Epistle Reading calls it, “transformed” (Romans 11:33-12:8), for both life in this world, contending against the gates of hell, and for life in the next world, fully experiencing God’s joy and peace.
Our parents’ flesh and blood by themselves may not reveal to us that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, but that is not to say, on this Rally Day, that parents have no role to play in their children’s confessing and growing in Christ. Parents bring their children, as we who are old enough bring ourselves, to lunch and other fun activities today but, more importantly, to the new year of classes that begins next Sunday. (Children, if your parents are not bringing you, ask them to do so!) Jesus’s Messiahship no longer needs to be a secret (confer Matthew 17:9). As we have realized, “The Father reveals the Son for forgiveness”. In the words of today’s Old Testament Reading (Isaiah 51:1-6), the Lord’s righteousness draws near, His salvation has gone out and is forever, and His righteousness will never be dismayed.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +