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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.
In keeping with Isaiah’s prophetic description of the Lord’s Suffering Servant as a lamb that is led to the slaughter and a sheep before its shearers that is silent (Isaiah 53:7), we probably usually think of Jesus’s standing before His accusers and not opening His mouth. To be sure, that silence was often the case, especially when Jesus did not defend Himself from false charges. But, Jesus did open His mouth at other times, such as that which we heard St. Luke uniquely report tonight, in his Divinely‑inspired account of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. And, tonight we reflect on what may be considered the “third” of St. Luke’s unique contributions to that whole picture of our Lord’s suffering and death for us, namely, his reporting Jesus’s words that highlight “The Sanhedrin’s Lack of Faith and Confession”. God being willing, our considering the theme “The Sanhedrin’s Lack of Faith and Confession” will lead us to reflect on our own faith and confession.
Listen again to verses 66 through 71 from Luke chapter 22, which include those unique words of our Lord in verses 67 and 68:
66 When day came, the assembly of the elders of the people gathered together, both chief priests and scribes. And they led him away to their council, and they said, 67 “If you are the Christ, tell us.” But he said to them, “If I tell you, you will not believe, 68 and if I ask you, you will not answer. 69 But from now on the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” 70 So they all said, “Are you the Son of God, then?” And he said to them, “You say that I am.” 71 Then they said, “What further testimony do we need? We have heard it ourselves from his own lips.” (ESV)
After Jewish leaders apparently questioned Jesus overnight at both Annas’s and Caiaphas’s houses (John 18:13-14, 24, 28; Matthew 26:59-68; Mark 14:55-65), when day came, which was necessary for a legal trial, they led Jesus away to the whole Jewish council, the Sanhedrin (confer Matthew 27:1; Mark 15:1). Apparently at least some of the Jewish leaders’ questions and perhaps also some Jesus’s answers were repeated, though each in different forms. Before the Sanhedrin, St. Luke uniquely reports both the Jewish leaders’ making the conditional statement, “If you are the Christ, tell us,” and Jesus’s answering with two conditional statements, “If I tell you, you will not believe, and, if I ask you, you will not answer.” We might even say that Jesus spoke prophetically, for, after He referred to Himself as the Divine Son of Man, and they then asked Him if He was the Son of God, and He pointed to their own words saying that He was, they did not believe, just as some of them earlier had refused to answer His questions of them (Luke 20:41-44).
As I said, this“third” of St. Luke’s unique contributions to the whole picture of our Lord’s suffering and death for us highlights “The Sanhedrin’s Lack of Faith and Confession”. The council’s members did not believe in their hearts and, even when they were asked, they did not confess with their mouths. Their minds were already made up, and so they were not interested in a serious discussion, letting Jesus correct their misunderstandings of Who He was. But, what about our faith and confession? What do we believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths? Do we force Jesus into our own expectations or receive Him as He is and as He comes to us? Sadly, too often our minds are also made up, and we are not interested in a serious discussion, letting God work through His Word on our hearts and on our mouths. For those and any such sins, we deserve temporal and eternal punishment, if God did not call and thereby enable us both to turn from our sins in sorrow and to trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake.
As God calls us to repent and believe, so Jesus seems to have been appealing to the Jewish leaders to repent and believe, but they rejected that call and Jesus’s own confession of Who He was. The Jewish leaders misperceived as blasphemy Jesus’s confession of Himself as the Son of God, and His saying that He was the Son of God would have been blasphemy, if it had not been true. The Jewish leaders sentenced Jesus to death and ultimately persuaded Pilate to carry out that death sentence on the cross. The charges before Pilate were largely political (though compare John 19:7), and those charges did not warrant death, as Pilate himself repeatedly admitted. Yet, because God’s Word tells us, we know that Jesus really died for us, because of our sins and the sins of the whole world. And then Jesus rose from the dead, showing Himself to be victorious over sin, death, and the power of the devil, for us. What St. Paul wrote by Divine inspiration to the Romans also applies to us:
… if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved (Romans 10:9-10 ESV).
With our mouths we confess our sins and the faith of our hearts, and so we are justified (forgiven) and saved. For example, as we did in tonight’s Psalm (Psalm 38, antiphon: v.15), we confessed our iniquity, that we are sorry for our sin. And, we regularly seek and receive the forgiveness for our sin that God offers us in His Word and Sacraments.
If the Jewish leaders had been willing to receive their testimony, Jesus’s words and deeds revealed Him to be the Christ already back then. And, Jesus’s words and deeds also reveal Him to be the Christ today in our time. Jesus’s Word is read and preached to groups such as this, and Jesus’s Word is applied to individuals with water in Holy Baptism, with a pastor’s touch in individual Holy Absolution, and with bread and wine in the Sacrament of the Altar that are the Body and Blood of Christ. In all of these ways Jesus reveals Himself to be the Christ, and, for those who receive these means in faith, Jesus Himself effects the forgiveness of their sins.
With Christ so revealed to us and our sins forgiven, we ourselves at least try always to believe and to confess, both in word and in deed. With God’s help, our minds are open to His Holy Spirit’s working through His Word, which we avail ourselves of whenever we can. We let the Spirit working through that Word correct both our misunderstandings of Who Jesus is and our false expectations of what He will and will not do. Those changes to our minds and our hearts flow out of our mouths and our hands, so that others can hear and see the love that God and we have for them. We want not only our “near and dear ones”, of whom we will sing in the Closing Hymn (Lutheran Service Book 887:3), to be near and dear to God, but, as we sang in the Office Hymn (LSB 539:3), we want the whole world to be able to answer “Amen” to the glory that we offer the Triune God.
Tonight we have considered “The Sanhedrin’s Lack of Faith and Confession” and, to a certain extent, also our own lack of faith and confession. Sometimes failing to be silent and sometimes failing to speak as we should, with repentance and faith we live every day in God’s forgiveness of sins, and so we also extend our forgiveness to one another. Ernst Christoph Homburg was a practicing attorney and poet in seventeenth‑century Germany. “Anxious and sore” afflictions, what he called “the heavy cross”, that he and his family experienced led him to turn from writing secular poetry to writing sacred hymns, primarily for himself, in order to strengthen his life of faith and trust in the Lord, for he said that he found his “best comfort and strength in the Word of God” (Pollack, 118‑119, 523-524; Precht, 101, 651-652). With Homburg, as we did earlier in our Opening Hymn (LSB 420), as we do now, and as we can do forever, for all that He suffered in order to comfort us, we give our Dearest Jesus “thousand, thousand thanks”.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +