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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.
On observances of All Saints’ Day such as today, we might especially think of the saints in heaven, those who have gone before us in the faith and whom the Lord has finished making holy previously, but we properly also think of the saints on earth, those who believe and whom the Lord in some sense is in the process of making holy now. After all, in the Gospel Reading appointed for All Saints’ Day, we heard Jesus tell His followers that not only were others blessed but also they themselves were blessed. In fact, Jesus tells them that they are blessed when others revile them and utter all kinds of evil against them falsely on His account; rejoice and be glad, He tells them, for their reward is great in heaven. This morning we consider the Gospel Reading under the theme, “Your reward is great in heaven”.
Much can be and is said about Jesus’s in the Gospel Reading’s essentially nine statements of blessedness: eight at least initially about others and one about Jesus’s followers. And, of those eight seemingly about others, the first and last describe how the others are presently blessed with the Kingdom of Heaven, and the intervening six describe how the others will be blessed at some point in the future. The ninth statement is about the present blessedness of Jesus’s followers and is variously taken as expanding on the eighth statement or summarizing all eight statements, but the ninth statement certainly contrasts the world’s treatment of Jesus’s followers with God’s treatment of them, in the process recalling God’s promise to Abram that his reward would be very great (Genesis 15:1).
Now to be sure, when we move beyond an initial reading and hearing of these statements of blessedness (what are called “beatitudes”), we realize that the first eight beatitudes are fulfilled in Jesus—Jesus perfectly is poor in spirit, mourns, is meek, hungers and thirsts for righteousness, is merciful, is pure in heart, is a peacemaker, and is persecuted for righteousness’s sake. But, the first eight beatitudes are also fulfilled in Jesus’s followers, insofar as His followers themselves are joined to Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven—Jesus’s followers also are poor in spirit, mourn, are meek, hunger and thirst for righteousness, are merciful, are pure in heart, are peacemakers, and are persecuted for righteousness’s sake. So, all nine beatitudes can be said in some sense to be about Jesus’s followers, and that includes you and me!
Jesus says we are blessed, already now in the present, even if particular aspects of our being blessed are still in the future, such as our being comforted, our inheriting the earth, our seeing God, and our reward’s being great in heaven. Do we consider ourselves blessed? Or, does our being poor in spirit (or poor otherwise), mourning, being meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, showing mercy, being pure in heart, being peacemakers, being persecuted, being reviled, and being slandered on Jesus’s account—do those things make us do anything but rejoice and be glad that our reward is great in heaven? Too often we look at things the way the world looks at things and consider to be blessed people who have earthly riches and possessions, physical health and beauty, fame or seeming happiness. While those things can be blessings from God, they are temporary, and their presence or absence at any given time is not, as some consider it to be, a sure sign, respectively, of God’s favor or disfavor.
We sin in our disregard of God’s genuine blessings and in our wrongful regard of what we consider to be blessings, as we sin in countless other ways, for we are sinful by nature. We deserve not blessings but temporal and eternal curses, such as death. But, God calls and thereby enables us to turn from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to at least want to stop sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives us. As the antiphon of today’s Psalm put it (Psalm 149; antiphon: v.4), the Lord adorns the humble with salvation.
The Lord adorns the humble with the salvation that Jesus won for all people by His death on the cross. God in human flesh, Jesus lived the perfect life that we fail to live and He died in our place the death that we otherwise would have deserved to die for our failure to live that perfect life. Any and all blessings that we receive from God—arguably including our reward that is great in heaven—do not come to us because of anything that we have done but because of God’s great undeserved love, mercy, and grace for the sake of Jesus Christ. Jesus hungered and thirsted for our righteousness and equates our being persecuted for righteousness’s sake with being persecuted for His sake. For Jesus’s sake, God forgives our sins and makes us holy, His blessed saints. God forgives our sins and makes us holy through His means of grace, those are, His Word and Sacraments.
God’s Word and Sacraments join us to Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven and are the sure signs of God’s eternal favor toward us. As God’s Word connected with tangible things, especially the Sacraments apply the Gospel to us individually. In Holy Baptism, God’s Word with water makes us sons of God, as we are called in the Gospel Reading, or children of God, as we are called in the Epistle Reading (1 John 3:1-3), and there we are clothed in the white robes of Christ’s righteousness. In Holy Absolution, God’s Word of forgiveness and the pastor’s touch forgive the sins we know and feel in our heart and so have privately confessed. And in the Sacrament of the Altar, God’s Word makes bread and wine be the Body and Blood of Christ given and shed for us for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. As Jesus Himself said, He is the Bread of Life, and whoever comes to Him will not hunger and whoever believes in Him will never thirst (John 6:35), a blessing of heaven described in the First Reading (Revelation 7:2-17). Especially on this All Saints’ Day we remember that not only today but also every time we receive the Sacrament of the Altar we join with all the company of heaven, including our former members Don and David, and are united in the Body of Christ with them and with all who have gone before us in the faith.
God loves, forgives, and otherwise blesses us, and the world reviles, persecutes, and slanders us on Jesus’s account. Still, we can rejoice and be glad, for our reward is great in heaven. (As we heard in the Epistle Reading, the world did not know Him and so does not know us.) Paradoxically, our reason to rejoice and be glad is hidden in this world under the cross. As we are certain that our reward is great in heaven, even in suffering under our crosses, we can refrain from sorrowing and complaining and, instead, rejoice and be glad (Pieper, III:74). As today’s Psalm described, we not only rejoice and are glad but we also praise the Lord, sing His praise in the assembly of the godly, and make melody to Him. We cooperate with Christ in us, doing good works that give evidence of our being made holy. For example, as God shows us mercy in His forgiveness, we mercifully forgive those who sin against. In the end, we see God, and that blessed vision sanctifies us fully for our eternity in His presence. We will be comforted, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. If our different faith‑produced good works on earth bring rewards of different degrees of glory, we will be content with the same bliss.
“Your reward is great in heaven”. All Saints’ Day and its Gospel Reading are about both the saints already in heaven and all of us saints still on earth. Whether or not we are fully experiencing it yet, by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, we all have the same reward that is great in heaven. Already now, as we rejoice and are glad, we saints on earth sing with the saints in heaven the song attributed to the angels, the elders, and the four living creatures: “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +