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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.
The sunshine, warmth, and dry weather yesterday were a welcome change to the clouds, cold, and wet weather of the preceding days. The week before the situation had gotten so bad where I was in Arkansas that the Rotary Club I was visiting sang as part of its meeting the century‑old song “Wait ‘till the sun shines, Nellie”, as the sun did shine a few days later. The light may be analogous, but a dawning of a far different kind is described in today’s Gospel Reading, which narrates Jesus’s journeying to and beginning His preaching and healing ministry in Galilee, including territory that once belonged to the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali. In the process of doing so, Jesus not only calls four disciples, but, as the Divinely‑inspired St. Matthew uniquely reports, He also fulfills God’s prophecy through Isaiah of a Great Light dawning on those people dwelling in darkness and the shadow of death. This morning we consider today’s Gospel Reading under the theme, “Jesus is the Light Who dawns for you in the Gospel’s preaching and healing”.
To better appreciate Jesus’s fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy a little background is helpful. Some 700 years before Jesus’s time, an Assyrian king took large sections of the Promised Land from Israel (2 Kings 15:29), to whose people it then seemed as if God’s promises were failing. So, God through Isaiah assured the people that His promises still held and told them that later His glorious great reversal would begin in those very lands (Roehrs-Franzmann, ad loc Matthew 4:12-22, p.17). God through Gideon and men from those lands earlier had defeated the Midianites by means of a “great light” consisting of torches initially inside empty jars (Judges 7:19-25; confer/compare TLSB, ad loc Isaiah 9:4, p.1105). Only for the people in Jesus’s day, as for us, the “great light” dawns in the Gospel’s preaching and healing.
What do we expect when we settle-in to listen to preaching? Do we want sappy stories and illuminating illustrations and expect what today’s Epistle Reading called “words of eloquent wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:10-18)? Do we dislike being confronted by our sins? Would we rather hear tips or steps that we think we can follow in order to improve our lives as we envision them? Are we tired of the Gospel’s call to repentance, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand? Do we take for granted the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake? Do we find exhortations to make use of all of God’s Means of Grace to be so repetitious that we tune them out? Such is even our darkness and shadow of death! We sin in those ways and in countless other ways. Whether the latest coronavirus spreading around the world or the first disease to appear after humankind’s fall into sin, we are surrounded by sicknesses and afflictions that at least should remind us that by nature we are sinful and unbelieving and so are apart from God’s saving light and are deserving of temporal and eternal death. We cannot find our own way or help ourselves; but God acts upon us.
As St. Matthew reports elsewhere, John the Baptizer anticipated Jesus by preaching “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). As we heard in the Gospel Reading, Jesus Himself preached, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”. And, as St. Matthew reports elsewhere, Jesus called and sent His apostles to preach similarly, “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matthew 10:7). All faithful preaching, of every time and place, proclaims repentance. All faithful preaching, of every time and place proclaims both God’s law, which shows us our sin, and God’s Gospel, which shows us our Savior and forgives our sin. God Himself enables both our sorrow over our sin and our trust in Him to forgive our sin. When we so repent, then God forgives us our sin, our sin of wrongful expectations and disregard of faithful preaching, and all our other sin, whatever our sin might be. God forgives us our sin for the sake of His crucified and resurrected Son, Jesus Christ, for “Jesus is the Light Who dawns for you in the Gospel’s preaching and healing”.
For the preaching of John the Baptizer, for the preaching of Jesus, and for the preaching of those whom Jesus calls and sends, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand because Jesus is at hand. The Kingdom of Heaven is present both in His Divine and human person and in His teaching about Who He is, what He does, and how we get the benefits of what He does. As God through Isaiah went on to prophecy in the verses after today’s Old Testament Reading (Isaiah 9:1-4), to a us a Child is born, to us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and His Name shall be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over His Kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it, with justice and righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:6-7.) We have done nothing to deserve this Son, but as a gift of pure grace, out of God’s undeserved love and mercy, the Sunrise visits us from on high, to give light to us who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace (Luke 1:78-79). John the Baptizer was the forerunner of Jesus arguably also in John’s arrest and death. But, unlike John, Jesus died on the cross, in our place, the death that we otherwise would have deserved. And so, as we sang in today’s Psalm (Psalm 27:1-14; antiphon: v.1), the Lord is our light and our salvation. With faith in Him, we receive His forgiveness and all that comes with it, such as life and salvation, and we receive those gifts through the Lord’s Means of Grace.
Like John the Baptizer and Jesus Himself, Jesus calls and sends men not only to preach but also to heal (Matthew 10:1). As we heard in today’s Epistle Reading, the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but, to us who are being saved, the word of the cross is the power of God. Such powerful preaching leads to our confessing both our sins and our faith and so also to our receiving Holy Baptism, our seeking out individual Holy Absolution, and our receiving Christ’s Body and Blood with bread and wine in the Sacrament of the Altar. Especially on this Altar and its rail, our own eyes see and our own mouths receive the Lord’s salvation that is a light to reveal Him to the nations.
Today we are scheduled to sing as the second Distribution Hymn a hymn that we have not sung before here at Pilgrim in the more than eight years that I have been here (Lutheran Service Book 749). Although the hymn “There Is a Balm in Gilead” was not in previous hymnals Pilgrim used, some of you may know the hymn from elsewhere. The hymn’s primary reference is neither to the literal balm that was in Gilead (Jeremiah 8:22; 46:11), nor is it to the healing that we eventually receive in heaven, but the hymn’s primary reference is to a healing from sin that we receive now, which enables us to continue to serve God here on earth (Herl, #749, LSB:CttH, 1079). As we receive such healing through God’s Word and Sacraments, we bring forth the fruits of our repentance and faith, including rightly regarding and receiving these Means of Grace, so also living in God’s forgiveness of sins and extending our forgiveness to one another, and doing other good works according to our various callings (Apology of the Augsburg Confession XII:132). All of us are called to repentance and faith, but all of us are not called as Peter and Andrew and James and John were called, to leave, as Jesus left Nazareth before them, their homes and everything else, in order to follow Jesus and later to be sent out as His apostles. To be sure, today there still is a need for men and women to serve the Church in such sacrificial vocations, and those who do can be sure of Jesus’s promise that those who leave houses and family for His sake will receive a hundredfold (Matthew 19:29). But, such sacrificial Church work is not by its nature more holy or pleasing to God than any other calling.
Far more important than the sun’s light that shined on us yesterday, as much as we may have appreciated it, “Jesus is the Light Who dawns for you in the Gospel’s preaching and healing”. Jesus delivers us from our darkness of unbelief and the shadow of death we deserve on account of our sins. And, as we petitioned Him in today’s Collect, our God mercifully looks upon our infirmities and ultimately stretches forth the hand of His majesty to heal and defend us.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +