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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 the Processional Gospel (John 12:12-19), the large crowd that had come to Jerusalem for the Passover took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Jesus, crying out to Him for salvation and acclaiming Him the Messianic King. As Jesus’s disciples realized after He was glorified, Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of today’s Old Testament Reading (Zechariah 9:9-12), riding into the city on a donkey’s colt, bringing salvation and peace. The crowd that came with Jesus from Bethany continued to bear witness about Jesus’s raising Lazarus from the dead, and the Pharisees complained to one another that the world had gone after Jesus.
Seemingly to illustrate that point, as we heard in the Gospel Reading, the Divinely‑inspired St. John next tells how some Greeks came, expressing their wish to see Jesus, which wish, whether or not the Greeks were there to hear it, prompted Jesus to talk about the need for Him, like a seed, to die, in order to bear much fruit, and calling for His followers to likewise hate their life in this world. For, Jesus said, the time had come for the ruler of this world to be cast out, but for Jesus to be lifted up from the earth and draw all people to Himself. Yet, despite Jesus’s final warning, some people would not be drawn to Him, and St. John explained that unwillingness to be drawn in relationship to two passages of God’s Word through the prophet Isaiah: the first passage that St. John quotes’ being specifically about the people’s not believing in God’s Suffering Servant, and the second passage that St. John quotes’ being about the Lord’s sending Isaiah to people who would remain impenitent and so lost.
The large crowd that took palm branches and met Jesus had heard that Jesus had done the sign of raising Lazarus from the dead, and, though St. John does not explicitly tell us what made those Greeks wish to see Jesus, we can easily imagine that they also had heard about that sign or Jesus’s other signs, for Jesus had done so many signs, all intended to manifest His glory and so create faith in those who saw and heard (John 2:11; 20:30-31). And, people can come to Jesus only if the Father Who sent Jesus—or Jesus Himself, or the Holy Spirit—first draws them (John 6:44), as by Word of those same miraculous signs. To be sure, God first seriously wills and acts to save all people (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, XI:78; Pieper, II:30-31), but, since some—we might say “many”, or perhaps we should even say “most”—people resist God’s drawing and will not be saved (Matthew 7:13-14; Luke 13:24), God then, after a time of grace, may harden them so that they cannot repent and be saved, but He eventually certainly damns them, as their sins—and our sins—deserve.
Most likely, we who are here today—whether in-person, via Skype, or streaming or downloading later—are not those who repeatedly resist and flat-out refuse to be saved, though that does not mean that we are without any sin in these regards. In today’s Gospel Reading there are both those who came to Jesus and apparently believed in Him and those, such as the Pharisees, who did not come to Jesus and apparently did not believe in Him, but there also are those, such as many of the authorities, who believed in Him but did not confess it, who loved the glory that comes from people more than the glory that comes from God, arguably loving their life in this world more than eternal life, being unwilling to suffer the consequences of following Jesus, such as being put out of the synagogue. At times, we also may be reluctant in various ways to confess our faith in Jesus. We also may love the glory that comes from people more than the glory that comes from God. We also may love our lives in this world more than eternal life. We also may be unwilling to suffer the consequences of following Jesus, such as our being put out of our modern social groups. We sin in these and countless other ways, and so we deserve temporal and eternal punishment, unless, as God calls and enables us to, we live in repentance and faith.
Like the people on that first Palm Sunday, we cry out to Jesus for salvation and acclaim Him our Messianic King. And, as He heard them and acted, so He hears us and acts! As we heard prophesied in the Old Testament Reading, Jesus came humbly, bringing salvation and peace, and, as we heard in the Epistle Reading (Philippians 2:5‑11), though Jesus was and is God in human flesh, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Jesus willingly died on the cross for the sins of the whole world, including your sins and mine. Jesus died in our place, the death that we deserved. There on the cross is the love of God for you and for me! There, in a sense, is the reversal of the fall into sin, now the casting out of the prince of this world, instead of the man and the woman who were cast out from the garden (Genesis 3:24; Pieper, II:517; confer II:344). There is the grain of wheat that dies and bears much fruit. There is the Son of Man lifted up from the earth and drawing all people to Himself. In the Gospel Reading, Jesus does not seem to answer the crowd’s question about how He could say that the Son of Man had to be lifted up to death, if the Scripture said that the Christ remained forever, but the answer to that seeming contradiction arguably is in Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. The Son of Man is lifted up to death but then rises again and remains forever! With the eyes of faith, we see the glory of God in Jesus’s death on the cross and His resurrection from the grave, and, by grace through that faith, God forgives us our sinful nature and all of our sins, whatever our sins might be. God forgives us through His resistible means of grace.
As we believe, teach, and confess in the words of the Small Catechism, by our own reason or strength, we cannot believe in Jesus Christ our Lord or come to Him, but the Holy Spirit calls us by the Gospel, enlightens us with His gifts, and sanctifies and keeps us in the true faith—the same way the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian Church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith (Small Catechism, II:6). We are baptized and absolved in the Triune Name of God, which Name Jesus prayed the Father to glorify and He did in Christ. We are the Triune God’s possession, and we are under His protection, illuminated as children of the light. And, where Jesus is, there we are, such as gathering around His presence on this Altar through bread that is His Body given for us and wine that is His Blood shed for us, for the forgiveness of sins and so also for life and salvation. As we heard in the Old Testament Reading, because of and by way of the blood of His covenant with us, God sets us free from the punishment we otherwise deserve.
So set free, forgiven and transformed by God’s working through His resistible means of grace, we at least try to live the lives that we should live: in various ways confessing our faith in Jesus; loving less the glory that comes from people and loving more the glory that comes from God; loving less our lives in this world (and not being afraid to lose them!) because we love more eternal life; and being willing to suffer the consequences of following Jesus, such as our being put out of our modern social groups. Yet, while trying to live these lives that we should live, we will continue to fail, and so we live every day with sorrow over our sin and trust that God forgives our sins freely for Jesus’s sake. We live every day like that until Jesus comes the final time in glory or until the day of our deaths, whichever comes first. And, on the Last Day, God’s voice will call all bodies from their graves irresistibly so that with reunited bodies and souls the unrepentant unbelievers will depart from Jesus to experience the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41) and the repentant believers will come to Jesus to inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world (Matthew 25:34).
As today’s Gospel Reading makes clear, those are the choices: to be “Cast out from Jesus or drawn to come to Him”. We are drawn and come. Now and for eternity, at the name of Jesus our knees bow and our tongues confess that He is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +