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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. (Amen.)
“Blessed are you-all,” Jesus says in today’s Gospel Reading, “when others revile (or “insult” [NIV, NASB]) you-all and persecute you-all and utter all kinds of evil against you-all falsely on My account.” I quoted that statement of the Lord’s to various people a number of times last year, as our Pilgrim congregation, especially her Board of Elders and her pastor, were, as most of you know, the repeated targets of a good deal of both spoken and written false evil statements because of our faithfulness to Jesus. Acknowledging our blessedness in the midst of such persecution by defamation is hard enough, but that is not where Jesus stops. “Rejoice and be glad,” He continues, “for (or “because” [NIV]) you-all’s reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you-all.” Rejoicing and being glad because our reward is great in heaven might seem easy enough, but rejoicing and being glad for persecution—not only “in spite of” but also “because of” persecution (Lenski, ad loc Matthew 5:12, p.197)? Those kind of reactions have got to be Divine gifts. Considering today’s Gospel Reading this morning, we realize that “When we are persecuted for Christ’s sake, we are blessed, rejoice, and are glad.”
Today’s Gospel Reading includes more than just that one statement of “blessedness”, which kind of statements are usually called “beatitudes”. These Beatitudes come at the beginning of the so-called “Sermon on the Mount”, what is often regarded as the first of five extended “discourses”, or sections of teaching, in St. Matthew’s Gospel account. Today’s Gospel Reading picks up right where last week’s Gospel Reading left off, leading up to that teaching (Matthew 4:12-25). From last week, you may remember that the Divinely‑inspired St. Matthew described Jesus’s beginning His public ministry as fulfilling prophecy about a great light’s dawning on those, especially the nations of Gentiles, dwelling in darkness and the shadow of death, and the Divinely‑inspired St. Matthew described Jesus’s drawing, from a broad region prophesied in the Old Testament, great crowds.
Today’s Gospel Reading picks up with Jesus’s, having seen those crowds, going up a mountain, and, when He had had sat down, His disciples’ coming to Him, and His, having opened His mouth, teaching them the Beatitudes. We hear these Beatitudes every year on All Saints’ Day, and, whatever else they might say about the saints im-personally, the last Beatitude seems to speak personally as it is repeated and, in the process, emphasized, especially the persecution. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” becomes “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” And, in Jesus’s following statement, the possession of the “Kingdom of Heaven” seems to become “your reward is great in heaven”, and the three mentions of persecution return to just one mention of “persecuting”, as in the preceding statement.
Such religious persecution entails guilt on the part of those doing the persecuting, but there can also be guilt on the part of the ones being persecuted. One writer describes religious persecution as a “privilege” and a “test” for those who are persecuted, not only a test to see if we “rejoice” and “are glad”, as Jesus commands in today’s Gospel Reading, and as we at Pilgrim probably did not really do after we recently were slandered and libeled, but religious persecution is also a test, as Jesus goes on to describe later in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:44), to see if we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Oepke, TDNT 2:230), and we at Pilgrim probably did not really do those things as well as we should have recently, either. Another writer describes how the right response to persecution does not come naturally to us (Roehrs‑Franzmann, ad loc Matthew 5:11-12, p.19), at least not to our sinful human nature. Our sinful human nature not only leads us not to respond rightly to persecution, but our sinful human nature also leads us to speak all kinds of evil against others falsely, and so others may speak all kinds of evil against us truly (confer 1 Peter 4:15).
In today’s Old Testament Reading (Micah 6:1-8), the Lord brings an indictment against His people and calls them to plead their case, as it were, before the mountains and hills. They could do nothing for the sin of their souls, and we can do nothing for the sin of our souls, either. Because of our sinful nature and all of our actual sins, we deserve temporal death and eternal punishment, but, out of His great love and mercy, God calls and thereby enables us to repent, and, when we do repent, then God forgives us and thereby saves us by grace through faith in His Son Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Jesus is the “Word made flesh. whose birth among us”, as our Hymn of the Day puts it, “Hallows (or, “makes holy”) all of our human race” (Lutheran Service Book 842:1). We are blessed in Him! Others may utter all kinds of evil against us falsely on Jesus’s account, or they may utter all kinds of evil against us truly, but what Jesus says is what matters. We trust His objective reality over our subjective feelings! His “strong Word”, another hymn says, “bespeaks us righteous” (LSB 578:3), and so we are righteous. Jesus was insulted and otherwise persecuted—even to the point of death on a cross—for the sake of our righteousness. God’s promise to Abraham about a very great reward is fulfilled also for us (Genesis 15:1), but not a reward as something that we earn. Jesus bore the sins of the world and died for all—in our place, the death that we deserved. As we repent, we receive His righteousness, which in turn leads us to follow His example. As the Divinely‑inspired St. Peter writes, if we are insulted for the name of Christ, we are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon us (1 Peter 4:14).
God gives us that Holy Spirit through His Word and Sacraments (Augsburg Confession V:2), His Word attached to things that we feel, see, and taste. In today’s Epistle Reading (1 Corinthians 1:18-31), the Divinely-inspired St. Paul described the preaching of Christ crucified as folly (or, “foolishness”) to those who are perishing but as the wisdom and power of God to those who are being saved (confer Romans 1:16). That same wisdom and power of God that works in the reading and preaching of His Word also works with water in Holy Baptism, with the pastor’s touch in individual Holy Absolution, and with the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar that are the Body of Christ given for us and the Blood of Christ shed for us and so therefore also give us forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. From the prophets, Christ, and His disciples with the Church in the past (confer Acts 7:52) to the present and to the future: those who preach God’s Word and administer His Sacraments, as well as those who hear and otherwise receive them, have been persecuted before, are persecuted now, and will be persecuted as long as this life continues, but, importantly, such persecution does not continue forever.
Yet, here and now, we who repent are already transformed by God’s working through His Word and Sacraments, and so we begin to do such things as rejoice and be glad, when others revile us and persecute us and utter all kinds of evil against us falsely. We are just like the apostles, when they were arrested and even beaten, who rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for Jesus’s Name (Acts 5:41). And, we begin to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Such and other good works of keeping God’s Commandments according to our various callings in life flow from our faith and God’s work in us making us ever more‑holy in this life. Our suffering because we confess Christ by words and deeds testifies to us that we belong to Christ (Pieper, III:72). The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther even goes so far as to say that the enemies of the Gospel’s agreeing with us would be a sure sign that we had lost the true teaching and practice, for the true Church “must suffer persecution because it teaches the Gospel purely” (Luther, ad loc Galatians 5:11 [1535], AE 27:44).
Considering the Gospel Reading this morning, we have realized that “When we are persecuted for Christ’s sake, we are blessed, rejoice, and are glad.” The uttering of all kinds of evil against us here at Pilgrim falsely on Jesus’s account in some ways may make it harder for us to be used by God to bring other people to Him, but ultimately God can and does overcome that obstacle as He overcomes all other obstacles to bring other people to faith. God gets us through the persecution that He in His wisdom permits us to face, through us God brings other people to faith, and together we rejoice and are glad, both now and forever.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +