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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.)
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
With all that is going on right now in the world and this country, in our workplaces and schools, in the Synod and District, and even in our own families, we might wish that, as He has promised to do, Jesus would come again and take us to Himself, only sooner rather than later. Like so many things, we can veer into the ditch, as it were, on either side of this road: we can wrongly not trust Him enough and so wrongly want too much to be delivered from everything going on, or we can wrongly love this world too much and so wrongly not want to be delivered from it now, if ever. Yet, regardless of our views on the timing, as Jesus makes clear in today’s Gospel Reading, “Jesus will take believers to Himself”.
Today’s Gospel Reading, an excerpt of Jesus’s teaching on the night when He was betrayed, starts off with Jesus’s telling His disciples and us not to let their and our hearts be troubled but to believe in God the Father and in Him. Jesus assured them and assures us that in His Father’s house are many rooms, that He was going to prepare them and us a place, and that He will come again and take them and us to Himself. And, Jesus even said that they and we know the way to where He is going. Then two of Jesus’s disciples, Thomas and Philip, demonstrated with their questions what Jesus probably already knew, that His disciples did not know as much as they probably should have known.
While Jesus’s disciples and we fail to know Jesus as perfectly as we should, St. John’s Divinely-inspired Gospel account earlier records Jesus’s having a similar conversation with the Jewish leaders, who arguably did not know Jesus at all (confer Brown, ad loc John 14:6-11, p.631). In today’s First Reading (Acts 6:19; 7:2a, 51-60), we heard how St. Stephen described the Jewish leaders as stiff-necked, as uncircumcised in heart and ears, and as always resisting the Holy Spirit, Who would lead them and all people to repent of their sin and believe in God the Father and Jesus, His Son, Who reveals God the Father. By nature, we are just like the Jewish leaders: stiff necked, uncircumcised in heart and ears, and always resisting the Holy Spirit. Because of our sinful nature and all of our actual sin, we deserve temporal death and eternal punishment. We deserve not for Jesus to take us to Himself, but we deserve for Jesus to cast us out of His presence, into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
As we believe, teach, and confess with the Small Catechism’s explanation to the Third Article of the Apostles’ Creed, 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. In 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. In this Christian Church, the Holy Spirit daily and richly forgives all our sins and the sins of all believers. The Holy Spirit leads us to be sorry for our sin, to trust God the Father to forgive our sin, and to want to stop sinning. When we so repent, then God the Father forgives us. God the Father forgives our sinful nature and all of our actual sin, whatever our actual sin might be. God the Father forgives us for Jesus’s sake. As we heard Jesus Himself say in today’s Gospel Reading, when we see Jesus, we see God the Father, and through Jesus we come to God the Father, presumably both here and now and to His house for eternity.
We may not fully understand what Jesus says about “preparing” a place for us; I mean, after all, what could possibly be un-prepared about God’s presence? And, were not all the Old Testament believers already in God’s presence, even before Jesus had this conversation with His disciples? Were they in accommodations that in some sense were still under construction? Perhaps what Jesus described in the Gospel Reading was His going to His Father by way of His death on the cross for our sins and His resurrection from the grave in order to make possible all people’s salvation from their sins (Grundmann, TDNT 2:705). Out of God’s great love, mercy, and grace, Jesus died for us, in our place, the death that we deserved. Then, Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, where He sits at the right hand of God the Father. When we trust God the Father to forgive our sins for Jesus’s sake, then God the Father does forgive us. And, our trust, our faith and belief, are not generic but have specific content. For example, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, we believe that Jesus is in the Father and the Father is in Jesus. The Father and the Son share a Divine essence with the Holy Spirit, but each of the Three is a distinct Blessed Person of the Holy Trinity.
As Jesus describes in today’s Gospel Reading, the disciples’ and our faith come from the Holy Spirit’s working through both the Words that Jesus speaks on the Father’s authority and the works that the Father Who dwells in Jesus does through Jesus. We may wish for the miracles that Jesus did then, but we arguably have what Jesus describes as greater miracles now (confer Marquart, CLD IX:20). Through the water and the Word of Holy Baptism, God works forgiveness of sins, rescues from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation. Through the touch and the Word of Holy Absolution, we receive forgiveness from the pastor as from God Himself. Through bread and wine and the Word of the Sacrament of the Altar, we receive the Body of Christ given for us and the Blood of Christ shed for us, and so we receive the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.
In all of these ways, we ourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, as the Epistle Reading describes (1 Peter 2:2-10). Those spiritual sacrifices do not merit our forgiveness, but those spiritual sacrifices are sacrifices of thanks and praise for the forgiveness that God graciously gives us in Christ. As we are in Christ and He is in us, we pray to the Father in Jesus’s Name, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and those prayers—which are not as our whims dictate but are perfectly in keeping with God’s will and promise—those prayers He does, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son (confer Pieper, III:82). As we prayed in today’s Collect, there are many changes in this world, but our hearts are fixed where true joys are to be found, namely, in God’s Presence for eternity.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus says that if He goes and prepares a place for us, implicitly then He will come again and take us to Himself. The grammatical construction is called a “future condition of fact”: a statement of what will be true when the given condition is true. If Jesus goes and prepares a place for us, then He will come again and take us to Himself. And, in this case, there is no doubt that Jesus has gone to the cross and risen from the grave and so has prepared a place for us, and so we can be sure that He will come again and take us to Himself. He may take us to Himself before He comes again, as was the case with St. Stephen in today’s First Reading, or we may still be alive at the time of His final coming. Either way, in His way and time, “Jesus will take believers to Himself”. As we sang in today’s Introit (Psalm 30:15; antiphon: Psalm 149:1), we sing praises to the Lord and give thanks to His Holy Name.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +