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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 Three-year Lectionary Series that we at Pilgrim follow for Sundays and other Festivals does not appoint any readings for midweek Advent or Lenten services such as this one, leaving individual congregations and their pastors, for better or for worse, each to do what is right in their own eyes (Judges 17:6; 21:25). In the past we have read The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ Drawn from the Four Gospel Accounts, which, as I mentioned in my newspaper column two Saturdays ago (http://www.pilgrimlc.org/news/ministers-moment-march-02-2019), results in our reading none of the four accounts appreciatively. Since this year of our Three-year Series primarily uses St. Luke’s Divinely‑inspired account, we would normally hear his account of the events from the plot to kill Jesus through His burial (Luke 22:1-23:56) on Palm Sunday, also called the Sunday of the Passion, but, freed from the bulletin insert’s “dictating” our readings, this year we will exercise another option that day. And so, this year in our five midweek Lenten services between Ash Wednesday and Holy Week we are going to read St. Luke’s account of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, and, in that same spirit, in those five midweek Lenten services, I am preaching on five of the fifteen unique contributions that St. Luke makes to the whole picture of our Lord’s suffering and death for us. Tonight’s first of those unique contributions is our Lord’s mentioning “Peter’s Being Sifted and Strengthening”.
Listen again to Luke 22:31-32, where Jesus said:
31 “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, 32 but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.”
We want to note well that our English versions obscure where Jesus is speaking to Simon Peter individually with a singular “you” and where Jesus is speaking to Simon Peter and the other apostles with a plural “you” (or we might say “y’all” or “all y’all”). Jesus says that Satan demanded to have Simon and the other apostles in order to sift them all like wheat, and Jesus says that He Himself has prayed for Simon individually so that his faith would not completely fail, and Jesus commands Simon, when he has turned again, to strengthen his brothers.
Where literal wheat might be sifted either with a larger sieve to separate it from foreign matter or with a smaller sieve to separate the wheat from the chaff (Fuchs, TDNT 7:292), Jesus is talking figuratively about Satan’s demand to “try” (or “test”) the apostles’ faith to the verge of overthrowing it (ESL #4617). And, we note that Jesus’s speaking of Simon’s “turning again” is itself a prophecy of Simon’s faith’s to some extent failing Satan’s trials, specifically, as Jesus goes on to foretell, by denying Jesus three times (Luke 22:34), which three denials St. Luke narrates some twenty verses later, as will hear next week (Luke 22:54-62). Of course, not only Simon and the other apostles, but all of God’s people (Amos 9:9) are shaken through a sieve of such trials or tests, including you and me. And, like Simon, the other apostles, and all of God’s people, too often your and my faith to some extent fails. We may not deny Jesus in exactly the same way as Simon did, but we deny Jesus in other ways: sometimes sinning openly for many people to see, and sometimes sinning more privately for maybe no one other than ourselves and God to see. Regardless, by such sin, we show ourselves, apart from repentance, to be not wheat to be gathered into His barn but chaff to be burned with unquenchable fire (Matthew 3:12; Luke 3:17), in the eternal torment of hell.
Yet, as Jesus foretold Simon’s “turning again” in repentance, so God calls and enables us also to turn in sorrow from our sin and with faith in God to forgive our sin for the sake of Jesus’s suffering and death for us. Jesus set fast His face to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51) and there to endure even death, death on the cross for us and for our salvation. As we sang in the Opening Hymn, Jesus strove with Satan and He won (Lutheran Service Book 418:2). On the cross, Jesus, true God in human flesh, destroyed Satan’s work (1 John 3:8). Jesus both lived the perfect life that we fail to live, and, in our place, He died the death that we otherwise deserve to die. We receive through faith both the righteousness of Jesus’s perfect life and the righteousness of His death. When we turn in sorrow from our sin and with faith in God to forgive our sin, then God forgives our sin, all our sin, public and private denials of Jesus, or whatever our sin might be. God forgives our sin through His Word in all of its forms, especially His Word’s sacramental forms: Holy Baptism, Holy Absolution, and the Sacrament of the Altar.
After his three-fold denial and the intervening resurrection of our Lord, Peter himself is sometimes said to have received a three-fold absolution directly from Jesus, when Jesus revealed Himself again to them by the sea of Tiberias, as we will hear again in the coming Easter Season (John 21:15-19). We receive individual absolution from those the Lord Jesus has called and ordained to act on His behalf, successors to Peter and the other apostles, whom He earlier had sent out, having given them a special gift of the Holy Spirit to exercise His authority to forgive sins and withhold forgiveness (John 20:21-23). That authority and its forgiveness, with the resulting life and salvation, is the same whether in the Word read or preached to groups or applied to individuals as it is connected with water in Holy Baptism, with the pastor’s touch in Holy Absolution, or with bread and wine that are the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar. Ultimately it is not pastors who act anymore than it was ultimately Peter who strengthened his brothers, but, as He himself later wrote by Divine inspiration, it is the God of all grace who strengthens us (1 Peter 5:10; confer 2 Peter 1:12-15).
And, we need that strengthening. We are not ignorant of Satan’s designs (2 Corinthians 2:11). Satan may demand to have us, that he might sift us like wheat, but we know that God is stronger than Satan, and that, as we are in Him, we are protected by Him. These verses that St. Luke uniquely contributes to the whole picture of our Lord’s suffering and death for us may not say it, but we know from elsewhere that Jesus also prays for us, especially that we be kept from the evil one (John 17:9, 11, 15; 1 John 2:1). As was the case with Peter, and Job long before him (John 1:6-2:10), God sets a limit to how far Satan can afflict us, using Satan’s efforts to “try” or “test” us but ultimately to purify our faith, like separating the wheat from foreign matter or from the chaff. We try not to deny our Lord but instead to confess Him, to confess Him even in the midst of trials, whether difficulties at work or school, our church, in our families, or even with our own health. As we sang in the Office Hymn, when God’s mercy sends us sorrow, toil, and woe, or pain attends us on our path below, we seek to see His hand and cast our cares on Him (Lutheran Worship 511:3), who not only in our hour of trial but always pleads for us.
Reflecting on St. Luke’s unique contribution of “Peter’s Being Sifted and Strengthening” has assured us that, even though we also are sifted as wheat and our faith often fails, God calls and enables us also to turn again, and He forgives and strengthens us with His own Word and Sacraments. The fourth stanza of tonight’s Closing Hymn by seventh-century hymn-writer Paul Gerhardt “long served as a children’s bedtime prayer” (Precht, #485, p.496), and we have no trouble realizing why, for it invokes Jesus’s protection as we prepare for sleep. To paraphrase the translation of Gerhardt, we can be sure that, asleep or awake, as children of God, we will meet no eternal harm (LSB 880:4).
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +