Trinity 11

Luke 18:9-14 - Trinity Eleven - August 7, 2016
 A Meditation on Divine Mercy

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Last week while I was gone, the appointed Gospel lesson gave a stirring image of God’s wrath as our Lord Jesus overturned the tables in the temple court and drove out those who bought and sold.  Divine zeal had consumed him.  If that wasn’t divine wrath nothing is.  In fact, last year the title for my sermon on last Sunday’s lesson was, “A Meditation on Divine Wrath.”  Since God’s wrath is real, it’s important that we know what makes God angry.  God demonstrates his wrath and teaches us to fear it not only in order that we might obey him, but also so that we might see our need for him to have mercy.  Even as Jesus wept for Jerusalem right before these events, we already learned the purpose of his wrath.  God’s wrath always serves his mercy.  Today’s sermon is therefore titled, “A Meditation on Divine Mercy.”  

God says through the prophet Ezekiel, “As I live, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11).  This is some sort of mystery, isn’t it?  God cannot deny his justice.  He most certainly does delight in destroying what is evil, doesn’t he?  And yet his love for humanity is so great.  His desire to remove our sin abounds even beyond his desire to punish it.  As the Apostle says, “Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” (Romans 5:20).  God became man in order to remove our sins by bearing his own wrath against them in our place.  God’s most earnest response to sin can therefore more properly be said to be grace than anger – because as real as God’s wrath is, so also his mercy is real.  As real as God’s sovereign holiness is, so just as real, and for us more significantly real, is that divine love that has been burning within the triune Godhead from eternity.  This love was extended in creation (“Let Us make man in Our image”).  It was manifest in our redemption (“That the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave Me commandment, so I do”).  And it is stretched out towards a rebellious world where the Holy Spirit publishes those glad tidings of good news for all men (“as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God”). 

Because of this, in a certain manner of speaking, if we are very careful in understanding what this means, we might even say that God’s mercy is more real than his wrath since God’s wrath is simply his righteous response to sin; while his love, on the other hand, is intrinsic to who he is.  Our Lutheran Confessions call the work of the law, which is to accuse and condemn, God’s alien work.  He only does it for the sake of the gospel, which is his proper work, namely to console and bless and give life.  God’s wrath only exists if sin exists.  God’s love, however, exists from eternity – before he made anything to love – and has been expressed from eternity between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This is the love into which Christ restores us and into which his gospel invites us. 

The reason God gets angry at sin is because sin denies the very love that defines who he is.  As the Apostle writes, “Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10).  God desires to do no harm to us.  The wrath he reveals, then, is really a manifestation of his love toward us.  Think about it.  God hates what is not love.  God is love.  His wrath always exists in relation to his love – in defense of his love – out of his desire that even you, a sinner, properly and truly know his love to be for you.  God is for you.  He hates only that which is opposed to him.  He therefore hates your sin.  So out of the same love that is integral to who he is, God shows mercy on those who deserve his wrath. 

He does so not just by wiping clean their slate.  He rather shows mercy by bringing estranged sinners back to himself.  He orients their hearts and minds back toward himself so that sinners learn to fear, love, and trust God again.  He does this by forgiving them their sins and clothing them in the righteous obedience that he himself accomplished as a Man.  He teaches us to love love by teaching us to know our need for love. 

God is love.  God cannot deny himself.  This makes mercy much greater than wrath.  God does not fulfill his wrath so that he can love.  No!  He fulfills his wrath against sin in Christ because he does love.  He does not love because he is first wrathful.  No, he is wrathful because he has first loved.  God’s desire to save is great.  His desire to damn only exists insofar as his limitless mercy is refused. 

So, to summarize so far:  God is love.  That is why he shows wrath against sin – because sin denies love.  God is love.  That is why he loves to show mercy to sinners – because to be God is to love. God loves you.  He loves you by saving you from what God hates.  He saves you from your sin by sending his Son whom he loves to take upon himself everything that God hates about you.  His Son has done it.  In the gospel, in the absolution, in God’s sure word of kindness, in the body and blood of God once shed for you, you are covered in and protected by and fed with the very righteousness of Jesus that becomes your very own possession by faith in him.  

God has no pleasure in killing the wicked.  He rather takes pleasure in forgiving sinners.  That’s what he says.  Isaiah tells us in chapter 53 what the Lord has pleasure in.  He writes concerning Christ that it pleased the Lord to bruise him, to put him to grief, and to make his soul an offering for sin.  In this he has pleasure: in the death of his holy and obedient Son who takes the place of those who have merited damnation.  God demonstrates his eternal love for us by executing all his righteous wrath against his beloved Son who pleased him in all that he did as our Brother. 

God doesn’t demonstrate his love by deciding not to be so perturbed by sin as much as he used to be.  No way.  How can a loving God choose to no longer hate the sin that denies the love that he has and is?  No.  He must hate sin.  He does hate sin.  If he is to be a loving God, he must lash out against sin and put an end to it.  And so this is how God demonstrates his love: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  — While we were stoking our desires, and stroking our pride – while we were feeding our grudges, our fueling our fixation on gaining stuff even at the expense of our neighbor’s comfort and happiness – while we were enemies of God, Christ died for us.  While we persisted in our defiant disregard for the glory of God who gives us everything we have, Christ died for us.  While we were helplessly enslaved to the sin that God threatens to punish, Christ died for us – the just for the unjust.  God punished your sin and mine and the sin of all enemies of mercy – he punished it in Christ.  In this way he not only satisfied the wrath that his love necessitated, but he also satisfied his eternal longing to lovingly rescue and redeem his rebellious creation. 

What is more, because he dearly wants each one of you to know his love for you, he teaches you to hate sin the way that he does – to hate it in yourself, to repent of it, and to earnestly desire to see it removed not only from the book of judgment, but also from your heart.  And dear Christians, he does.  He forgives it fully.  And with this good conscience towards God, even though the sin you hate is the sin in your own heart and mind, you know that the sin that God hates he does not see in you.  He forgives it.  He sees it only there where Jesus took it away on the cross. 

Dear brothers and sisters, if you want to be bold before God in prayer, if you want to confidently look forward to heaven as though you already had it, since by faith you do, if you want to resist temptation on one hand, and lift up your hearts in true hope and love toward God who loves you on the other, look to him who became your sin for you – look to the serpent suspended on the post for all who suffer from the venom of sin to see.  Look to Christ crucified for you.  There you have peace with God.  There you see the eternal heart of God towards you.  And – if it has some more immediate comfort to say so – there you see the present and current love of God toward you too.  He has mercy on you, a sinner … now.  He forgives you even today so that you go home justified before the only one whose hatred of sin even matters! 

He who teaches you to hate sin in yourself and to see your sin taken away on the cross also teaches you to hate sin in others.  And yet he shows you how to deal with it the same way he has dealt with it in you — suffer if you must, be wronged and denied justice if need be, forgive and pray for reconciliation – as we have been taught: Hate the sin; Love the sinner.  This is love.  It is always mindful of that which contradicts itself, namely sin.  But it is all the more so mindful of its own desire, namely to have compassion on our enemies, to do good to those who cannot repay, to forgive even as we have been forgiven in Christ. 

St. Paul writes in Romans 11, “God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all” (Romans 11:32).  God takes pleasure in mercy.  We find God to be a merciful God only when we recognize our sin.  So also when we recognize sin in others, we do not do so to raise ourselves above them, but to do towards them what God has done towards us.  In order to show such love, we must know such love.  When we recognize our own sin, we learn three things: First, that we are all in this horrible mess together; we have all rebelled and all must bear our own weight.  Second, that our God threatens to punish our sin and that no man can bear another’s load.  And third, that God promises that he has punished your sin in Christ, since although no mere man can bear your load, God can.  For this reason he became your Brother. 

Since it is for the sake of mercy that God reveals his wrath, it is no surprise what our incarnate Lord said when he drove out those who sold for profit from the temple; as you heard last Sunday: “It is written, ‘My house is a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves’” (Luke 19:46).  Jesus wants his temple to be a house of prayer.  This morning we heard Jesus tell a parable about two men who come to that very same temple to do just that – to pray.  But with this parable Jesus teaches us what kind of prayer he has in mind.  One man prayed for mercy; the other did not. 

If it defiles the temple to turn it into a warehouse of merchandise and to sell things for profit, so it defiles the temple all the more to pedal off your own your good works as though they are worth something to God.  This is what the first man did.  He was a Pharisee.  He did not come in to sell livestock and doves to those who wanted to offer sacrifices.  That would have been bad enough.  Instead, he came to the temple with something he thought was worth even more.  Those who sold for profit were ripping off those who bought.  But this man sought to rip off his neighbor in a much more profound way – by ripping off God.  By presuming to have something that God would want to buy, he denied his neighbor what he came for. 

How else could he sell God what he had?  This is basic marketing.  In order to sell a product, you have to persuade your potential buyer first that he needs what you have, and second that you’re offering something better than your competitors.   When one seeks to justify himself before God, he regards all other men as competitors.  He has to spruce up his own good works to make them stand out.  He has to compare his righteousness to the sins of others.  This is exactly what he did. 

But what he would deny his neighbor, God would not.  God’s mercy is not for sale.  It is free – as free as his breath was breathed in the clay from which our first father was formed – free as the greeting to St. Mary who received and conceived her Lord according to his word – free as the wind that blows where it will to warm the hearts of those made cold by fear and dread and bitterness.  “You who have no money, come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isaiah 55:1).  No, God’s mercy is not for sale.  It is free.  

You see sin.  In me?  In him or her?  You see what we owe?  To you?  To God?  Friends, see what God paid, not with gold or silver, but with the holy blood of his own eternally beloved.  For me.  For him and her.  For you.  Owe no one anything but to learn to love the gospel and so to treat your neighbor in such a way that maybe, perchance, God loves him too. 

What God commands in the 10 Commandments, is not his way of expressing what he needs from us.  It is his way of teaching us what he loves.  He loves your neighbor.  He loves you.  And as the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, so the Son has life to give to all who have nothing to sell him.  Take heart.  You go home justified, forgiven, and with God’s blessing to pursue this love in all you do for Jesus sake.  Oh that we would meditate on this forever!  Amen!