Quinquagesima

Luke 18:31-43 - Quinquagesima - February 10, 2013 

Faith Knows What It Wants

I remember when I was a kid, my parents chose the music in the car and so my siblings and I had no choice but to grow up on Oldies – you know, the music from the 50s and 60s.  I remember feeling like I was cut off from current pop-culture even as a young boy, because all my friends knew the bands and groups that were popular throughout the 90s, and like my parents, I was totally out of touch.  Now I suppose I never felt too deprived.  I still think that the music from my parents’ generation is about as good as it gets.  But I remember thinking that these old songs that I had grown up on were overly obsessed with singing about love.  And I remember being kind of embarrassed about it, like maybe my friends’ music was “cooler” than that.  But I eventually learned that it wasn’t just a 1960s thing.  Even the music from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the music that my friends were listening to, the music that your kids and grandkids are listening to today, is just as obsessed with the topic.  Love.  The problem is – and the more music you listen to the more you realize this: how little the world knows about love. 

Elicit affairs.  Broken hearts.  That’s love.  Carnal urges.  That’s love.  One night stands that end in bitterness and betrayal.  Obsessing with youth and beauty.  Coveting your neighbor’s wife.  That’s love.  This is what people sing about.  And if the music doesn’t make it clear enough, watch TV; watch a movie.  Love is passed off as whatever makes one feel good at the moment.  Now it’s bad enough when popular culture, in its obsession with sex, claims to be extolling the virtue of love, even though it really just exploits women and children and mocks marriage.  But we see this same thing happen even when people talk about religious matters.  

People talk about the love of God as whatever affirms another person’s expression of his own love – even when it’s sin, like fornication or sodomy.  And so the loving thing, they say, is never to condemn another for what he believes or does … as long as it’s love, you can’t say it’s bad.  Does someone have a blasphemous opinion about God?  Well, his opinion is just as valuable as anyone else’s.  Does someone want to turn Jesus into a yes-man who validates whatever people feel?  Well Jesus is his as much as Jesus is yours.  No one has a monopoly on God.  No one has a monopoly on love.  It is judgmental and cruel to give the impression that another person’s religious notions are incorrect or that someone is living in soul-destroying sin.  This has become the principle religious decree of the world: live and let love.  But the world doesn’t know what love is.  And so the world does not know how to live. 

Love is not found in what makes us feel good.  Jesus certainly did not feel good when He demonstrated God’s love for humanity by bearing the whips and scourges and rejection of those whose sin He was suffering for.   No, love is not found in what pleasures man.  Love is found in what rescues man from divine retribution and judgment.  And so love is found in pain.  Because of this, true love is hidden from the eyes of the world. 

In our Gospel lesson this morning, Jesus took His twelve disciples aside and said to them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.”  Now, how did the disciples not understand these things?  It’s so clear!  But it was hidden from their eyes too, because they did not understand what love was.  They still operated according to the world’s definition. 

There’s a poem that I learned from my grandpa and from my dad, by the famous Norwegian playwright, Henry Ibsen, whose character, Brand, in one of his plays, had this to say about the world’s definition of love:

Of what the paltering world calls love,
I will not know, I cannot speak;
I know but His who reigns above,
And His is neither mild nor weak;
Hard even unto death is this,
And smiting with its awful kiss.
What was the answer of God’s love
Of old, when in the olive-grove
In anguish-sweat His own Son lay
And prayed, O, Take this cup away?
Did God take from him then the cup? 
No, child; His Son must drink it up!

To define love in any other way than in the suffering obedience of Christ is to deny the love of God for us.  “In this is love,” the Apostle writes, “not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.  Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10-11). 

It is important that we Christians, who know what love is, love one another – especially our brothers and sisters in Christ.  “He who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murder has eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3:15).  And so we love, and we love all, because God first loved all of us.  “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:16-17). 

How is it possible for us to hate those whom our God has loved so much?  It isn’t.  It is important that we love one another and even love and forgive our enemies, because it is in the love of Christ for the whole world of sinners that we as individuals find the love of God toward us.  To hate one whom God loves is to deny God’s love in its entirety.  It is to deny what our faith rests upon.  Faith and love cannot be separated from one another, because Christian faith firmly holds onto the love that God reveals toward sinners in the death of His beloved Son. 

But how can we show love to a world that operates with such a perverted view of love?  How can we show love to those who accuse us of being unloving every time we speak the truth about what God says?  It is deemed unloving to take a firm stand on what we believe.  It is unloving to refuse to worship and pray with those who do not confess what we do about God’s love in Christ.  To make the claim that Jesus is the only way, the only truth, and the only life will most certainly be met with accusations by the world that we are unloving and uncaring.  How then do we love those, who, like the disciples blinded in their ignorance, refuse to see the love in what we do and say? 

Well, we speak the truth.  Because we hear the truth.  What other love can we point to?    We continue to confess that we are sinners in need of God’s mercy.  We continue to locate God’s love in the suffering and death of Jesus.  St. Paul writes in our Epistle lesson that love bears and endures all things.  This means that it suffers the assaults of the world that persecutes and hates what we believe.  We can only do so with patience by knowing first who bore these assaults in our place.  

The world is blind.  And in her blindness, there is nothing she needs more than to receive that for which we also pray: Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.  It is true that faith will pass away.  It is true that only love endures forever, because faith will give way to sight.  It is true that prophecies will pass away.  But this does not mean that we must invent a love apart from what is prophesied.  It does not mean that we must compromise a clear confession of faith in order to show love.  No.  Far from it!  We must cling to the love that fulfills what was prophesied.  We must remain true to the love upon which saving faith depends. 

Consider the blind man in our Gospel lesson.  He was blind.  He couldn’t see.  What a picture of humanity.  The only hope he had for mercy was to recount the prophecies of Scripture, and to believe them.  And so in his cry for mercy, he identified Jesus as the one whom the prophets foretold.  “Son of David, have mercy on me!”  By calling Him the Son of David, this man identified Jesus as the one who would be forsaken by God, as David foretold, stricken, smitten, and afflicted by God, as Isaiah said, bruised for our iniquities and burdened with the load of the world’s sin.  This Man to whom he cried for mercy was the one who would do what the prophets said He would do.  The disciples in their blindness didn’t know what Jesus was talking about.  But this blind man in his need depended on it.  And he asked for it.  He confessed loudly despite the objections and rebukes of everyone who heard.  “Be silent,” they said.  But his need drove him to the promise of love.  And the promise compelled him to shout all the more.  

Faith is often pitted against love.  Faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love, right?  But there is no love that endures forever apart from the faith that receives it now.  Faith knows what it wants.  And our Gospel lesson demonstrates this very well.  Jesus had just explained to His disciples what He must do according to Scripture to save the world from sin and death.  And while the disciples could not understand it, Jesus heals the blind man.  He did this to show them what they in their blindness needed to do as well.  Ask for mercy.  Don’t expect to see anything at all of any value until your cry for mercy from the Son of David is answered.  “What do you want me to do for you?”  Jesus said.  This is the question that is always posed to faith.  What do you want?  What can Jesus do for you?  Tell him.  Confess your sins, and before the world that hushes you, learn from Jesus how to glorify God.  He alone opens blind eyes. 

The world wants love apart from seeing God.  People want to extoll the virtue of love apart from where God reveals His love for sinners.  They say that it is more important that we live “lives of love” than that we believe correctly.  Deeds over creeds.  What we believe is less important than that we love.  But what a lie!  What is more important, after all: that I show love to my son or that I teach him to know me as his dear father?  What a ridiculous a question!  I reveal to him that I am his father by loving him. 

And so God does toward us.  God teaches us what love is.  He teaches us what love requires.  He teaches us in the obedience of His Son in our place that He is our loving Father.  He teaches us what to believe.

Behold in Faith God’s only Son
Come nigh and see what Love has done
To save thee from damnation. 
The Father lays on Him thy guilt,
For thee His precious blood is spilt
To bless thee with salvation. 

This is the love that we offer to the world.  We offer it by remaining uncompromising in our confession of the truth.  “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).   It doesn’t look like love.  It looks like rejection.  It looks like condemnation.  It looks like death.  And it is.  It is ours.  Taken away from us.  So that we might be received by God.  True love is seen when God takes our sin seriously, not when He pretends to ignore it.  God won’t ignore it.  He didn’t.  So we don’t.  And He won’t ignore the sinner in his need.  He hears the cry for mercy.  We tell Him what we want, what we don’t have.  And He gives to us out of His great love what we need, for Jesus’ sake. 

Even as Christians, our love is imperfect.  We resent our persecutions and grow bitter against the world.  We fight with each other, we argue, we gossip, we hold grudges, we lust for what the world offers as its highest good.  Our love fails.  We fall short.  And so we return to the love that does not fail, the love that is perfect.  And just as our cries for mercy are answered, so we continue to sing our songs – not of our generation, but of our God – until faith is turned to sight in heaven’s glory and our hearts are made pure forever.  We sing of Jesus. 

My song is love unknown,
My Savior’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take frail flesh and die?

Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend,
In Whose sweet praise
I all my days could gladly spend.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.