John 8:46-59 - Judica, Lent V/Annunciation - March 25, 2012
Of God
It is our job to discipline and correct our children. It is
a sin not to do this. The 4th
Commandment gives a special responsibility to parents as well as to
children. Of course parents should not
be overly harsh. St. Paul tells us, “Fathers,
do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition
of the Lord.” It is to our
children’s temporal and eternal benefit that we teach them to listen to the
words that we say. When they know that
our authority is real, then they learn that God’s authority is real. When we teach them that our authority is a
sham or that our threats are empty, then they learn that God’s authority is a
sham and that His threats are empty. Children
need to be taught the truth about God.
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old
he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). A father who will not teach his son in the
way he should go shows no love for him. But
when a child who receives firm discipline grows up, he learns the value of that
which was once unpleasant. And in his
acquired wisdom he learns to be grateful to his parents for the guidance he
received. This can be aptly compared to
our relationship with God: “My son, do not despise the chastening of
the Lord, nor detest His correction; for whom the Lord loves He corrects, just
as a father the son in whom he
delights” (Proverbs 3:11-12).
A father teaches his son.
A son learns from his father. God
teaches us and we learn from Him. He is
our Father. A son who despises
discipline and who will not heed the words of his father hates his father—he
denies the relationship into which God has placed him. So also, he who despises the Lord’s
instruction and will not listen to what God says hates God. He denies the relationship that God desires
to have with His children. He is not of God.
This is what Jesus says in our Gospel this morning. “Whoever
is of God hears God’s words.” Then Jesus continued, “The
reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” So He said to those who despised
the words He spoke.
God is the Father of all.
But the saving relationship we have with God is not based simply on the
fact that He made us. God made the birds
of the air and the beasts of the field that have no souls to save. And indeed God is the maker and preserver even
of those who by their unbelief have rejected His salvation. The saving relationship we have with God is
also not based on the fact that we obey Him and please Him by our own works. My son is my son not because of anything he
does or doesn’t do. But as my son, I
love him, and so I teach him, and he receives my words. And here lies the relationship between us and
God. We listen to Him when He speaks,
and He has the words of eternal life.
God loves us. We are
born to be His children by faith through water and the word where He covers and
forgives us all our sins for Jesus’ sake.
It is this same word by which He teaches us what it means to be His
children: He teaches us who He is and who we are; He teaches us what to
believe; He teaches us how to behave. Ah,
but just as my children are towards me, and your children are towards you, we
also often disobey our Father in heaven.
Oh, we have heard His word.
We have learned the 10 Commandments.
We have all been taught what they require of us and what they tell us
not to do. When we covet, when we lust,
when we gossip and hold grudges, we are disobeying what God has clearly told us
not to do.
This disobedience begins in our hearts. The desire to have what your neighbor has
begins in the dissatisfaction toward what God has given you. The willingness to put the worst construction
on something you hear about someone else finds its source in your heart that desires
to find glory at the expense of others. Our
ungratefulness for all the earthly benefits that God showers upon us, our
desire for more and more despite how much wealth God has given — all of this can
most appropriately be compared to a child who takes for granted the love and
nurture of his parents.
So what is our relationship to God? Is He still our Father? Are we still His children? Well, if we look for a natural kinship, we
will find that we are by nature sinful and unclean. If we look for a relationship that we have
earned, we will find that we have merited His temporal and eternal
punishment. This is what God’s word
teaches us.
St. Paul writes to us in Ephesians 5,
“Let
no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things [that is, because of the various sins of
idolatry] the wrath of God comes upon
the sons of disobedience.” By nature, by deed, we are sons of
disobedience. But by adoption, by grace,
we are sons of God. When we listen to
what He says, we are not deceived by empty words. We are enlivened and enlightened by the very
word that brought life and light into existence. And here we find our relationship with our
Maker and Redeemer as sons and daughters of God.
We do not deny what we are by nature in order to pretend to
have a familial relationship with God. No,
we confess what we are. God tells us
to. We don’t appeal to our family ties;
we don’t appeal to our church membership or to our association to someone with
a strong faith; we don’t appeal to how well we have behaved. Instead we appeal to our status as baptized
sons and daughters. There in our Baptism
His holy word turned plain water into a life-giving bath that washed our sins
away. We appeal to the good conscience
we have towards our Father in heaven for the sake of the suffering and death of
His eternal Son. By faith in the words
that He says, God credits to us Christ’s pleasing life of obedience. So we hear God. We are His children. And we who are sinful from birth hold onto
the rebirth that made us heirs of heaven.
We listen to His words. And so we
are today, as Jesus says, of God.
Children tend to disobey their parents. That’s just what they do. If ever it seems like you have found a child
who perhaps does not disobey his parents, watch out for that one. He’s sneaky, and he’s probably getting away
with something. All children are naughty
to some degree. And even in their most
earnest desires to please mom and dad they struggle with a weakness that they
cannot uproot from their hyper little hearts.
They’re sinners. They all do
things that require constant correction and discipline until that day when they
leave the nest. So do we.
Just like a naughty little child, no sinner completely
masters his sinful flesh. We must all
wrestle with our naughtiness, our vanity, our selfish judgments and desires
until the day we die. And just like a
naughty child often draws the attention and scrutiny of more than just his
parents, so also, God is not the only one who notices our sin. The world will see it. The devil will see it. And they will accuse. They will judge. We who call ourselves God’s children fall
into doing those very things that our God forbids. “What
kind of child are you?” the devil will say, “You are not a child of God, but a son of disobedience? Just look at
all your sin.” The devil will chide us, “You
do not deserve to claim such a relationship with God.”
Now the devil may be right.
But he is not our father. He has
no right to lecture us. We are not of the devil, remember. He is a liar.
But we are of God. He tells the
truth. Yes, we see by our sin that we have
been disobedient children, and so we confess it. We don’t deny it. We do not say that we are without sin because
then the truth would not be in us. But
we are of God, and so we heed God’s
word and confess that His judgment is true.
And our Father in heaven is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness. He gives us a
better judgment, because when God our Father sees our sin He covers it for
Jesus’ sake.
What makes us the children of God is not our perfect
behavior. Rather what makes us His
children is that we have received His correction as from a father, and we
continue to receive it. We have not
despised it. And why? Because like a true child we know His love
for us. Long before the devil could
accuse us, before the world could mock us, before our consciences were even
ashamed, God, in love for us, corrected and chastised His only begotten Son on
the cross. There hung the only son of
disobedience being punished by His eternal Father. But it was our sin. In our place, Jesus bore the wrath and stripes
that are hard to bear. And by His
passion we share the fruit of His salvation.
Here we find the obedience of a Son: “Yeah,
Father, Yeah, most willingly, I’ll bear what Thou commandest.” Here we find the love and patience that God
demands of His children. Here we find
the punishment we deserve and which God has spared us.
The devil and the world and our consciences might convict us of sin; but they cannot convict Christ of sin. And that’s what really matters. Because He is the spotless Lamb of God who
bore sin for us. This is how our Gospel
lesson began: Jesus said, “Which one of you convicts Me of sin?”
And of course they could not.
Jesus told the truth. His status
as the Son of God from eternity remained uncontested. “Before Abraham was,” Jesus said, “I
AM.” He existed as the eternal God even as He made
the Gospel promise to Abraham. And even
today, it is the eternal God who makes His promise to us. And so we who are of God hear His word.
Today is March 25.
Nine months from today it will be Christmas. Today the church has historically celebrated
the day that the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would give birth to
Jesus. Jesus is Of God. The whole truth of
the Gospel hinges on this. By the word
of the angel, the eternal Son of the Father was conceived by the Holy Spirit in
the womb of the Virgin Mary. There God
chose to dwell in the midst of sinful flesh.
We are also Of God. Our salvation depends on this. By the word that is preached to us through
the power of the Holy Spirit we are born in the womb of the Christian
Church. God makes His home in us by the
same word through which He made His home in Mary, and became the Savior of the
world.
Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my
word, he will never see death.”
To ‘keep’ means to
cherish. It means to treasure and guard
and hold as valuable. Mary heard the words of God from Gabriel and
kept them and pondered them in her heart.
And she gave birth to the Lord of Life who conquered her own sin and
death. She kept God’s words, but oh, she
saw death; she saw as her own son endured the most heinous torture and suffered
the darkest demise. She saw death. But Jesus tasted it for her. Her vision of death was beatific and it was
one that we pray would be imprinted upon our hearts as well. Because in her tear-stained vision she
witnessed her God tasting what she and we have been spared: the death that our
sins have deserved. She saw what Abraham
saw – she saw her Substitute who endured what God demanded. And so during this Lent, we ponder the
conception of the Son of God, and with it we ponder the reason God became man –
to suffer and die for His children on earth, and to rise again to bring us to
life eternal.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment