Trinity 17

Luke 14:1-11- Trinity 17- October 16, 2011 

  God Resists the Proud, but
Gives Grace to the Humble

The Third Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.”  What does this mean?  “We should fear and love God that we do not despise preaching and His word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.” 

The 10 Commandments were given to Moses on Mt. Sinai about 3,500 years ago and were intended specifically for the children of Israel.  God gave many other commandments through Moses as well.  Most of them, like those commandments about how to dress and what to eat and so forth never applied to anyone outside of Israel.  This was the ceremonial law, and it was peculiar only to God’s chosen nation.  However, such commandments that prohibit murder, adultery, and stealing obviously did extend to all nations.  This is the moral law, written in the hearts of all men.  This is what we call a conscience.  The law carved in stone on Sinai only reiterated what was already written in all of our hearts. 

Moses was a prophet.  The Law that God gave to him (both the 10 Commandments and all the other ceremonies and regulations) was intended to prepare the children of Israel and teach them about the specific things that their God would someday do to save sinners while living as a man here on earth. 

And then Christ came and lived as a man here on earth.  He fulfilled the law – He fulfilled the ceremonies that pointed to Him, and He filled the moral law that only He could obey.  By doing so, Jesus redeemed Israel from all her woes, and became a Light to lighten the Gentiles.  In Christ there is now no distinction between Jew and Gentile, because Christ is the end of the law – the whole law – for all who believe. God’s people are identified not by where and how they worship, but by whom they worship. We worship Jesus. We worship the Father in Spirit and truth. 

Just as the Old Testament Law was a schoolmaster that instructed God’s people concerning what Jesus would do, so also the 10 Commandments instruct us today by showing us our need for what Jesus has done.  The Old Testament ceremonial law no longer applies to anyone.  The nation of Israel no longer exists.  But the moral law continues to apply.  Sin still exists. 

The 10 Commandments require that we love God above all things, and that we love our neighbor as ourselves.  Love fulfills the law.  Nothing else does or can.  It’s pretty easy to see how commandments against stealing, and cheating, and gossiping, and that tell us to worship God alone should continue to be taught today.  After all, we need to hear it.  Such laws convict us; and even while they teach us how to serve one another, they also teach us to repent and to seek forgiveness from our merciful God.  Such is the purpose and function of the 10 Commandments. 

But when it comes to the 3^rd Commandment, we seem to run into a little bit of confusion.  All the rest of the 10 Commandments can be clearly identified as part of the moral law.  But the 3^rd Commandment is different. It looks to be strictly ceremonial.  Here is how it is recorded in Exodus 20:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”  

Do not work on Saturday.  That’s what this means.  But this is not the moral law.  God did not write this law into the hearts of all men.  He gave it only to Israel, and for a specific purpose.  Many Christians believe that we are obligated not to work on the Sabbath day.  But they are wrong.  Many will insist that we worship on Saturday, or, claiming that Sunday is the new Sabbath, that this day must be kept sacred.  But they have misread Scripture.  This is not a moral issue.  It is a millennia-old custom – and a good one that we should not despise – to devote Sunday, the day that Jesus rose, to the preaching of the Gospel.  But still the Bible does not insist on any one day for us in the New Testament to rest or even to go to church.  Listen to what St. Paul says on this very matter.  “Let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.”  Let no one judge you concerning Sabbaths.  Why?  Because Christ fulfilled the law. 

Even in Jesus’ day, people were just as much confused and legalistic concerning the 3^rd Commandment as they are today.  Consider our Gospel lesson and the question that Jesus posed to the Pharisees: “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?”  Now, these Pharisees imagined that they took very seriously the words from Exodus 20 that I just read.  And so they strictly abided by the no-work standard that the 3^rd Commandment appears to impose.  But the Pharisees did not understand how to obey the law because they did not understand what activity, or lack of activity, fulfills the law.  Love fulfills the law.  Nothing else does.  They falsely imagined that they could obey the law, because they did not know who fulfilled it.  Jesus fulfills the law.  No one else can. 

Consider the original purpose of the Sabbath.  Sabbath means in Hebrew day of rest.  By commanding everyone to rest on the seventh day, God mercifully provided a day for His people to cease from their weekly toil.  It was as Jesus said elsewhere, “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man.”  It was in mercy that God set apart this time to relax from their labors and to focus their attention on hearing the word of God.  The God who made them and all that they had, and who rested when He was finished, is the same God who redeems them from sin in order that they might also rest from all of their spiritual labors as well. 

The question that Jesus asked the Pharisees therefore not only exposed their legalistic insistence that nothing whatsoever be done on the Sabbath, but it also revealed the fact that they despised the very mercy that truly does fulfill it.  “Is it lawful, is it proper, is it good to do good on the Sabbath?”  How could they answer?  They were speechless.  On one hand they believed that it was wrong to do anything.  But on the other hand, how could they say that it is wrong to do good?  I suppose they had never considered such a question.  Besides, they didn’t have the power to heal.  And so Jesus demonstrated how the entire law is fulfilled by doing what only God can do.  He showed mercy.  He healed the man who suffered from such an awful disease. 

“Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?”  It would not have been a violation of the Sabbath to rescue your son, or some beast of burden that needed to be rescued from danger.  The day of rest was not intended to deprive those who needed mercy.  No, it was intended to provide it.  In the same way, therefore, Jesus did not break the 3^rd Commandment when he healed this man.  It is not as though He said, “Oh, yes, the law is good.  But love is better.”  No.  That’s not true.  Yet how often are the 10 Commandments disregarded and brushed aside today and trumped by some phony notion of love.  “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”  Ah, but I don’t love him anymore.  I love someone else.  But God commands you to love the one to whom you are bound.  “Thou shalt not steal.”  Ah, but I will take from the rich and give to the poor.  But God commands you to protect what is your neighbor’s.  Will not your Father in heaven feed the hungry mouths?  “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”  Ah, but she loves me, and I love her.  But God commands you to urge her to stay and do her duty.  Love does not contradict the law.  Love fulfills the law. 

“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”  Oh, if only the excuses that we give to ignore the preaching of the word of God were as noble as rescuing someone from danger.  But what excuses do we make?  What keeps you from coming to church regularly to hear the preaching of the Gospel and to receive the Sacrament?  What distracts you during the sermon and throughout the liturgy?  What worries and concerns in your heart cause you to regard worldly affairs as more pressing than your spiritual well-being? 

The Sabbath day is not fulfilled by anything that we can do, or by anything that we can keep ourselves from doing.  The Sabbath is fulfilled in the same way that the rest of the Law is fulfilled.  It must be God’s doing.  St. Paul writes in Romans 8, “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.”  God condemned sin in the flesh.  That means that the sin which the law exposes in you was condemned – not in you – but in the person of Jesus who took on human flesh and blood in order to render the obedience that we could not and in order suffer the due reward that God did not want us to suffer. 

So what has kept you from coming here?  Jesus has taken that upon Himself.  What has been distracting you?  Jesus too kept your troubles in mind even as He kept His heart and soul focused on what God required of Him as He bore your sin away forever.  What worldly priorities flit in and out of your restless heart?  Jesus’ sole priority was to show mercy to you even by rendering to the Father that obedience to the law that we were too weak to offer.  What sin wearies you?  What guilt renders you weak and tired even to think about?  Jesus gives you rest. 

We can’t “do” the law.  We can’t do anything to fulfill it.  That is why we come here in order to receive from our God the righteousness that comes from Jesus who did.  We don’t gather here to celebrate our own love, because that is not how we know the love that fulfills the law.  We come here to learn the love of Jesus that surpasses all knowledge:

My song is love unknown –
My Savior’s love to me. 
Love to the loveless shown
That they might lovely be. 

And so we fix our eyes and ears on Jesus.  We look to where Jesus worked to fulfill the law in our place, who, with a cheerful and obedient heart, found no rest from His labors until every last requirement was met even as He commended His final breath to the Father, and as His life-giving blood dripped from His lifeless body.  This happened on Friday.  It was a real day in real time, accomplished for real sinners.  He was buried, and on Saturday, the Sabbath, He rested in the grave.  “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”  What a strange law.  So difficult to place.  But when you know Jesus who fulfills all the commandments in your place, and gives to you the righteousness that He earned – when you know Jesus who worked for you, then what a joy to know the Jesus who rested in the grave for you and who rose again on Easter Sunday to give you the victory over death. 

The 3^rd Commandment requires that we cease from our work.  Not on Sunday; not on Saturday; but every day of our lives.  It is as St. Paul writes, “to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.”  That is why we set aside one day a week in order to hear the word of God that gives us eternal life every day.  “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”  By nature, we want to work – to do something.  That is why we listen to the gracious word of God instead that teaches us how to do nothing, but to receive as often as we need it our Sabbath rest which Christ has won. 

The Pharisees approached the law with pride and self-confidence that they could fulfill it.  And so they had no idea what the 3^rd Commandment required.  We approach the law with hearts humbled by the law, with confidence only that Jesus has fulfilled it for us.  “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (Prov. 3:4).  Only when we see this commandment fulfilled in our place can we begin to know what this commandment truly requires.   When sinners believe the Gospel then it is that we hold the preaching of God’s word sacred, and gladly hear and learn it.  “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”   And so with humble hearts claiming no work or merit of our own, we come to where Jesus gives to us the grace that we need. 

Let us Pray:

A pledge of peace [dear] God I see
When Thy pure eyes are turned to me
To show me Thy good pleasure.
Jesus, Thy Spirit and Thy Word,
Thy body and Thy blood, afford
My soul its dearest treasure.
Keep me Kindly
In Thy favor, O my Savior!
Thou wilt cheer me;
Thy Word calls me to draw near Thee.

Now richly to my waiting heart,
O Thou, my God, deign to impart
The grace of love undying.
In Thy blest body let me be,
Even as the branch is in the tree,
Thy life my life supplying.
Sighing, Crying.
For the savor Of Thy favor;
Resting never,
Till I rest in Thee forever.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.