All Saints'

Matthew 5:1-12 - All Saints’ Sunday - November 2, 2014
The Blessedness of the Christian Life

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. 

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, “God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high …” (Hebrews 1:1-3) — through Him, our Lord and Mediator, Jesus Christ, grace, mercy, and peace, be to you.  Amen. 

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When God curses, that which he curses is cursed.  When God blesses, that which he blesses is blessed.  When God speaks, it is so.  God’s word is efficacious.  He who upholds all things by the word of his power knows what he says and why he says it and to whom he is saying it.  In times past, God spoke through the prophet Moses.  Moses was God’s mouthpiece. 

But on one occasion, from Mt. Sinai, God actually spoke without a mouthpiece.  He revealed his Majesty by speaking directly to all of Israel. 
After this, our fathers begged Moses to have God speak only through him from now on.  Why?  What words did God speak that scared them so?  The 10 Commandments. 

God spoke the 10 Commandments directly to Israel from the mountain.  He opened his mouth and spoke.  In the 10 Commandments, God is describing what his people will do.  But in so describing his people, our fathers were cut to the heart and terrified, because instead of describing them, they simply revealed to them how far they truly were from living as God’s holy people. 

This is the purpose of God’s law.  It is to terrify.  It is to describe perfect righteousness in such a way that we become aware of what we truly are: poor, wretched sinners.  Instead of describing a blessed people, the law speaks a curse – from God’s own mouth. 

God spoke from his holy mountain.  Anyone – any man or beast – that drew near the mountain would die.  So said God.  No one dared.  Moses alone spoke for God.  So no one dared draw near the mountain except for Moses.  This is how it is with the law.  We hear what it says.  We hear it say what we should be in order to please him.  And because of the sin that it exposes in us, we become afraid to draw near to the law lest we be destroyed.  We acknowledge the law, sure.  And who doesn’t admit that we’re all sinners?  But how unwilling we are to truly draw near, naked and exposed, and be scrutinized by what the 10 Commandments actually say! 

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(1) God alone is to be our God.  And yet we place our trust in everything but God.  We worry about health and money as though God were not working something very great through our sickness and poverty.  But he is.  And yet to avoid our crosses, we conform our habits and opinions to the world around us so that we are as indistinct as possible.  Heaven forbid that we should stand out as odd and be ridiculed by the heathen.  For this attitude, God’s law rebukes us. 

(2) Yet, God is merciful.  So we are to call on him in every need.  But we don’t.  Not because it takes too much time and we’re too busy or because we don’t know what to ask for.  No, that’s not why.  The reason we don’t pray as we should is because we lack faith in God’s promise.  That’s always the reason.  We wait until our hearts are ready, but they are never ready.  But our prayer does not depend on the readiness of our hearts.  It depends on God’s command to ask and his promise to give.  It depends on his word.  His heart is ready.  We would know this well, and our hearts would be truly prepared to pray, if we praised him as we should — that is, if we pondered his mercy toward us in Christ and gave thanks for his atoning sacrifice – if we learned better and better how to confess our faith and defend it against false doctrine — then we would know to pray as we ought.  But because this gospel is so often far from our hearts, so it is just as seldom that pleasing petitions escape our lips.  For this faithlessness, God’s law rebukes us. 

(3) We are to rest on the Sabbath; that is, we are to take time regularly to hear God’s word.  We are called by God to rest from our labors by hearing of his labor for us, that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.  We are to support the preaching of the gospel by denying ourselves our leisure, by donating our mammon, and by sacrificing our honor for the precious gift of Christ that is worth more than all these things.  But all these things are precious to us.  If we are too busy doing what we think we need to do to live fulfilling lives, then we end up too busy to take refuge in the Sabbath rest that Christ delivers in word and Sacrament.   For our foolishness, God’s law rebukes us. 

(4-10) And the reason we dishonor parents, and hold petty grudges, and do shoddy work at the office, the reason we lust after flesh to which God has not joined us in marriage, and the reason we complain about others as though we had some good reason to do so – the reason we do all this is because we do not love our neighbor as ourselves.  No.  We love ourselves.  We can see and feel our needs.  And we dare not let the needs of others interrupt our quest to be satisfied – so much that our hearts even demand a god who will put our needs above our neighbor’s.  But if we dare not draw near to the law that teaches us otherwise, if we dare not be instructed by Moses who speaks for God, then the law will come to us.  The mountain will move and smoke and touch us.  God’s law will thunder and the earth will quake until we have nothing left but to stand guilty before God who requires his people to be holy as he is holy.   For our sin, God’s law rebukes us. 

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We do not approach the law hoping for some other response from God.  Especially as Christians, we know well what we’ll learn about ourselves when we take the law in hand.  Jesus teaches us this lesson.  He takes the law in hand for us – not only in order to teach us what it truly requires, but also in order to fulfill it.  This is why he came. 

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2).  So said John the Baptist to prepare his way.  And so must we do.  To repent is to turn from your sin.  But in order to turn from your sin, two things must first occur: you must be confronted with your sin, and your sin must be taken away.  In other words, the law must rebuke you, and the gospel must bless you.  This is how the kingdom of heaven comes to you.  It comes to those who repent.  It comes to you in mercy.  Repentance from the law is only half complete. Christ must add the gospel.  He must lift the curse in order for you to turn toward the blessing.  He does.  He perfects your repentance by giving you his own righteousness in place of your sin. 

It was like any other mountain that Jesus went up — any other mountain where his disciples followed and the crowds drew near.  But then that mountain became holy — not just holy, but it became the holy mountain.  For there in flesh and blood stood not Moses speaking for God, but in flesh and blood stood Jesus speaking as God.  He opened his mouth and began to teach – directly to the people. 

But instead of speaking curses as on Sinai, he spoke blessings.  A beatitude is a blessing.  He did not speak the law that described the holiness that God expected of his people.  Rather he spoke a description of his people by describing himself.  What lack and failure the law shows in you, Jesus removes for you.  And here is how: 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

To be poor in spirit is to truly acknowledge your sin.  It is to see no wealth in yourself or in any of your efforts to please God.  It is to dismiss all silly hopes that God will in the end decide not to care about sin.  It is to acknowledge instead that everything you need must come from him.  And it does. 

To us who are poor in spirit, the kingdom of heaven is ours.  Present tense.  It is ours right now.  We have all things when we have Christ, because it is Christ who emptied himself for us.  It is Christ who became poor for us by taking our sin into himself and even giving up the Spirit in death.  He takes our poverty and gives us his kingdom.  In this kingdom we have eternal life in the rebirth that John the Baptist urged us into, and in which Jesus has joined us to himself.  In this kingdom we have pardon for all our sins, peace with God and all the blessings that follow — as follows: 

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

We mourn our sin.  But our mourning does not earn the blessing.  Jesus’ mourning does.  He mourned for Jerusalem’s unbelief; he was sorrowful unto death; he sighed under the heavy burden that crushed him in Gethsemane when as the Lamb of God he felt the full weight of the whole world’s sin.  He mourned.  He was not comforted until all was finished, not until he was raised.  And so we find our comfort also where we are raised with him by faith.  We shall be comforted.  Future tense.  We look forward to full joy in heaven even while we continue to mourn on earth. 

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Meek means humble and gentle.  This is Jesus.  He meekly invites us to cast our burden on him.  We labor under the curse in a cursed creation.  But Jesus labors for us.  He places himself under the law in our place.  In him we see that all things that weigh us down work for our good, because he promises a new heaven and earth.  He honors his Father by doing his will, and so earns for us the promise that we will live long in the land that the Lord is giving us.  And so meekly, gently, we humbly bear one another’s burdens on earth knowing that our true rest has been won and awaits us where Jesus is. 

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

Jesus hungered and thirsted for our salvation.  He earned it by living off every word the proceeded from the mouth of God and by drinking the bitter cup of God’s wrath in our place.  We hunger and thirst for righteousness by desiring what Christ has won.  And he fills us.  He prepares a feast on his mountain and invites us to eat and drink.  He clothes us with the wedding garment of his righteousness washed clean in his own blood.  We taste the feast by faith now.  But in heaven it will fill us, no longer by faith, where we will neither hunger nor thirst anymore. 

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

We cry to mercy to him who is merciful.  And we obtain it. Our life as Christians is always going around this circle.  Look how often we ask for mercy in the divine service.  Those who first obtain mercy live by mercy and show mercy and need mercy and receive mercy.  It won’t end until we praise the Lamb in heaven for the mercy he never failed to give on earth. We say Amen to what we receive in the Lord’s Supper by living in fervent love toward one another. 

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

God loves you.  He loves you with a pure heart.  He need not deny what is real – the fact that you are not worthy to be loved, the fact that you continue to defile yourself with the sin that proceeds from your own heart.  He need not deny it, because he sees the purity of Christ’s heart.  He is worthy to be loved.  He is pure, as the law requires.  He stands before God pleading our case.  And it is for his sake that God loves us.  We see him now as our crucified Savior – as John said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  And we will never stop beholding him, even as we see our God, the Lamb on his throne, who is worthy to be praised forever.  He makes our hearts pure by giving us his own purity. 

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

Jesus is the Son of God; he is true God.  He makes peace.  Both of these statements are confirmed in Colossians 1[:19-20] – the only other place in Scripture where the word for peacemaker is used: “For it pleased the Father that in [Christ] all the fullness [of God] should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself … having made peace through the blood of His cross.”  Christ has settled all scores.  In Baptism, we have the inheritance as first-born sons because we are joined to the Only Begotten.  We are reconciled to God who is no longer angry at us.  He no longer rebukes us.  So also, we settle all scores among ourselves by seeking peace.  We forgive as we are forgiven.  “Let us do good to all – especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).  

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Such a life invites sorrow.  It invites being taken advantage of for doing the righteous thing on one hand, and for claiming the righteousness of another on the other hand.  But here we enter again the present tense.  The kingdom ours remaineth.  No persecution can separate us from the blessing God speaks.  The Lord has spoken.  And while we suffer as though we are not blessed, the kingdom of heaven remains in our possession, and so Christ who is our righteousness rules mightily in our conscience.  

So, dear Christian congregation, thus says the Lord: “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” 

You hear that you are bigots for standing on the word of God.  You hear that you are unloving for not joining fellowship with those who teach false doctrine.  You hear that you are holier-than-thou for living as Christians and counting the blessed life with Christ as more precious than life in this perishing world.  You hear lies.  You hear evil.  But you also hear your God.  He tells you that you are blessed.  He who has taken away your rebuke by bearing your guilt gives you his innocence.  He who has swallowed death by dying for you now lives.  And he who earned your reward in heaven now holds it for you today.  He moves you from the mountain of condemnation and brings you to his holy mountain of eternal kindness.  He will wipe away all your tears and give you reason to rejoice forever.  But do not wait.  The Lord comes with salvation today.  Your Savior is the final mouthpiece of God.  His word is final.  And so we raise our anthems of joy and certainty even now this morning as we gather with angels and archangels and all the saints of heaven evermore praising God and saying, blessed is who comes in the name of the Lord. 

Amen.