✠ One Message: Christ crucified and risen for you ✠
Matthew 6,1-4 4313
13. Sonntag nach Trinitatis 058
Louis, King of France, † 1270
25. August 2013
1. O almighty and Merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that Thy faithful people do unto Thee true and laudable service: Grant, we beseech Thee, that through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord we do finally attain Thy heavenly promises and may faithfully serve Thee in this life (The Book of Common Prayer, 13. Sunday after Trinity). Amen.
2. Jesus taught the crowds and His disciples: „Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.“
3. There are those who boast in the law. They parade their piety before others. They sound forth how well they keep the commandments. In Jesus’ day such men were the scribes, the lawyers and the Pharisees. These three groups held up the commandments of God and strove to perfectly obey them. They would discuss and interpret the written law and the oral traditions of the elders and offer commentaries on the best course of action in a given situation. The discussion in our Gospel lection for today is an example of how the Pharisees discussed the law. These discussions were not merely devoted to how one was to act in a given situation, but more importantly, how did one merit everlasting life. The Pharisees argued that the law taught Jews to love God and love their neighbors. These two commandments were a summary of the Decalogue. If these two commandments were kept, then one was certain of eternal life.
4. In His Beatitudes in Matthew 6, Jesus expounds upon these two commandments. Here Jesus discussed how to practice your righteousness in public and how you give your alms. The practicing of righteousness is another way of saying loving your neighbor, and almsgiving was money you gave to some poor beggar or handicapped person so they could buy food, medicine or clothing. The Pharisees made a big show of these things. They gave large sums of money to the poor and infirm. They made sure everyone saw them do this. They made their righteous deeds known to as many people as possible. Jesus said those who carried on this way are hypocrites.
5. Jesus unveils their hypocrisy in His Parable of the Good Samaritan. What does the law say in the situation presented? Moses wrote that you help your neighbor, tend to his wounds, get him help and preserve his life. What did the Levite and the priest do? They did not obey the law, for they ignored the beaten man and left him in his misery, knowing that ignoring his plight might actually result in his death. The lawyer to whom Jesus told this parable was a hypocrite too. He boasted that keeping the law, that loving God and the neighbor, merited eternal life. He implied that he, as a lawyer and a Pharisee, had kept this law perfectly and thus had earned eternal life from God. This is nothing more than works-righteousness: the obtaining of righteousness by one’s own merit and keeping of God’s law. People like this deal with God in such a way as to get from God what they want (Nagel 204 § 5). They will not receive from God what He wants to freely give. No, they will earn it for themselves and obtain it for themselves. God will owe them their eternal life because they reached forth their hand and took it for themselves and earned it for themselves. Such Pharisees insisted that if they got anything from God it was not a gift but it had been earned. They would do their bit and claim their reward (Nagel 204 § 5). Such were the Pharisees in Jesus’ day and so also in our day. We ourselves are tempted to earn our salvation, do our part and merit our reward by obeying God’s commandments.
6. „The Law demands the giving of love, which is the opposite of what we are bent on getting for ourselves. It is God’s judgment and condemnation of every motive in us that is contrary to God’s way of giving. Looking at what God requires, then looking at ourselves, we may see how we have become the opposite of what God wants us to be. As the Scriptures say, „By the Law is the knowledge of sin“ (Romans 3:20). No one can make a claim for oneself on the basis of the Law. „The scripture hath concluded all under sin“ (Galatians 3:22). God gave the Law to drive people from the folly of trusting in themselves. He would bring them to recognize the suicide of rejecting God’s way. He would bring them to despair of themselves so that emptied of proud self-getting they might be open once again to receive His gifts“ (Nagel 205 § 7). This was the point of today’s parable: you cannot earn eternal life by keeping the law, for no one is able to keep the law perfectly. No one loves God with all their might, and no one loves their neighbor like themselves. O we can love like this in pieces, but only loving once in a while or most of the time is not sufficient to claim obedience to the law. Obedience must be consistent and constant every minute of every day from the time we open our eyes at our birth until the time we close our eyes in death’s sleep. Such is the tremendous burden of the law, and it is a burden we can never, ever keep. Jesus wanted the lawyer to realize this, and He wants you to realize it too.
7. No one of us loves God and our neighbor as the law demands. No one of us gives alms without hypocrisy; we want to receive a reward in return. No one of us practices our righteousness humbly. We want to be recognized and commended for the good deeds we do under the law. Consequently, no one of us can claim to merit eternal life by keeping the law.
8. The good news is you do not have to keep the law perfectly. God does not expect you to do what He knows is inherently impossible for you to do. Jesus brings us the gospel and tells us that He has kept the law for us. Cain after his murderous rage had abated could not bring his dead brother back to life, and Cain could not protect himself from his avenging kinfolk on the horrible murder he had committed. The lawyer was unwilling to help a destitute neighbor in need, and thereby revealed that he truly did not love God or his neighbor as he had boasted before Jesus. What Cain and the lawyer could not do, Jesus did. Jesus showed mercy upon Cain and promised to protect him from vigilantes. Jesus will on the last day reverse Cain’s sinful deed when He raises up Abel’s dead, murdered body along with all the rest who have been buried in death. Jesus stopped and healed a man beaten almost to the point of death and breathed new life into his body. Each one of us are that deathly-beaten man who had been waylaid by the devil who had robbed us of our original righteousness, took our joy of life and left us penniless with only death and hell as our future abode.
9. Jesus will not abide for death and the devil to have the final word on this earth. Jesus came to this earth to turn the tables on the devil and usurp his machinations in our lives. Jesus did this by keeping the law perfectly. Jesus loves God and He loves you and all people. He proved this love by going to the cross, bearing the law’s punishment upon Himself in our place and reconciling us back to our Heavenly Father.
10. „God has not given two ways of salvation—one of gift and promise and another for our getting achievements by the works of the Law. That is to make the Law contradict the gift-giving promises. God gives only the one way to His favor, which is the way of His giving and our receiving. His giving what we do not deserve is His grace. Our receiving what He gives is faith. God’s way is the way of gracious giving and the only response to that is our receiving, our faith. That is what alone makes God happy; that is what alone makes us happy“ (Nagel 206 § 12).
11. The fruit of this gospel is faith, and faith ripens into good works that are found in the law. So we give alms and offerings, not as a means to merit eternal life, but as an expression of the eternal life we have already been given as a gift from Jesus Himself. We love God and our neighbors, not in order to add up points to earn everlasting life, but we love because God has first loved us and His love flows in us and from us to love others in return. We practice our righteousness, not to trumpet our piety before others for accolades and other rewards, but we act righteously because we have received that righteousness from Christ. He has given us His own righteousness, and we share that righteousness with others, especially when our neighbor is in need of help. If we work hard to increase our wages so only to get more possessions for ourselves, then we are only breeding further restlessness in ourselves to that we become consumed with wanting more and getting more (Nagel 208 § 19); this constant obtaining of things will be our reward, but it will only be a temporal reward that lasts as long as we have the money to satisfy our wants. If we work and earn so we may have more to give back to God, to friends, family and others, then our work is a joy, for it is performed in God’s way of doing things“ (Nagel 208 § 19), and Jesus’ way of doing things is always the way of a free gift and an imputed righteousness from His hands. When our good works are focused on God and helping our neighbor, God rewards us with a peaceful conscience. God rewards those who are humble in their service and their giving. His reward may not be in temporal things that catch the eye of the world, but His rewards are more often intangible, such as contentment, joy and the knowledge that God is happy with the work we have done for others. These rewards are mere down-payments on the greater reward that Jesus has already obtained for us which is eternal life in heaven on account of His righteous merit. Amen.
12. Let us pray. O Yahweh Christ, Your Name is worthy to be praised from this time forth and forevermore! Send us the Holy Spirit so that all that we say and do flows from Your love and thus flows to our neighbor as an expression of Your love and mercy for them. Amen.
To God alone be the Glory
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All Scriptural quotations are translations done by The Rev. Peter A. Bauernfeind using the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 4. Edition © 1990 by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, and the Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 27. Edition © 1993 by Deutsch Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart.
ELKB. Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Bayern. www.bayern-evangelisch.de/www/index.php. Copyright © 2013 Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Bayern.
Nagel, Norman. Selected Sermons of Norman Nagel: From Valparaiso to St. Louis. Frederick W. Baue, Ed. Copyright © 2004 Concordia Publishing House.
VELKD. Vereinigte Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Deutschlands. www.velkd.de. Copyright © 2013 Vereinigte Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Deutschlands.
