The text this morning is from the Gospel according to Matthew, the fifth chapter:
“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. “Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
So often, we think of Jesus as the big softie. We think of Him as kind and gentle and compassionate. And, of course, He is those things, but we see in the text today that Jesus is also a lawgiver and a judge. But, when we see Him not just giving the Law, but expanding on it, it’s not just so that we may keep these outwardly, but that He’s showing us the depth of our sin and depravity and how we cannot keep them at all.
As Lutherans, I think this kind of thing makes us uncomfortable. We’re Gospel people. We are all about the freedom we have in Christ. We don’t have to submit to Rome and the pope. We don’t have to keep monastic vows. We don’t have to do all the kind of junk that takes us away from Jesus. We know that. We’re totally about it; it’s, like, our whole identity. But, we get this tendency, I think, to start thinking that the Law has nothing to do with the Christian life. And that’s just not true but it’s attractive.
The Law is good and right and holy. And it’s from God. But, the Law makes us feel bad, and it seems hard, and it’s not always fun. After all, it’s a lot more fun, usually, to break the law than it is to obey it. It’s stodgy and dull. It makes us look uptight and rigid. So, there’s always this tendency to avoid the Law and grasp onto the Gospel. It’s always there; it’s a constant temptation. After all, if we loosen up, if we relax a little, we’ll all feel better, right?
I mean, we do this with everything. When I get home after a long day, I go upstairs I take my shoes off, I take my suit off and put on sweats. I relax a little and I feel much more comfortable. If it’s that way at home, maybe we want to make sure that people feel comfortable in other places, so bosses lower their dress code standards, they start giving flex time to employees. Churches even get caught up in this, where they start to relax their standards. Flip flops and jeans become the dress du jour, which aren’t in, themselves, bad, but they’re usually not worn in order to show understanding that you’re coming before a holy and righteous God. Our music becomes trite and, although it’s certainly not heretical or contains wrong teaching, it doesn’t confess anything by saying anything about God and what He’s done for us in Christ. We relax all kinds of things for the sake of comfort, and we wrap it up in the cloak of accessibility, or flexibility, or even evangelism.
Where the Church has failed in this, in particular, isn’t really the worship wars, though that could be a part of it. It’s that over the last decades, the Church has gotten much more relaxed with our adherence to the Law. Again, we think, well, we want to love people into believing in Jesus, so, yeah, it doesn’t matter if you might commit adultery by living with your girlfriend before marriage. Divorce, yeah, we’ll never have a problem with that. Or, what about this, well, it doesn’t really matter what you believe, so long as you’re a Christian of some stripe, yeah, why don’t you come up to the altar and receive Communion with us?
This kind of adherence to the world’s ideas of love and acceptance over the truth got us into a lot of messes, and, honestly, began the decline of the Church in America. It’s why all the mainline “Christian” denominations are shrinking, because they imitate what the world says, and if their message is the same thing as the world, then why bother with the Church? We’re shrinking, too, though, as a denomination, and that has nothing to do with us not maintaining fidelity, that’s just because all churches and denominations rise and fall.
You see then about the Church, how we want to kind of sidestep the Law because it’s not always the nicest feeling. Well, Jesus knows that. He’s known that since the beginning of the world, when we fell into sin. And so, not only does He not loosen the restrictions of the Law, He tightens it up, so that if you’re one of those people who really like the letter of the Law, disregarding the spirit of the Law, well, He increases the letter of the Law so that you have no excuse.
Yeah, you might not have actually purged a nice into someone’s belly, but if you get angry with someone, or even worse insult them, you should go to hell. In fact, you shouldn’t even come before God to get your sins forgiven if you’ve ticked someone off and you haven’t fixed it, because otherwise, well, there’s really not a lot of hope for you. Okay, and sure, you may not have actually fornicated with someone, a someone who isn’t your spouse, but if you’ve even looked at someone with a twinge of desire in your heart for their hot body, or their mind, or their whatever, then you’ve made yourself guilty and you’ve even drawn that person into it. In fact, that’s so bad, it’s better you should cut off the thing that’s drawing you to the person, whether it’s a wandering eye or a wandering hand, and throw it into the garbage, than be thrown into hell. And divorce, whew, Jesus makes it even worse, that divorce isn’t the only sin, but now adultery, assuming it’s not because of sexual immorality. In our world today, with no-fault divorce, we’re surrounded by adulterers. And then swearing, taking oaths: this is where Jesus is making clear that your word needs to be your word, and you can’t expect God Himself or any false God to cause your promise to happen. Either you do it or no one else does, and if you don’t fulfill your word, that’s a sin, a breaking of the eighth commandment by extension.
Jesus makes it clear: you cannot escape the Law. He’s not relaxing it by a single iota, a single dot. In fact, Jesus expands the Law so that no one, nowhere, has an excuse before God or men. You cannot escape the accusation of the Law. It will stand there and beat you down. It will show you what you need to do and it will scream out to God what you haven’t done.
But we want to ignore it. We want to stick our fingers in our ears and sing la-la-la. We want to relax it among ourselves, because we can still be pretty good, just so that life goes a little bit better, a little easier, so we can seem a little nicer. But that’s not what Jesus calls us to do. He calls us to obedience.
We Christians cannot be afraid to say that we need to keep the Law. We need to keep it. We must. We don’t do it in order to be saved, of course. We do it because Jesus tells us to do it. He gives us the power to do it. We don’t do it because we inspired by our depravity to start making it up to God, but because we’re empowered by the Gospel to obey the Law. And a Christian who doesn’t or doesn’t want to obey the Law isn’t thinking like a Christian, and may even not be a Christian.
A Christian is going to want to keep the Law. They just are. They have the Holy Spirit dwelling in them, empowering them to hear God’s Word and obey. A Christian is going to know that they cannot keep the Law, but they are still going to do their best. And when this Christian understands this, they will run to God’s Word and find the forgiveness of sins that He offers freely to all people and then run back into the world to obey the Law to serve their neighbor. After all, that’s who obedience to the Law is for: it’s for the love of our neighbor because God is holy and has asked us to do it.
So, what are we supposed to do? The Law seems so rigid. And Jesus just seems to increase the trespass. Do we relax it and hope for His mercy? Do we make up a bunch of laws so that we can really keep it right now? Like, put a fence around the Law so we don’t even approach it? I don’t think these are the right responses. We need to turn ourselves back into God’s Word. We need to say, well, Jesus said do this, so I should do this. We need to find all the places where God has demanded of us certain things. We need to obey those. We need to pray for His guidance to see what it is we need to be doing. We need to work for the good of those around us.
And then, when we fail in sin, we see why it is that Jesus increased the trespass: so that we have nowhere else to go but to fall on His mercy. We can’t depend on ourselves, we can’t rely on our powers, we can’t effect our salvation. All we can do is look to the Law-giver for mercy. And if it were only according to the Law, there could be no mercy. But, Christ has fulfilled the Law for you. Through His perfect life, through all of His obedience, He earned salvation. Yet, upon the cross extended, with His blood pouring out, He put that salvation there, that you might receive it through His means of grace. Through the Word, you receive the blood of Jesus through the ears. Through Baptism, you receive it on your body and on your heart. Through the Supper, you receive it in your body. The blood of Jesus, spilled for you upon the cross, washes over you, through you, in you that you may be clean and delivers to you the very righteousness Christ earned. And now that very righteousness is yours.
You have no recourse in this world but Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He takes away your sin, bringing it to Himself, that He might give you instead His righteousness. He kept the Law. He kept the letter, He kept the spirit, and He did it for you, that you may live forever with Him. And live then you shall, with Him filling you, showing you the way into everlasting bliss just as He shows you the way of peace with your neighbor. Obey the Law, Christians, and depend on your Jesus to forgive you, for He, the giver of the Law loves you to His own death, that you may never die forever. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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