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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Does anyone navigate the old fashioned way with directions and paper maps anymore? Nowadays it seems most of us navigate with directions from map websites and by smart‑phone and other electronic devices utilizing the global positioning system. Those G‑P‑S devices are so smart that they can not only tell us how to get to where we are going, but, if television shows and movies are any indication, they can also tell investigators from where we have come. There are a lot of comings and goings in the Gospel Reading for today, the Second Sunday in Lent, and the Reading is also concerned with knowing from where and knowing to where various people are coming and going. All or part of today’s Reading is also used three other times in our three‑year series of readings, and so we do well to consider its pairing with the Old Testament Reading, which today tells of the call of Abram (Genesis 12:1-9), and thus, as we continue our journey as Christian pilgrims through Lent and this life, we focus this sermon on “Comings and Goings”.
In the Gospel Reading, Nicodemus, a Pharisee and ruler of the Jews, came to Jesus by night. Nicodemus said they “knew” that Jesus to be a teacher come from God. Jesus told Nicodemus that, in order to see the Kingdom of God, one had to be born from above—that is, from heaven, where God and His Kingdom are. (Born “from above” is a better translation of the Greek ánothen than born “again”, especially given ánothen’s pairing with “heaven” elsewhere in St. John’s Gospel account [for example, John 3:31]). Nicodemus asked about the possibility of one’s a second time going into the womb and being born. Jesus spoke of Nicodemus’s not knowing either from where the wind (or Spirit) comes or to where the wind (or Spirit) goes, or from where or to where those born of the Spirit are coming and going (see Ecclesiasts 11:5). Despite Nicodemus’s not knowing how such things could be, Jesus spoke of heavenly things, such as His coming from heaven and going to heaven, having been sent not to condemn but to save the world.
Now, people speculate whether Nicodemus was being hypocritical, condescending to Jesus, or trying to trap Jesus, as the Jewish leaders were and did on other occasions (Matthew 22:16; Mark 12:13-14; Luke 20:20-21), though a trap would seem to require witnesses. While we do not know Nicodemus’s thoughts and motives, Jesus did know them: in the verse just before today’s Gospel Reading, in fact, St. John says Jesus Himself knew what was in man (John 2:25). Jesus both confronted Nicodemus’s inadequate knowledge of Jesus’s identity and tried to expand what Nicodemus thought was possible, what Nicodemus knew to be true, apparently based on his own experience and conclusions from Jesus’s unique and incomparable miraculous signs. The Jewish leaders asked for such signs (John 2:18; 6:30), they saw them, and yet they still did not believe (John 12:37), while ordinary people seemed to think that Jesus had done enough of such signs to show that He was the promised Christ (John 7:31). Jesus said Nicodemus was the teacher of Israel and still did not understand heavenly things, such as Jesus’s coming from heaven and going to heaven.
What do we know and understand about such comings and goings? About the comings and goings of God? About the comings and goings of ourselves? By nature, we are no better than Nicodemus appears to be, in some cases limiting to our own experience what we think is possible. Born of the flesh, we are flesh, in some sense ignorant of and opposed to God. Born of human blood and will, our bodies, souls, and all our powers on our own are incapable of receiving His testimony and so also are incapable of believing in God. Without the proper knowledge of God, much less the proper fear and love of God, we sin in countless ways against Him and against our neighbors. We may even be ignorant of from where we come or, on account of our sin, to where we will go.
As Jesus somewhat indirectly warned Nicodemus about perishing, so He warns us. While Jesus did not come primarily to judge but to save (John 8:15; 12:47), Jesus nevertheless cannot avoid judging (John 8:16), as His Word judges (12:48), and so, as Jesus tells Nicodemus and us in the verses immediately following today’s Gospel Reading, those who do not repent and believe stand condemned already (John 3:18-21). However, those who repent and believe—who turn in sorrow from their sin, trust God to forgive their sin, and want to do better than continue to sin—those do not come into judgment but already have passed from death to life (John 5:24; 1 John 3:14). When we so repent and believe, then God forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake.
As Jesus told Nicodemus and told other Jewish leaders on other occasions, they had no idea from where He comes and to where He goes (John 8:14; 9:29-30). Jesus is far more than a teacher come from God, as Nicodemus said. Jesus is the Teacher and God Himself dwelling among us in human flesh (John 1:14). God the Father so loved the fallen (sinful, foul, stinking) world, that He gave His only (one of a kind) Son to death on the cross, that whoever believes in Him should have eternal life. So, the lifting up of the Son on the cross was necessary, not only to fulfill Scripture but also to save us! God’s loving will to save us and His sending His Son to save us characterize His Kingdom above, the heaven from where Jesus came and to where He went. When we believe and trust in Jesus Christ, Who was nailed to the cross and there paid the ransom for our sins, then God’s wrath is lifted from us, and we see and enter the Kingdom of God and see and have eternal life (see also John 3:36). Or, to paraphrase St. Paul in today’s Epistle Reading (Romans 4:1-8, 13-17), where he quoted Genesis (15:6), we believe God and our faith is counted to us as righteousness. Or, to paraphrase where St. Paul quotes David’s Psalm 32 (vv.1‑2), we are blessed because our lawless deeds are forgiven, our sins are covered, the Lord no longer counts them against us.
The forgiving and covering of our sin, the Lord’s no longer counting them against us, takes place through His Word and Sacraments. Perhaps just as the wind gives evidence of its blowing by making a sound, so the Word and Sacraments give us identifiable marks of the activity of the Holy Spirit in the Church. (You may recall that, on the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit Who Himself made a sound like a mighty rushing wind [Acts 2:12]). The Word in the Gospel accounts, like St. John’s, is written so that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, by believing, we may have life in His Name. The Word with water and the Spirit in Holy Baptism gives birth to us from above; at the font we are born of God (John 1:13). Today’s Gospel Reading makes clear both that Baptism is not something we do but something God does and that under normal circumstances Baptism is necessary for salvation. By Baptism we know the Triune God and so have eternal life (John 17:3; 1 John 4:7). The same Holy Spirit works through the words of a pastor sent with Christ’s authority to individually absolve (or forgive) the sins that those who privately confess them know and feel in their hearts (John 20:21-23). And, those who are so baptized and absolved come here, to this altar rail, in order to receive from this altar bread that is Jesus’s body and wine that is His blood, and so to receive the forgiveness of sins, and thus also life and salvation. The necessity of this sacrament Jesus makes clear elsewhere in St. John’s account, saying that, unless you eat His flesh and drink His blood, you have no life in you (John 6:53).
Born of God in Baptism, forgiven in Absolution, and strengthened in the Supper, we live as His holy people. Nicodemus apparently eventually got it, as we hear of his assisting with the burial of Jesus near the end of St. John’s Gospel account (John 19:38-29). And, like him and like Abraham in today’s Old Testament Reading, we journey toward the Promised Land, calling on the Name of the Lord for help in worship at His altar. Because His Holy Spirit is in us, we try to stop sinning, and, even though we fail at that, as we live in the forgiveness of sins, we who are born of God in Christ still have victory over the sinful world (1 John 3:9; 5:4, 18). Jesus gives us eternal life, and we will never perish; no one can snatch us out of His hand (John 10:28). Although we may die in this world before Jesus returns, yet we will live, and if Jesus returns first, we will never die (John 11:25-26). More than a whimsical hope, by faith we have eternal life as our possession even now, and that eternal life cannot be destroyed.
Born of God in Baptism, forgiven in Absolution, and strengthened in the Supper, we know and understand about Jesus’s comings and goings, and about ours. No paper maps, map websites, or G-P-S devices are necessary! By God’s grace and revelation to us, already now we have life with Him. He is the “Highest Good” to Whom we sang in the Entrance Hymn (Lutheran Service Book 819) and about which we will also sing in the Closing Hymn (LSB 571). Although the Entrance Hymn’s writer Johann Jacob Schütz writing in German called Him dem höchsten Gut and based his original hymn on a passage from Deuteronomy (32:3-4), the expression goes back to Cicero’s Latin expression summum bonum and can be traced back even further to ancient Greek philosophy. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote in his Republic that “the idea of good … [is] the universal author of all things beautiful and right”, but, with hymn‑writer Schütz, we know that God is that Author, and we know that “Within the kingdom of His might / All things are just and good and right: / To God all praise and glory!”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +