Sermons

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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.

As some of you know, earlier this week my sister and younger niece stayed with me overnight. My sister and I wanted to go running early the next morning, but my niece did not want us to leave her at my house alone. (So instead of doing something healthy, we all slept in a bit and then ate pancakes.) Maybe some people (especially us introverts) like to be left alone in some circumstances, but, generally speaking, no one really likes to be left alone, particularly not if they are younger, and especially not if they are afraid of the dark. Yet, even the absolute worst experience we can imagine of being alone, in the dark, may not begin to compare with what Jesus experienced for us on the first Good Friday. As prophesied, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, “Suffered Alone, without the Father’s Presence”. Tonight as we continue the special midweek Lenten sermon series with the general theme “Passion Prophecies fulfilled for you!” we consider that prophecy and fulfillment, that the Messiah “Suffered Alone, without the Father’s Presence”.

God through Isaiah had said of His Suffering Servant that people would despise and reject Him, hide their face from Him, and otherwise have little regard for Him. God said it would seem that people did not even believe the prophecy through Isaiah because the Suffering Servant would seem like such an unlikely way to show the Lord’s strength, and the Suffering Servant would have no form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him. (Isaiah 53:1-3) Indeed, as St. Matthew’s Divinely‑inspired Gospel account tells of Jesus’s Passion, Jesus’s countrymen, disciples, and the crowds all in turn forsook Him, followed by God the Father Himself (Matthew 27:46; confer Mark 25:34). Jesus expresses His being without even the Father’s Presence by speaking from the cross at least the first half of the opening verse of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Some of us heard that psalm sung last night as the Altar was stripped. Originally a prayer of David’s, prayed as he suffered under his enemies’ unprovoked, vicious, and prolonged attacks but as he nevertheless maintained his faith, no other psalm is quoted more frequently in the New Testament or points so fully to Jesus’s crucifixion, as the New Testament makes clear with Jesus’s own lips’ quoting Psalm 22 and other writers’ alluding to it (for example, Matthew 27:35, 39, and 43). In David’s case, when he spoke the words of the psalm by Divine‑inspiration, he may not have been really forsaken by God but may have only felt forsaken. In Jesus’s case, the forsaking was very real, and He felt it.

Even if David had not provoked his enemies’ vicious and prolonged attacks, David on his own was hardly innocent or righteous before God. David, as we often do, in a sense impatiently complained that God had not yet granted him relief from his affliction—affliction, no doubt, that God was using to a good end. Jesus, on the other hand, had done everything right and nothing wrong. Jesus, of all people, had the perfect right to ask why God the Father had forsaken Him, even if, in some sense, Jesus knew precisely why God the Father had forsaken Him and its good end or goal. God the Father had forsaken Him because of your sin and my sins. God the Father had forsaken Him in order to save us. You and I deserve to be forsaken, for our sinful natures and for our countless actual sins should leave us alone, without the Father’s Presence. Now and for eternity, you and I should be separated from God, cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Neither David, in his feeling forsaken, nor Jesus, in His being forsaken, despaired of God’s mercy and grace. And, by God’s grace and mercy, neither do we despair. David called for help as if God had already heard and delivered him, so confident of that deliverance that he himself vowed to praise God for that deliverance and called countless others to join him in that praise. At the hour of afternoon prayer, suffering alone without the Father’s Presence, Jesus from the cross called out to the Father. In faith Jesus still referred to the Father as His God, and Jesus completed His will, crying out in victory and yielding His Spirit. Likewise, we turn in sorrow from our sin. We trust God to forgive our sin, and we want to do better than to keep on sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin. God forgives our sinful natures and our countless actual sins for Jesus’s sake.

You see, Jesus “Suffered Alone, without the Father’s Presence”, for us! In the darkness of what should have been broad daylight, because of our original sin, because of our countless actual sins, and because of all our guilt, Jesus was forsaken, forsaken even by God the Father. Now, how two Divine Persons Who share the one substance of God can be separated, no one on earth can understand, and if anyone could understand it, he or she would no doubt lack the words to adequately depict or describe it. Yet, the Bible tells us that the two Divine Persons were separated, and so we believe, teach, and confess the separation. In the person of the God-man Jesus Christ, God Himself died a true death. On the cross Jesus experienced the torments and pains of hell, the rejection of the Father and the expulsion from His Presence. All God the Father’s just and righteous wrath against the sins of the entire human race was visited upon His Son, born of the Virgin Mary—truly an unlikely way to show the Lord’s strength! Of course, the forsaking was not the end of the matter. As David trusted he would be, so he was, in fact, delivered. Likewise, as Jesus trusted that God the Father would do, so God the Father did: God the Father vindicated the Son by raising Him from the dead, accepting His sacrifice on our behalf (more on that prophecy and fulfillment on Sunday). So, you and I can trust that God forgives us, and, for Jesus’s sake, He does forgive us.

Just as the death of His Son in human flesh was an unlikely way for the Lord to show His strength, so in unlikely ways the Lord forgives us. Not only in preaching, but with water and the Word in Holy Baptism, with words of Holy Absolution applied individually to someone who has confessed privately, with bread that is Christ’s body and wine that is Christ’s blood in Holy Communion—in all these concrete ways God does forgive us. Even on Good Friday—if not especially on Good Friday, when Christ “Suffered Alone, without the Father’s Presence”, when He won our redemption on the cross—with that redemption Christ Himself is appropriately present at this Altar, distributed by me, and received by all those who commune at this rail, received for the forgiveness of sins, and so for life and for salvation. In His and our doing so, with restrained praise, we thank Him for our redemption and proclaim His death to the world.

Like Isaiah, like Jesus Himself (John 12:37-38), and like St. Paul (Romans 10:16), we proclaim the Suffering Servant to a world that seems not to believe what it hears from us. Christ’s Church on earth appears to be shrinking in number, yet, as David foretold, the number of people praising Jesus is ever‑growing, whether or not we see the growth in this time and place. God’s redemption at work in us brings forth the fruits of faith in our lives according to our vocations, and He uses us to witness to His saving love and bring others into His Church that transcends time and place. If we, in some way worse than a young child, were to appear to be left alone, in the dark, forsaken even by God, we still know that the separation from God that we deserve has already been experienced for us by Christ, and nothing can be worse than that. For us, He fulfilled prophecy and “Suffered Alone, without the Father’s Presence”, and so nothing is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, now or for eternity (Romans 8:38-39).

Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +