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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.
Maybe you saw the riotous protests Wednesday night at the University of California Berkeley, or maybe you can recall other violent demonstrations over recent months, after which police arrested few if any of the lawbreakers. Perhaps such seeming disregard for the law by those on the streets is not so surprising, when you consider certain elected officials’ selective enforcement of some laws and total disregard for others. Such a misperceived freedom from all law in the Church is called “antinomianism” (from the Greek words anti and nomos, meaning “law”), and those who wrongly hold that misperception are called “antinomians”, although Jesus has other names for them in today’s Gospel Reading. In that Gospel Reading, the Divinely‑inspired St. Matthew uniquely reports Jesus’s telling His disciples who came to Him on the mountain (Matthew 5:1) that He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. This morning as we consider the Gospel Reading we realize that “Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets for us”.
Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, as we heard in last week’s Gospel Reading, Jesus told His disciples that they were blessed when others reviled them and persecuted them and uttered all kinds of evil against them falsely on His account, that they should rejoice and be glad, for their reward was great in heaven (Matthew 5:11-12). Then, as we heard in this week’s Gospel Reading, Jesus told His disciples that they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world and, as such, that they themselves should not relax any of God’s commandments nor should they teach others to relax them, but they should do and teach the commandments; and Jesus told His disciples that, in order for them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, their righteousness would need to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, who, as we will hear in the next two weeks’ Gospel Readings, did in fact relax God’s commandments and teach others to do the same.
In today’s Gospel Reading Jesus says that we should not begin to think that He came to abolish the Law or the Prophets—that is, the whole of the Old Testament—for He did not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Jesus said that, until heaven and earth passed away, not an “i” or even the dot of an “i” (AAT) would pass from the Law until all was accomplished. With the death and resurrection of Jesus, however, heaven and earth arguably had begun to pass away, and all arguably was accomplished, and so the rest of the New Testament certainly must have understood that the abolishing or relaxing of the Old Testament’s ceremonial law and civil law, as instantiations of the moral law, was consistent with what they and we heard Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount. The moral law—think of the Ten Commandments—was no longer lived out the same way in Church and in society, but the moral law itself nevertheless remained unchanged.
Is that the message that you and I get from Church and society, that God’s holy moral law remains unchanged? Certainly society suggests that the moral law is more and more relaxed, if not completely abolished. Even some religious traditions also seem to have relaxed, if not abolished, Old Testament commandments concerning such things as the family and governmental authority; abortion and murder; heterosexual relationships before marriage and same‑sex relationships before and after what is called “marriage”; dishonestly taking our neighbors money or possessions, hurting or not defending others’ reputations; not being content with what we have, and the like. Even if you and I do not relax or abolish God’s holy moral law, maybe we are quick to condemn such sins of others but do not consider how we ourselves individually continue to sin against God’s holy moral law, because our sinful natures still cling to us, meriting us death now in time and torment in hell for eternity, apart from sorrow over our sin and trust in God to forgive our sin for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ.
As we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, “Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets for us”. You may tend to think of the teaching of the whole Old Testament as what we should do or not do, and so showing us our sin, but the Old Testament as a whole also shows us what God does about our sin. Already before the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew by Divine inspiration had told how various aspects of Jesus’s birth and life fulfilled what the Lord had spoken by the prophets (for example, Matthew 1:22), and today we heard that claim on the lips of our Lord Himself: He said He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. True God in human flesh, Jesus perfectly kept God’s holy moral law for us, both doing all that we should do and also not doing all that we should not do. And, Jesus perfectly paid the price for our failures so to keep the moral law; having perfectly kept the Commandments, He was the spotless Lamb of God Who could be offered on the cross to take away the sin of the world, including your sin and my sin.
As we heard in today’s Epistle Reading (1 Corinthians 2:1-12), the Holy Spirit with the power of God works through the preaching of Jesus Christ and Him crucified—despite the shortfalls of the preacher—to impart the secret and hidden wisdom of God, that is, to reveal the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation freely given us by God, through not only preaching but also God’s Word attached to things that we can feel, see, and taste in His Sacraments. In Holy Baptism, we are born from above of water and the Spirit, and so we not only see but also enter the Kingdom of Heaven (John 3:3, 5). In individual Holy Absolution, we see, hear, and feel our pastor by Christ’s divine command forgive us who have privately confessed our sins (Small Catechism V). And, in Holy Communion, our hunger and thirst for a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees is more than satisfied with bread that is Christ’s Body and wine that is Christ’s Blood and so give us His righteousness. As we turn in sorrow from our sin and trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, in all of these ways we receive His righteousness.
As we sang in today’s Introit (Psalm 119:9-16; antiphon Psalm 119:12), our blessèd Lord teaches us His Word. That Word in us brings forth from us the good works that today’s Old Testament Reading described as light breaking forth like the dawn (Isaiah 58:3-9a; confer Ephesians 2:10). At one time we were darkness, but now we are light in the Lord, and so we walk as children of light in all that is good and right and true (Ephesians 5:8-9; confer 1 Thessalonians 5:5). We shine as lights in the world, in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation (Philippians 2:15). At times we may be tasteless salt good for nothing except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet, or we may be like black holes that absorb Christ’s light but do not shine before others, and we may even abolish or relax God’s holy moral law, but, with daily sorrow over our sin and trust in God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, we receive God’s forgiveness and extend our forgiveness to others. And so, as God wills, He leads those others here in order to receive His forgiveness and, as a result, to glorify Him.
Considering the Gospel Reading this morning, we have realized that “Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets for us”. The teaching of both the Old and New Testaments as a whole shows us our sin so that we might receive what God has done about our sin in Jesus Christ. To be sure, there have been faithful Christians, such as St. Paul, who were wrongly accused of antinomianism, suggesting that people were free from all law, even as we today rightly identify antinomians in various religious traditions and similarly in society. By God’s mercy and grace, we let His light shine through us so that they might also give glory to our Father Who is in heaven.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +