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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.
In our Midweek Advent Vespers services this year, we are focusing on “The Comings of Jesus”, Who, as we heard last week, was and is known as “the Coming One”. The Hebrew verb for that “coming” is one of the most frequently used Hebrew words in the original of the Old Testament, used more than 25‑hundred times, with such a variety of meanings that 150 different Greek words were used to translate them (Preuss, TDOT, II:20 ff.). Most of the times the word is used it has every‑day meanings, but a number of meanings are more‑significant, such as God’s coming to His people: once, as we considered last week, and repeatedly now, as we consider tonight, under the theme “Jesus Comes Now”.
Notably, God’s coming to His people repeatedly now also, to a certain extent, entails our coming to Him. Psalm 24, which we sang responsively earlier tonight and may have been Divinely‑inspired through David at the time when the Ark of the Covenant was brought up to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:12-15), calls God’s people to worship, noting especially at the beginning His creation and at the end His glory. In between, the Psalm asks who shall ascend the hill of the Lord where the Ark was, who shall stand in His holy place? And then the Psalm answers those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not worship falsely or swear deceitfully. They are those who seek the face of the God of Jacob and so are blessed with righteousness from the God of salvation.
Of course, by nature we do not have clean hands and pure hearts: we are neither clean outwardly nor pure inwardly. Apart from the Holy Spirit, we are dead in our trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1, 5), and so, by our own reason or strength, we cannot believe in Jesus Christ our Lord or come to Him. The Psalm calls for Jerusalem’s literal gates and doors to be lifted that the thrice‑described Lord, the Triune God, might come in. But, before God first acts on us, we on our own do not open the figurative gates or doors of our hearts to Him. After God has come to us and enabled us to believe, then we respond by humbly seeking Him in the places and ways that He promises to come to us. Or, as James puts it using different words, we draw near to God, and so He draws near to us (James 4:8).
Our humbly seeking God in repentance is a key emphasis of the season of Advent. God works in us sorrow over our sin, trust in Him to forgive our sin, and desire to do better than to keep on sinning. So God prepares us to celebrate His having come once in the flesh to save us from our sins, to receive Him as He comes to us now in His Word and Sacrament, and to welcome Him when He comes the final time to judge the living and the dead. We are to live in such repentance every day, but especially seasons such as Advent. In what, if any, ways are our lives different right now than they were two Sundays ago before Advent began?
Ultimately, God’s forgiving us does not depend on the depth of our sorrow, the quantity of our faith, or the extent of our desire, but, thanks be to God, His forgiving us depends on His limitless love, mercy, and grace. When we at all repent and believe, then God forgives us: He forgives our sinful natures and all our sin, God forgives whatever our sin might be, God forgives us for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
As we heard in tonight’s First Reading (John 14:18-31a), our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when He was betrayed, comforted His disciples whose hearts were troubled over Jesus’s leaving them to go to the Father. In His state of humiliation, Jesus, as He said, was less than the Father, with Whom He otherwise was equal, according to their one substance, the Divine nature that they share with the Holy Spirit. In that state of humiliation, Jesus did just as the Father commanded Him, including going to the cross to die for the sins of the world, including your sins and my sins. The Lord came once to die for our sins, and now He comes repeatedly in order to give us the forgiveness of sins that He earned for us on the cross. Remember how in the Reading He said that He would not leave the disciples as orphans (bereaved, or desolate) but would come to them. He not only came to them after His resurrection and in the sending of the Spirit but He also came to them and comes to us now through His Word and Sacraments. As they received Him in faith and had peace unlike that the world gives, so also we receive Him in faith and have peace unlike that the world gives.
Tonight’s Second Reading (1 John 5:6-12) refers to how Jesus both came once and comes to us now: namely, by water and blood. Jesus’s baptism and crucifixion testified with the Spirit as to Who Jesus was and what He was doing, and, by Jesus’s baptism and crucifixion, He set apart (or sanctified) for us the water of the Sacrament of Holy Baptism and His Body and Blood in the Sacrament of the Altar, and so these then become ways that the Spirit continues to testify and so bring us to repentance and to preserve us in the faith (confer John 19:30, 34-35). These are the ways that believers have clean hands and pure hearts and are blessed with righteousness and salvation. For, as God promised, in every place where He causes His Name to be remembered, He comes to be present with us and blesses us with the forgiveness of sins (for example, Exodus 20:24). In these ways, Jesus is present with us always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20), and when we “have Him”, we have eternal life.
God the Father draws us, and so we are able to come to Jesus (John 6:44, 65). All that the Father gives to Jesus will come to Him, and whoever comes to Him He will never cast out (John 6:37, 45). In the second stanza of tonight’s Office Hymn (Lutheran Service Book 333), we sang:
Now He gently leads us;
With Himself He feeds us / Precious food from heaven, / Pledge of peace here given.
Manna that will nourish / Souls that they may flourish.
Flourishing, we come to and love Jesus, and we rejoice in His salvation. Here where God has caused His Name to dwell, He Himself is present to bless us in these ways with the forgiveness of sins, His righteousness that we receive by grace through faith. And, in these ways the water, blood, and Spirit continue to testify to others. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians that as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes the final time (1 Corinthians 11:26).
More about that Jesus’s future final coming, another important use of the word, next week. Now, we conclude by praying as we did earlier in the final stanza of the Office Hymn:
Come, then, O Lord Jesus, / From our sins release us.
Keep our hearts believing, / That we, grace receiving,
Ever may confess You / Till in heav’n we bless You.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +