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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.
How did you do this past week in regards to doing what you were supposed to do? With the civic holiday on Monday and maybe one or more “snowdays” on Tuesday and the days following (as much as we might have enjoyed staying in our P-Js under a blanket all day)—did you get everything done this past week? Do you ever? No matter our vocations in our families, church, and society, no doubt that not a week goes by in which we fail to do something—some chore at home, Bible Study at Church, assignment at school, or task at work. There are not enough minutes in the hour, hours in the day, or days in the week! No doubt that, if we could, we would take items off of our “to-do lists”, not put more items on those lists. Yet, when we heard today’s Gospel Reading moments ago, we might have heard Jesus essentially add two more items to our “to-do lists”: specifically, repent and believe. Truly, “Jesus proclaims ‘Repent and believe’”.
As we are discussing in our Midweek Bible Study in connection with St. John’s Gospel account (John 3:22-4:2), John the Baptizer and Jesus were both active at the same time for a while in the Judean countryside. As we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God. Jesus’s both going into Galilee, the territory of Herod Antipas, who had John arrested, and Jesus’s proclaiming a similar but sharper and more-imminent message regarding repentance and the kingdom of God is striking, to be sure (Voelz, ad loc Mark 1:14, 150). In this season of Epiphany, however, Jesus’s coming into Galilee and proclaiming the Gospel of God (not to mention His passing alongside the sea of Galilee) is perhaps more significant in that, fulfilling Old Testament prophecy (for example, Isaiah 9:1-3), Jesus is preaching to Gentiles like us, shining His great light on those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, although we might wonder how Jesus’s proclaiming “Repent and believe”, two more commands, are any light at all!
As I said in the last Church Year in regards to a different Gospel Reading, even reducing to two the number of Commandments that we might have to do in order to save ourselves is of little help. We fail to keep the Ten Commandments, and so we fail to keep the two commandments that summarize them: love God and love our neighbors. Those two commandments might fit better on a yard sign, but, on our own, we still do not keep them! And, if keeping Jesus’s commands to “Repent and believe” were completely up to us, we also would not be able to fulfill them. For, by nature we are dead in our trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1, 5), unable to believe in Jesus Christ our Lord come to Him. Sure, we might hear God’s Commandments and recognize that we fail to keep them, and we may even be sorry that we fail to keep them, but cannot truly turn away from our sins without Jesus’s call to repent and believe, which itself not only denounces our sins but also enables us to turn from them to God, trusting Him to forgive our sins for Jesus’s sake (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XII:44-45; confer Smalcald Articles, III iii:4; Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, V:8). In today’s Old Testament Reading (Jonah 3:1-5, 10), God used Jonah, after “almost incredible adventures” (Nocent, 1:377), in order to call and enable the people of Nineveh to repent in the allotted time, so that they would be spared the disaster that God had otherwise promised them, and in today’s Epistle Reading (1 Corinthians 7:29-31), God used St. Paul in order to tell the Corinthians and us that the time left to repent is very short, for the present form of this world is passing away.
Not only is the time of God’s judgment fulfilled, but the Kingdom of His Divine appointment is at hand. Jesus’s work is “the great turning point in world history”, “the coming of the kingdom of God directly into the present as the miracle of God” (Preisker, TDNT 2:331). The Gospel (or the “good news”) that the God-man Jesus calls and enables us to believe in—to have expectant confidence in (Bultmann, TDNT 6:211 with n.271)—is the good news of His own victory on the cross in His battle over sin, death, and the power of the devil for us! Especially in St. Mark’s Divinely‑inspired Gospel account, Jesus and the good news about Him, His suffering and death for us, are essentially identified (see, for example, Mark 8:35 and 10:29; confer 14:9). That good news about Jesus carries God’s power with it and effects what it proclaims—in this case repentance and faith, and the resulting forgiveness and salvation—as the gift of God. Thus, that good news about Jesus brings peace with God for all of us burdened by the guilt of our sins, and thus that Good news about Jesus also brings us great joy. (Friedrich, TDNT 2:721-727.)
In today’s Gospel Reading, we heard how Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of God, and in the next couple of weeks we will hear how Jesus also enacted the Gospel of God. Jesus certainly surpassed all those who had proclaimed repentance and faith before Him, and, in some sense, those such as Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John, whom we heard Jesus call and whom He later sent to proclaim repentance and faith after Him (for example, Luke 24:46-49), surpass Him (see, for example, John 14:12). God uses those Jesus sends’ not only reading and proclaiming His Word, but their also Baptizing in His Name, individually Absolving at His command, and distributing His Body and Blood in bread and wine to transform those of us who hear, are washed, privately confess, and eat and drink. We repent and believe and are forgiven, and so God also gives us eternal life and salvation. The good news of Jesus’s victory over sin, death, and the devil for us, leads us to partake of the feast of victory now and ultimately also for eternity (Friedrich, TDNT 2:721-727).
Until then, we live each day with repentance and faith, and, with God working in and through us, we begin to keep not only those two commands but also the Ten Commandments, at least trying to produce God-pleasing good works according to our vocations in our families, church, and society. The people of Nineveh showed outward signs of the repentance and faith God worked through Jonah, and so do we show such outward signs! For example, as Jesus did not discriminate in His proclaiming of the Gospel of God, neither do we discriminate in our proclamation or resulting loving of our neighbors. Considering tomorrow’s 45th anniversary of the landmark U-S Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade that wrongly legalized abortion and has since resulted in the slaughter of more than 58 million unborn children (Right to Life), we remember that every God-given life matters, now and forever—the lives of the people of Nineveh, Galilee, and Corinth mattered; your lives and my life matter; and the lives of every unborn infant, planned or unplanned, and the lives of every infirm senior, acute or chronic, conscious or unconscious matter (confer Salemink, CPR 28:1, 68). We may suffer for such belief, teaching, and confession, but such is the cross of the Christian!
“Jesus proclaims ‘Repent and believe’”, and so we do repent and believe! Not so much two more items on our “to-do” list, for God enables us to do so! Turning in sorrow from our sins to trust God to forgive our sins for Jesus’s sake, we have nothing to fear. In today’s Closing Hymn (Lutheran Service Book 735), which was influenced by one of its authors struggle with illness for most of her life (Precht, 660), and which may be new or less-familiar to some than to others—in that hymn, we sing of how that lack of fear is based on the Father’s choosing to give us His Kingdom; we sing of how we can have good cheer because He will keep us in His love forever; we sing of how we can praise Him because He stoops down to heal us, uplift and restore us; and we sing of how we can thank Him for staying close beside us, in all things working with us. Let us so sing, today and always!
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +