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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.
Imagine someone whom you had grown up with, gone to church and school with, and maybe even worked in the same community with, saying in a church service in your hometown that he was the Messiah, God’s long-promised Savior. How would you react? As New Testament believers in Jesus, no doubt we would object and for a good reason, although for a different reason than the people in Jesus’s hometown objected when that happened to them, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading. Jesus proclaimed to His hearers the Lord’s favor in Himself, but, in so doing, Jesus, as it were, fell out of favor with His hearers. This morning we reflect on today’s Gospel Reading under the theme “The Lord’s favor and His hearers’ favor”.
As the Divinely‑inspired St. Luke tells it, after Jesus’s Baptism and Temptation, “Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and a report about Him went out through all the surrounding country, and He taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all” (Luke 4:14-15)—at least until He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. There, in a kind of service that goes back at least to the events of today’s Old Testament Reading (Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8‑10), if not further, apparently Jesus’s hearers’ familiarity with Him was a stumbling block for them. Although Jesus at least initially proclaimed the Lord’s favor to His hearers, after two proverbs and two references to Old Testament prophets followed, His hearers’ ultimately unbelieving reaction led them to attempt quite an unfavorable action, with Jesus’s miraculous escape arguably ironically giving them the kind of “epiphany” of His divine nature that they apparently had wanted.
What may initially have been their speaking well of Jesus and marveling at the gracious words that were coming from Jesus’s mouth changed as Jesus’s hearers thought about Jesus’s being Joseph’s son. Jesus knew their true attitude better than they did (Buls, ad loc Luke 4:14‑30, p.18), and Jesus quoted the two proverbs and referred to the two Old Testament prophets, seemingly to show His hearers both how they were rejecting Him and how His doing miracles for others but not for them was consistent with other prophets. But, when Jesus’s hearers heard those things, they were filled with wrath and tried to throw Jesus down a cliff, effectively to stone Him as a false prophet and blasphemer. Like other “prophets” both before and after Him, Jesus was rejected, and rejected not only by the people of His hometown.
Do we reject Jesus as His hometown hearers did? We surely do not reject Him for the same initial reason that they did, and we hardly are trying to throw Jesus down a cliff as they did. However, that does not mean that we do not reject Jesus or reject His ordained and sent messengers in other ways, perhaps being “too familiar” with them or not liking how they handle things. Jesus knew His hearers’ thoughts, and He seemingly sharpened His application of His law. Pastors today sometimes also can be quite pointed in their preaching and get similar responses. Nearly a century ago, in commenting on part of today’s Gospel Reading, a Missouri Synod professor wrote these words:
“As long as faithful pastors speak in a general way in their preaching and admonishing, they have peace and are even praised. But if the same men dare to point to individual sins, they are accused of unjust criticism and condemnation.” (Kretzmann, ad loc Luke 4:28-30, p.287.)
Little has changed! Faithful pastors may or may not be driven out of town in one way or another, but they may find instead that members of the congregations that they serve leave the congregations for such reasons, perhaps not enduring sound teaching but trying to accumulate for themselves preachers to suit their own passions (2 Timothy 4:3). They and all of us need God’s law to warn us, as we sang in the Psalm this morning (Psalm 19:1-14; antiphon v.14). For, we are all sinful by nature, and so we all sin, if not in these ways, then we sin in other ways, and so we all deserve eternal death and damnation, apart from repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.
Hundreds of years before the time of Christ, God inspired Isaiah to prophesy of His Servant, the Virgin Mary and God’s Son’s, having the Holy Spirit upon Him because He had been anointed in His baptism to proclaim good news to the poor and sent to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. As, Jesus told His hometown hearers, He also tells us today, that prophecy is fulfilled in our “hearing” (or, more literally, “in our ears”). And, Jesus wants that prophecy to be fulfilled also in our hearts (Kretzmann, ad loc Luke 4:20-22, p.286). When we are poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3); when we recognize our captivity to sin, our spiritual blindness, and our oppression; and when we do not reject but trust in the Lord’s favor for the sake of Jesus’s death on the cross for us; then God forgives us our sins. Out of His great love, mercy, and grace, God forgives our unfavorable responses to Jesus and to His ordained and sent messengers, or whatever our sins might be. God forgives all our sins because Jesus has suffered the penalty of our sins on the cross in our place. When we do not reject but trust in the Lord’s favor, we seek and receive His forgiveness through His Word and Sacraments.
Strikingly, the two Old Testament accounts to which Jesus in today’s Gospel Reading referred—the cleansing of the leper Namaan and the miraculous provision of food to the widow of Zarephath—especially point us to God’s miraculous cleansing us of our sins in Holy Baptism and to God’s miraculously feeding us with Christ’s Body and Blood in the Sacrament of the Altar in order to sustain us on our way through this life. And, the miraculous way that Jesus passed through the midst of the Nazareth mob assures us that Jesus’s Body and Blood can be miraculously present in, with, and under the bread and wine in the Sacrament of the Altar—all for our forgiveness, life, and salvation. God’s Word read and preached offers those gifts to all people collectively, and His Sacraments administered give them in concrete ways to us individually.
Today’s Gospel Reading may speak most directly to pastors and their hearers, but every member of the Body of Christ that we heard about in today’s Epistle Reading (1 Corinthians 12:12-31a) has callings in which he or she also has “hearers” of his or her words and deeds that can share the Good News of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Each of you in your typical day probably individually comes (and certainly collectively come) into contact with more non‑Lutherans and unbelievers than I do. Encourage them in their captivity, blindness, and oppression, and invite them to seek and find the Lord’s favor here, where His Gospel is purely preached and His Sacraments are rightly administered. Here, united in Christ, we suffer and rejoice together, especially being comforted that, when we seem to be rejected, we are being treated the same way that Jesus was (Matthew 5:12; confer Luther, AE 67:218) and that ultimately people are not rejecting us but rejecting Him Who sent us.
This morning we have considered today’s Gospel Reading under the theme “The Lord’s favor and His hearers’ favor”. We realized that the Lord graciously offers His saving favor to all, but sadly all do not favorably receive His offer. When we do favorably receive His offer with repentance and faith, we have His salvation as our possession already now and look forward to experiencing it fully and completely on the Last Day. After his own period of rejection, Nikolai Grundtvig eventually became one of the Lord’s ordained and sent messengers, a faithful pastor who suffered a good deal for his faithfulness. He was also a hymn-writer, the most-important Scandinavian hymn-writer of the 19th century and the best‑known hymn-writer in the Danish language (Pollack, pp.514-515; Precht, pp.631-632; Herl, #843, HS’98:Handbook, p.106). As one of the Distribution Hymns this morning, we are scheduled to sing a translation of what he wrote as an additional fifth stanza for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress” (Pollack, #283, p.206; Precht, #333, pp.351‑352); we close now by praying the words of that stanza’s final three lines:
“Lord, grant, while worlds endure,
We keep [Your Word’s] teaching’s pure
Throughout all generations” (Lutheran Service Book 582).
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +