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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.
Today’s Gospel Reading contains what is perhaps one of the most‑popular and best‑loved expressions of the Gospel message, a verse that you may know by heart, in one version or another: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” That verse and its surrounding verses, perhaps not surprisingly then, are appointed by our current three‑year series of Readings to be read on three different Sundays, which include two in the same year and is one more Sunday than in the previous series of Readings. The use on this Second Sunday in Lent is newer, and we consider this day of the Church Year and the day’s other Readings and such as we consider what the Gospel Reading might communicate to us this morning, that, in our respective ways, Abram, Jesus, and we are “Sent to be a blessing”.
Unique to St. John’s Divinely‑inspired Gospel account, today’s Gospel Reading comes after Jesus had driven out from the Temple Courts the sacrifice‑sellers and money‑changers and, when asked for a sign of His authority to do so, had told the Jewish leaders that, when they had destroyed the temple that was His body, He would raise it up in three days (John 2:13-21). Next, among other things, St. John tells us both that many people believed in Jesus’s Name when they saw the other signs that He was doing and that Jesus knew what was in man (John 2:23-25). Then a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus came to Jesus, speaking about what the Pharisees at least thought they knew about Jesus’s ability to do the signs that He was doing.
Ability and inability are prominent in the discussion that immediately follows between Jesus and Nicodemus. Jesus said that unless, one is born from above, he is unable to see the Kingdom of God. Nicodemus asked how a man is able to be born when he is old and whether he was able to enter into his mother’s womb a second time and be born. Jesus said that, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he is unable to enter the Kingdom of God, and Nicodemus asked how such things were able to be. Nicodemus apparently knew a lot less than he thought that he knew, and he sort of fades from the scene as Jesus continues to speak to him, including Jesus’s speaking to Nicodemus about God’s loving the world by giving His Son, sending Him into the world not to condemn the world but to save the world through Him. In other words, that God sent His Son to be a blessing, as God had sent Jesus’s ancestor Abram, hundreds of years earlier.
As we heard in today’s Old Testament Reading (Genesis 12:1-9), God called Abram and sent him and his extended family to go to land that God promised to give to Abram and his offspring. A seventy-five-year-old went hundreds of miles, where he knew not, by paths at least that he had not yet trod, through perils unknown, and yet he went by faith, with good courage, and with God’s hand leading him and His love supporting him (Murray, CPR 30:2, 17, apparently alluding to a Collect such as Lutheran Service Book #193, For guidance in our calling). In today’s Epistle Reading (Romans 4:1-8, 13-17), St. Paul makes much of God’s promise to Abraham and his offspring’s coming through the righteousness of faith and the promise’s including all of us who believe, whether or not we are literal descendants of Abraham.
Of course, of ourselves we have no strength (Collect of the Day). On our own we are unable to believe. By nature and on account of our actual sins, we are part of the world that stands condemned and would perish eternally, apart from God’s giving and sending His Son in order to save the world. Today’s Gospel Reading makes clear God’s will that all people, not only Nicodemus but also us, turn from sin to God in order to be saved (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, II:49). That is God’s intention, though the reality is that those who reject His enabling call remain condemned in their sin and will perish eternally, not having believed in the Name of the only Son of God (John 3:18).
God later tested Abraham by telling him to take his only son Isaac, whom Abraham loved, and offer him as a burnt offering; Abraham did not withhold his son, his only son, and God provided a lamb to sacrifice in Isaac’s place (Genesis 22:1-19; confer Hebrews 11:7). That account, among others, seems to be in the background as Jesus tells Nicodemus how God loves the world, including us, by giving His only Son, Whom He loved, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life (confer 1 John 4:9). Jesus died in our place, the death that we deserved. God’s plan to save the world necessitated that the Son of Man, God in human flesh, be lifted up on the cross (confer John 8:28; 12:32-34), so that whoever looks in faith to Him, Who was so crucified (Pieper II:336), may have eternal life (confer Numbers 21:8-9). In this way of faith in Christ, we have forgiveness of sins, justification, righteousness—not having earned it by works, but being given it freely by faith. God’s promise to bless not only Abram, but also all the families of the earth in Abram, including us, is fulfilled in Christ.
We are in Christ as we are baptized in His Name, reborn from above by water and the Spirit. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Jesus says elsewhere that the flesh is no help at all, but the Spirit gives life (John 6:63). We are not reborn of the will of the flesh, but we are reborn of God by water and the Spirit (John 1:13). In Holy Baptism, God enables us to see and to enter His Kingdom. So baptized, when we know and feel particular sins in our heart, we privately confess them to our pastor for the sake of individual Holy Absolution, forgiveness that the pastor has received a gift of the Holy Spirit in order to effect for us (John 20:22-23). And, so absolved, we come to the Sacrament of the Altar, in order to eat bread that is the Body of Christ given for us and to drink wine that is the Blood of Christ shed for us. For, this is true food and true drink, and, unless we so eat and drink, Jesus says, we have no life in us, but, if we do so eat and drink, then we have eternal life, and Jesus will raise us up on the Last Day (John 6:53-55). In the meantime, like Abram and Jesus before us, we are sent from this place in order to be a blessing.
Our individual callings obviously differ from those of Abram and Jesus, but our individual callings nevertheless are the callings that God has given to us and intends for us to use, in order to love and serve Him by loving and serving our neighbors—whether those neighbors are in our families, schools or workplaces, or communities that get progressively larger as they radiate out from us. Nicodemus may have faded from the scene of today’s Gospel Reading, but he turns up later in St. John’s Gospel account, both serving in his vocation as a ruler of the Jews calling for giving Jesus a hearing and learning what He was doing (John 7:50), and bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes to care for the body of Jesus after His crucifixion (John 19:38-39). Each of us can speak and act in the ways that God puts before us, in the places that we are, with the people whom God puts in our lives. Individually and even collectively as the Church in this place, we may seem inadequate to the work that God has for us to do, here and with the Church at large, but the Holy Spirit breathes where He wishes His enabling breath.
Having considered this day of the Church Year and the day’s other Readings and such, we considered the Gospel Reading’s communicating to us this morning how, in our respective ways, Abram, Jesus, and we are “Sent to be a blessing”. God loved us by giving His only Son that whoever who believes in Him does not perish but has eternal life. That eternal life begins here in God’s presence, but on a weekly basis we go out from here and again come in here throughout our earthly lives. We do not always know where we go and what perils await us, but we go by faith, with good courage, and with God’s hand leading us and His love supporting us. We can be sure, as we sang in today’s Psalm (Psalm 121; antiphon: v.8), that the Lord will so keep our going out and our coming in from this time forth and forevermore.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +