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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. (Amen.)
Just last Sunday after Pilgrim’s Divine Service, as I greeted people at the door, I answered a question about Jesus’s teaching in what is today’s Gospel Reading about one person’s being taken and another person’s being left. We might happily blame Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ series of best-selling novels and the movies based on them for popularizing the idea of unbelievers’ being, as their first novel’s title put it, “Left Behind”, but LaHaye and Jenkins’ more-recent works only rehashed false teaching that has been around for nearly two centuries. For example, others and I vividly remember the 19-73 movie titled “A Thief in the Night” with its haunting theme song by Larry Norman titled “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”, the refrain of which song included the line “The Son has come and you’ve been left behind”. American C. I. Scofield and his Reference Bible of 19-17 are often blamed for popularizing Englishman J. N. Darby’s 18-47 teaching termed “dispensational premillennialism” (Stephenson, CLD XIII:83), but the idea of a secret “rapture” of believers reportedly goes back to Scottish clergyman Edward Irving in 18-32 and before him to a Scottish woman named Margaret MacDonald, who claimed that during a church service in 18-30 Jesus revealed to her that detail about His return in a secret “rapture” (Nichols, CTQ 64:4 [2000] p.320). Interesting history aside, considering the whole of today’s Gospel Reading, this morning we realize that “Those ignorant of the day and hour can always be ready to be left with the Lord”. We take that theme in three parts.
First, then, consider “Those ignorant of the day and hour”, which includes you and me. We all are “ignorant of the day and hour”. In the context of St. Matthew’s Divinely-inspired Gospel account, Jesus had just told His disciples that they knew that the season of summer was near when the fig tree’s branch became tender and put out leaves, and that they likewise would know that the Son of Man was near when they saw all the things that Jesus had just described (Matthew 24:32-33). But, Jesus said then, neither the disciples, nor the angels of heaven, nor the Son on earth, but only the Father knows the precise day and hour. To illustrate the ignorance of the day and hour but knowledge of the “season”, Jesus used the example of Noah and the ark, saying that as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. People maybe had heard Noah’s preaching about the flood, calling them to repentance and faith in God’s deliverance, but they did not know the precise day that the judgment would come, until Noah and his family entered the ark and the flood came and swept away all the unrepentant unbelievers, leaving behind repentant and believing Noah and his family.
You and I face similar judgment that will similarly come on an unknown day and at an unknown hour. We may similarly ignore preaching about the end calling us to repentance and faith in God’s deliverance. Without any proper concern for what is coming, we may similarly go about life as usual, with everyone eating and drinking, with men marrying and women being given in marriage—even though some have stopped getting married altogether (Kretzmann, ad loc Matthew 24:36-41, p.137), and others have redefined “marriage” as something completely different from what God instituted. Without heeding the signs around us, seasons seem deceptively normal, and we and the people around us seem to be deceptively together (Franzmann, Follow Me, 180-181). We may falsely assume that life will continue this way indefinitely (Gibbs, ad loc Matthew 24:38, p.1295), and we may wrongly want it to continue this way forever. By nature we are unrepentant unbelievers who deserve to be taken to judgment, but God calls and so enables us to be repentant believers who so can always be ready to be left with the Lord.
Having first considered that we are “Those ignorant of the day and hour”, we second consider that we “can always be ready”. Repentant and believing Noah and his family heeded God’s Word and built the ark that God used to deliver them from the flood, but, ultimately, they were saved, from their sin and the eternal damnation that they and we deserve, through faith in God’s love, mercy, and grace for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ (confer Hebrews 11:7). Jesus is the Son of God in human flesh, though just how He simultaneously could have Divine omniscience and yet not know the date of His own final coming, His coming in glory to judge the living and the dead, remains somewhat of a mystery. But, what is not a mystery is that Jesus took the sins of the world to the cross and there died for us, in our place, the death that we deserve. As we sang in the Introit (Psalm 118:25-26; antiphon: Zechariah 9:9b, altered), our King comes to us righteous and having salvation, and we call out to Him to save us. And, He does save us, from our sinful nature and all of our sin, whatever our sin might be; He saves us here in this His house; He saves us by way of His Word and Sacraments.
The water of the flood swept away the unrepentant unbelievers, but the Divinely-inspired St. Peter says that repentant and believing Noah and his family in the ark were brought safely through the water of the flood, and he says that that deliverance through water corresponds to Holy Baptism, which saves us (1 Peter 3:20‑21). Similarly, St. Paul says that God saves us by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, Whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior (Titus 3:5-6). To that same goal of salvation, Jesus gives the Holy Spirit to men and sends them as ministers in order for them both to absolve us individually and to give us, in the Sacrament of the Altar, Jesus’s own Body to eat with bread and His Blood to drink with wine, not for eating and drinking in a profane or unholy way, as in today’s Gospel Reading, but, as Jesus Himself describes elsewhere, for those who so eat and drink to live forever (John 6:51; confer Goppelt, TDNT 8:236-237). Thus faithfully receiving God’s forgiveness through Word and Sacrament, we can be “ignorant of the day and hour” and still “can always be ready to be left with the Lord”.
Having first considered that we are “Those ignorant of the day and hour”, and having second considered that we “can always be ready”, we third consider that we are “to be left with the Lord”. The parallels between the days of Noah, particularly the day when Noah entered the ark, and the coming of the Son of Man, particularly the day and hour of His final coming, make clear that the unrepentant unbelievers are the ones swept away or taken, while the repentant believers are the ones left, left to meet the descending Lord in the air and to come with Him to earth, where they will be with Him always (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). We may be “ignorant of the day and hour” of His final coming, but we are always ready for His final coming, “staying awake”, as it were, watching and being vigilant for His final coming, but also, until then, doing good works in keeping with our various callings in life, including bearing witness to the peace and joy that we have already now in Jesus Christ our Lord, peace and joy that we will experience completely at our Lord’s final coming with both the resurrection of our bodies, if necessary, and their glorification that come with that final coming.
The end of the old Church Year’s focus on the Last Things obviously has carried over to the start of the new Church Year that begins today. Our Lord’s past first coming in the flesh is in a significant way the guarantee of His future final coming in the flesh (confer Acts 1:11) and so that past coming leads to our being ready for that final coming. Considering the whole of today’s Gospel Reading, this morning we have realized that “Those ignorant of the day and hour can always be ready to be left with the Lord”. So, as we sang in the Introit, we both give thanks to and extol our God.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +