Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed, Alleluia! +
I have said these things to you to keep you from falling away. Here we get to the point, here we get to the sharp edge. For the past month or so we've been hearing these words of Jesus from John 15 and 16, and they are all setting us up for life after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, life after Pentecost. And they've not always been rosy words – there's been warnings of tribulation and sorrow and lamentation. Today it gets ratcheted up. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. You know what being a believer, what having faith might mean? Rejection from your community – where your family, your friends, your home – turns on you. You aren't with the program anymore, we can't talk to you, we can't even bear to see you, get out. And it might be done violently. They might even kill you and think they are serving God, protecting the “church” - just like the chief priests who killed Jesus thought wrongly that they were serving God.
2000 years of Church history shows that this warning is true. It was true in the lives of the apostles and the early Church. The Christians were kicked out of the synagogue – and that actually was a technical, legal thing. The Jewish people had various religious rights and exemptions in ancient Rome – protections under the law. The Christians lost those protections, and they were handed over to Rome, and many were martyred. Of the 12 Apostles, 11 are executed – only John dies a normal death, and that is still in exile. And things like this follow for the Church. And they still follow and happen today – where confessing faith in Christ Jesus and looking to Him for mercy and forgiveness can get you mocked, ostracized, or even killed.
So why bring it up? Why does Jesus take time to introduce this idea right before His own death? So that you do not fall away. Fall away. You know, I bet pretty much every one of you know the Greek word here that Jesus uses that gets translated as “fall away” - it's “skandalisthete” - scandalized. That you would not be tripped up and knocked over and fall flat in your faith. That's what a scandal is – right? It's some event that takes someone who is powerful and flying high and knocks them down. And Jesus warns you today that Satan and the world, and even your own flesh are going to try to get you caught up in scandals of your own, things to knock you down and shatter your faith. Because this is the reality – no one can forcibly take Jesus away from you – but you can and will be tempted to fall away from the faith, to set it down and walk away from it.
And this is something we're seeing today. Last Century, way back in the 1900s (okay, normally I would have just said 40 or 50 years ago, but it's the past now), there was some societal pressure to be a Christian, especially after World War 2, especially during the cold war when the Godless Communists were our enemies. It was patriotic to be a Christian, and you were supposed to be patriotic. That's just not as big a pressure in society anymore. In fact, I'd argue that it's far more common to get pressures to drive you away from the Church, away from the Christian Community, away from the whole approach to life where you say, “I'm a sinner, and I need Christ's forgiveness.” Call something a sin today, and you might get dragged to court. Say you've got church this weekend, and your club or team will mock you, throw you to the bench, or kick you out. Making Church, making the faith a priority has always been hard – and there's a lot less encouragement, a lot just pressure to do that – and in fact there's encouragement and pressure to have you give up, to have you fall away. You have to be prepared as a Christian to have people think that you are backwards and just horrible because you don't go along with their silly little games.
Man, I'm a bit bummed right now. I mean, I could keep swirling on down this line of discussion, and I'm sure we could all work up some bitter rants about how the world is changing, and we could work ourselves up and we could get some massive resentments building up and maybe even work up some indignation and rage. And then suddenly this place gets shifted and corrupted into a house of anger and disdain and judgment. But aren't there things to be angry over, and aren't there things to judge. Yes, but is that the center, the focus, the heart of this place, of being a Christian? That you hate the right things to hate? You see, this is the thing with falling, there are multiple directions you can fall. Someone can push you one way – you might fall that way, or you might over-correct and fall over the other way. 115 has ditches on both side of the road, if you miss the left one but swerve over to the right side one, you're still in the ditch. And our own sinful flesh will try to use what happens to us as an excuse to calcify, to harden, and that's a falling away too. That's a shifting of the focus of this place.
And neither of these results is what Jesus desires for you. So hear Him again. When the Helper comes, Whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about Me. The Helper, the Holy Spirit – what's He going to do? He's going to bear witness, He's going to fix your eyes upon Jesus. Ultimately, to be a Christian is this – that you learn to see and understand everything, everything, in view of, in light of Christ Jesus and His death and resurrection. We see everything through Jesus tinted glasses. And that's the job of the Holy Spirit – to bring you Jesus, to hold before your eyes and in your mind first and foremost the story of redemption and forgiveness – that God Himself comes to rescue and redeem fallen man by becoming man Himself, by living perfectly in our place to fulfill all righteousness, by dying in our place to take up all punishment, and by rising again to reestablish and inaugurate life again. This is the Truth – Jesus is the Truth – the Way, the Truth, and the Life, actually – and the Spirit's job is to keep you centered in Jesus – because when you are centered in Christ, He raises you up. When you are centered in Christ, what's to scandalize you?
And I ask you that seriously – when you have the story of Jesus, the history of salvation that unfolds in the Scriptures, what's going to scandalize you? What's going to be so abhorrent that it catches you off guard and knocks you down? Because in the Scriptures you've seen it all, and you've seen how Jesus deals with it all. Are people mad at you for being faithful – well, that's happened plenty of times in the Scriptures. Abraham, Joseph, David, John the Baptist, the Apostles, they all get treated horribly. Shouldn't surprise you. And it happened to Jesus Himself – He Himself is abused for His faithfulness, He is struck by a soldier for speaking the truth before the chief priests. There's no reason any of that should shock you. And you see Jesus – you know the pattern – Jesus suffers, calls out, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” - and then dying, He rises. Those attacks, those insults don't knock Jesus off the plan of salvation. Sometimes there's temporal deliverance from the problems, sometimes there's not – either way they all end with the heavens being opened and the risen and ascended Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father welcoming the forgiven unto eternal life.
There is not a sinner you will come across this week who isn't a sinner that Jesus has died for. There isn't a sin that you will encounter this week that wasn't taken up by Christ on the Cross already and crucified. This is true whether it that sinner over there and their sins that really hurt and harm you – or whether its this sinner, the sinner you see in the mirror each day, and those stupid sins that harm yourself and mess up your own life. Forgiveness still reigns. The Cross of Christ Jesus still towers over them all. Christ Jesus came into this world to redeem sinners. This is the Truth, this is what Jesus came to do. This is the highest reality.
And Satan can't change reality. He can lie, he can delude, he can try to pull the wool over your eyes. He can tell you that if you repeat something enough it becomes true no matter how absurd it is – but it's not. Jesus is the Truth, and the Spirit puts your eyes upon Jesus. The Spirit works in the Church by the Word to keep you in Christ Jesus and His forgiveness. The Spirit sees you baptized – you wake every day as a Baptized child of God – you know that over and against all the lies of the world that you are one for whom Christ Jesus died. You know that however the world treats you, however they disdain you, you are part of the family of God, an heir of salvation, a Royal priest who will reign eternally with Christ. So what if people don't let you in their little club of the day – you're baptized into Christ.
The Spirit works in the Church by the Word – where He bears witness about Christ day by day to you – where in you and through you the Spirit bears witness to others. The Word of God is living and active, and day by day the Spirit applies the Word to us, through preaching, through absolution – to where whatever the sin or struggle you are forgiven, we are forgiven, so that Christ Jesus and His forgiveness remains the central truth of our lives and existence. Forgive each other this week – forgive people in the name of Jesus, and live in His peace.
The Spirit works in the Supper, where you are fed and nourished on Christ Jesus, where He comes with forgiveness and life and salvation. You're not detached from Christ – see, He gives Himself to you, to strength you, to restore you, to pick you up from the times you've lost your balance and been knocked down and to keep you firm in the faith. Over and over the Spirit works to bear witness to Christ, to bring Jesus to you, so that over and against all the wiles of the world, Jesus is actually all in all for you, for your good, for your blessing.
Have you noticed, that even over and against all the warnings we've heard these past few weeks – Jesus says the same? Jesus doesn't fall, He isn't scandalized, He doesn't clutch His pearls, He doesn't take His ball and go home. No – Jesus endures, and He goes to the Cross, and He dies and rises, and He stays with you, in the Word, giving you His Spirit so that you know what He has done always, so that you know that His mercy endures forever. That's the wondrous truth of who Jesus is – never let anything distract you away from that. For the central reality of your life and all existence is this – Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed, Alleluia! +
No comments:
Post a Comment