MONDAY
As we see throughout the Gospels and certainly in our reading from Matthew this morning, the Pharisees are always trying to trip up Jesus. They’re always trying to outsmart Him, to expose Him, to discredit Him in the eyes of the people. That’s why they ask Him questions–not because they genuinely want to know the answers, but because they want to use His answers to crush Him under their feet.
But while the Pharisees are huddled up after asking Jesus what the greatest commandment is, our Lord comes to them with a different question and a different heart. He comes, not to humiliate these men, but to invite them to see who He is. Jesus is something better than a political liberator, a temporal Christ who will free them from the Romans and let them keep their perishing glory. He is the Son of God who will free them from sin and give them eternal glory, a glory they can only receive if they turn from their pride and admit their sins. So in all of this, Jesus exposes their ignorance about the Scriptures, and how the Scriptures teach that the Christ will be divine, not to crush them, but to heal them, to invite them into His kingdom of peace.
And so it is for you. When God speaks the Law to you through the Scriptures, through preaching, He doesn’t do this to expose you before the world and humiliate you for daring to question Him through your sins. He does this so that you can see that you need something greater than the perishing glory of your own pride and that He has given you something infinitely greater than that perishing glory. He has given you eternal life. David’s Son and David’s Lord has placed that into your hands. Rejoice in it.
WEDNESDAY
There’s a little bit of Pharisee in you, a little bit that will always grow and metastasize if you feed it. This is true of all of us, even the Super Lutherans.
It’s a good thing, of course, that we Lutherans love proper articulation of doctrine. It’s good that we cherish the word of God and wish to worship God in spirit and truth, with reverence and awe. But we should always be cautious not to let our views on these issues become an obsession like tithing our spices when we neglect the weightier matters of repenting of our sins and trusting in Christ.
It’s good to make the sign of the cross at certain points in the service. It’s good to stand or kneel at various other spots. I want the world to know that Lutherans take the sacredness of worship seriously. But what good is it for Lutherans to be the most pious in worship if we’re not the most pious anywhere else? It’s good to cling to solid hymns, to reverent musical styles. But what good is doing things the right way if we don’t gossip about our neighbors any less than anyone else, if we don’t struggle less with anger, if we don’t get less riddled with anxiety over temporal, fleeting matters?
The reverence of holy worship, the proper articulation of holy doctrine–these are rewards Jesus has given us, the results of when He destroyed our sins upon the cross. These things are not actions for which our Lord will give us greater glory than the rest of the world. So let us live not as white-washed tombs, but as white-washed sanctuaries, as temples of the holy spirit where our inner hearts are as clean as our external worship. And may Jesus Christ give us the strength to do this always.
THURSDAY
On the surface, it seems a bit strange that the Scriptures describe God as patient and slow to anger. After all, much of the Old Testament is about God’s anger erupting and pouring out condemnation upon the people who have turned against Him, those who have given themselves over to idolatry. But it helps to remember that the very distant past and the distant past always look much closer to each other than they really are.
We are about as far away from the birth of Christ as the birth of Christ is from the birth of Abraham. Likewise, the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah is about as far removed from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem’s temple as we are. God endures decades, centuries, even millennia of His people running away from Him, defiling themselves and His temple with prostitutes, slaughtering their children to demons. About six hundred years before the birth of Christ, the men from Jeremiah’s own city are conspiring to put him to death for preaching the word of God. And yet, six hundred years later, when the Pharisees and chief priests conspire to do the same things to Christ, your God has not given up. He’s still committed to love and mercy.
So don’t give up either. When your sins are still hounding you, don’t get impatient and flustered, thinking that you must not be a Christian because you’re not living the way you want. Run to the cross and find your forgiveness at the feet of the One who will never grow tired of loving you, not today, not tomorrow, not in a thousand years. When the world around you seems to be increasingly devoted to demons, don’t despair. Double the time from the signing of the declaration of Independence to today, then add another hundred years. That’s the distance between Jermiah being led like a lamb to the slaughter and Jesus being the Lamb of God slaughtered for the sins of the world. God will raise up and tear down nations where and when it pleases Him. But He will not grow tired of loving you, forgiving you, and doing the same for your neighbors and children. Be at peace. Your Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. And He always will be.
FRIDAY
Yesterday I spoke about how we have a weird way of viewing the past in terms of time. We think of Abraham and Jesus being much closer than they are, despite the fact that we’re as far from the birth of Jesus as Jesus was from the birth of Abraham.
Well, there’s another sense in which we have a weird way of viewing the past, which is morally. We have quite selective memories about the past. We see all the immorality of today, the forms that didn’t exist or weren’t so brazen when we were children, and yet we forget all the forms of immorality that were all the rage back in the day. People who grew up in the 50s remember the wholesomeness of television and forget the state of race relations or the teen pregnancy rates. People like me who grew up in the 90s remember the blessed state of race relations but forget the glorification of prison culture and drug use that still plagues our culture.
And so, we all think, today is so much worse than yesterday. The present is hopeless, the past was perfect. And this mindset is a major reason why we all struggle to accept Christ’s word that we cannot know the day or the hour. We all want to believe His return must be drawing closer because, certainly, without question, the world is getting worse. The boils and pustules of this vile world must be signs that He is drawing closer.
Repent and relax. You neither know the day nor the hour. Christ’s return is always closer than before, of course, because that’s how time works. But you don’t know if it will be one more day or one million years. What you do know is that you are a sinner always in need of your Lord’s mercy and compassion, His forgiveness and love. So let go of your anxieties and run to the One who has freed you from them. Run to the cross of Christ, the Savior of the world who is your King whether you live in the darkest of moments or the most blissful of eras. Cling to Christ and, whenever He returns, He will receive you into His kingdom.
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