The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity – Sunday 8 October A✠D 2023
✠ Psalmody: Ecclesiasticus 36:21-22a; Psalm 122:1, 6, 8-9;122:1, 7;130:1-2a
✠ Lection: Deut. 10:12-21;1 Cor. 1:4-8;St. Matthew 22:34-46
In the Name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The will of God is always best and He has revealed His will to us in His Holy Word in both Law and Gospel. We are not to pit these two against one another as if they are opposed or as if there is any variation or shadow of turning with God and with what He says. He has given us both the Law and the Gospel as beautiful, and altogether good testimonies of His own will revealed. Unfortunately, through our breaking of His Law, both in the Garden of Eden and in our own lives daily, we bring ourselves only to misunderstand, devalue, and despise it. It is only by Who Jesus Christ is that our interaction with God’s Law becomes a good experience.
The significance of God’s Law in our lives as people created by Him to live in this world isn’t merely whether we have the 10 Commandments posted in our courthouses, schools, or on roadside billboards. The significance is how we treat the fact that He has written them upon all of our hearts and to where that writing leads us. The significance is in the bearing that His commandments have on our lives even if we try to live as if they don’t, or as if we can slide on by day-after-day unnoticed by God and what He demands in the very places and persons that He Himself has created.
When one of the Pharisees, a doctor of the Law, who had gathered around Jesus asked Him a question, testing Him, this man showed that he had no true understanding of or love for the Law, but only sought to use it to trap Christ in a malicious way. That Pharisee said, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” His wicked hope was for Jesus to answer with one of the more-than-600 specific laws from the Old Testament so that he could accuse the Christ of not knowing, or at least of not confessing, that all the Law and the Prophets hang on two commandments: ‘love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ Even the lawyer knew this to be true because it is literally written in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, as was quoted by Jesus. But what the lawyer and the rest of the learned Pharisees didn’t understand is that all the Old Testament Scriptures are written about Jesus, and since all of them hang on these two great commandments, then these great commandments must be about Jesus and not merely about how we are to deal with the Law in our lives.
What this means is that as we encounter the three uses of the Law, we cannot fall into the temptation to become mere utilitarians of it, meaning we may neither deceive ourselves into thinking that we keep the Law, nor may we despise God’s commands as if they are ill-given, burdensome, wet blankets hurled on our worldly pleasure parades. We cannot encounter the Law’s first use, to curb and restrain sin in our world, and say that evildoers shouldn’t receive harsh treatment; that we should make sure to just be nice, even to people who are seeking to drag our neighbors into Hell with them while making their lives a living one before they ever get there; all by resisting the goodness of God’s commandments and their bearing upon the whole world to do the good of which those statutes speak. We cannot encounter the Law’s second and most important use, to be a mirror for our own sins, and refuse to look in that mirror because it is uncomfortable. Sin is ugly. Sin is real. We can neither ignore our sins nor wallow in them as if they are either non-existent or too horrible to be forgiven. Either is an incomplete second use of God’s Law. We also cannot encounter the Law’s third use, to show Christians what living like Christians looks like, and say instead, “No, thank you. I don’t mind saying that I’m a Christian, but I still want to live the way that I want to and God will just have to be okay with that.” These are abuses of the Law and treat it as if there are bad and undesirable things that God commands in it. Any rebellion against His Law only comes from the sinful old man still dwelling within us that despises God, His Word, and all the goodness that the Lord brings about through it. Do not be in leagues with the Old Adam. The truth that neither that Pharisee nor our flesh even care to realize is that all of the commandments, especially the two upon which the rest are built, draw our minds to Christ Jesus, because they are about Him.
What do you think about the Christ? Whose Son is He? It’s right to agree with the Pharisees here because they are correct. The Christ is the Son of David. To be a son means to be begotten of a father. To be a Son of David, means to be begotten, to be born in the flesh, into David’s family. This was prophesied of old to be true about the promised Messiah. He would be of David’s royal bloodline, one of his descendants. Jesus, born in the flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was born an earthly descendant of King David. He is the Son of David. Yet, of this very same Person, the Messiah, the Christ, David spoke in Psalm 110 saying, “Yahweh said to my Lord, ‘Sit at My right hand, till I make Your enemies your footstool.’” David was calling his Son his Lord and the only way that he would do this is if by the Holy Spirit he was confessing his Son to also be the Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven.
So, when we hear the commandments, the Holy Spirit seeks to bring our minds not to how we might use or disuse the Law because we see it either as a means to an end by our own burdensome works or as something not really worth our admiration, but to see Christ, David’s Lord and ours, David’s Savior and ours, even in the Law and not just in the Gospel. Jesus is righteous and holy, not only as the eternal Son of the Father, but as the perfectly obedient, on your behalf, Son of David Who came in your flesh. It was He, fully God from all eternity, Who stepped down from heaven, was born of a woman, born the Son of David, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. It was He Who kept the great commandment by loving God all the time He was upon the earth, even in His hour of death. It was He Who perfectly loved His neighbor, including you, in all of His teaching, healing, rebuking, in His turning over of tables in righteous anger, and in His submission to your death for all of the Law that you do not keep.
It is only by Who Jesus Christ is that our interaction with God’s Law becomes a good experience then. He has fulfilled it and once again made it our delight because it is about Him. Because of Who He is, what is has done, is doing, and will do, may you now embrace the Law, not as a burdensome or tasteless list of merely what to do and not to do, but as the very goodness of Who your own Savior is. All of the Law and Prophets hang on He Who hung on the tree for you. Following His lead in loving God and neighbor is a true and noble desire of the heart that now lives in Christ.
In ✠ Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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