Thursday Matins - Higher Things Youth Conference Matthew 27:45-50
In Nomine Iesu
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. Matthew 27:45
The Splendor of the Father’s light who makes our daylight lucid bright hangs in the darkness. The Light no darkness can overcome dives headlong into black hole of the world’s sin and death. It happened on a Friday - the day man was made, the day God spoke His “very good” over all creation. It happened between Noon and three pm - the bright hours of the day. It was a very good Friday.
He is the beloved Son, the only-begotten of the Father, God enfleshed in humanity, yet He cries out as one damned by God in the miserable isolation of your sin and death. This hell on earth is your hell which He bears for you, what you deserve for what you’ve done and for who you are. He has become your sin, the ultimate Substitute Sinner in place of sinners, the Sacrifice, so that you in Him might become the righteousness of God. This is why He came, this is why He was baptized - to die in the darkness for you.
“While we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly.” For you. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. For you. While we were still enemies we were reconciled to God by this one dark death on a Friday afternoon between Noon and three.
Would you be willing to die for another? Perhaps you would. Maybe there’s a little super-hero in you. If the cause were just, if the person were noble, if the time were fight, perhaps you would. Would you be willing to die for your enemy, your slanderer, your betrayer, one who would wish you dead?
In the world of religion, you climb up to your god; in the faith of the cross, your God comes down to you. In the world of religion, you die for your god. You might even take a few of your enemies along with you into death, thereby ensuring your place in paradise. But in the faith of the cross, your God dies for you. In the world of religion, you must make peace with your god. In the faith of Jesus, your God makes peace with you while you are still His enemy.
Eli, eli lama sabachthani? The first verse of Psalm 22. The prayer of the God-forsaken believer. He trusts in God and yet is abandoned by God. And in His abandonment, he asks why. Jesus prays it in Aramaic, His mother tongue, as He learned it from His youth. It’s the question on the lips of every sufferer. Why? Why, do you let the innocent suffer? Why have you forsaken me in the hour of my need? Jesus asks the question for all of us, for all of humanity, and receives only the silence of the darkness. There is no adequate answer to this question, in spite of all our attempts to fill in dark silence with the noise of our speculations.
There is only faith, trust in the One who meets us in the darkness of our own death and says, “Trust me. I am with you to forgive you, to save you, to bless you.”
He drinks the sour, bitter cup. Jesus told His disciples He would not drink of the fruit of the vine until He drank it new in the kingdom of heaven. He drinks the bitter cup of wine long gone sour, so that you might drink the sweet, new wine of His blood poured out to save you.
He dies, forcefully, intentionally, with a shout not a whimper. This is His victory, His hour of power, His glory. This is His “jihad,” His holy war alone to fight, and in His death He conquers.
This is salvation’s time and place - on a cross on Friday between Noon and Three - where God in the flesh hung in the darkness suspended between heaven and earth to save fallen humanity. You have peace with God in this one, dark death. You have access to God’s undeserved kindness. You have hope, a bright future in a dying world; you are already glorified at the right hand of the Father in Christ the Son.
You are given to rejoice even in your sufferings. Yes, you heard that correctly: rejoice in your sufferings. Jesus is not a detour around suffering; He’s the only way through it, for He has gone through it. Your pain is absorbed in His pain and redeemed for good. Your sufferings in the cross-pierced hands of Jesus are the raw material of endurance, character, and hope. There is no other way. There is no such thing as a baptized believer of character, endurance, and hope who has not suffered and despaired of God in the present. You will have your own dark day, your less than happy Fridays when we see nothing, hear nothing, when God seems absent, when there literally is nothing for you to do but trust in the Promise of baptismal water, of bodied bread and bloodied wine, and words of forgiveness.
And there He is for for you, making all things new, reconciling all things to the Father, embracing you in a death that will not let you go. In His darkness is your light; in His death is your life; in His lonely forsakenness is your acceptance by God and your peace.
In the past few weeks, we have had stores conduct "Christmas in July" sales. On the 7th Sunday after Trinity we've had "Little Reformation" Sunday. And now, on Tuesday, the 7th of August (my sainted father's birthday, no less), we get Good Friday!
May this message truly impact the young lives that hear it, that they may spend their lives knowing that Christ is there, with them, sustaining them, even thorugh valleys of the shadow of death
Posted On: August 08th, 2007 at 7:09pm by frank sonnek
ok. now you have really done it pastor C. THIS needs to be translated into portuguese. darn. I notice that your sermon referencing babete´s feast has already been translated. it is being very widely circulated down here... :)
Posted On: August 08th, 2007 at 9:20pm by frank sonnek
God abandons God. THIS is My God. There is no other!
The word Definative illustrated definatively for all time in the body of a dead Jew. Given and shed for ME.
My sins required that. My Shame.
He Who governs all things dies. My Sin.
He conquers death, by commending His spirit. My Surrender.
He at the height of Power in the depth of passivity. My Power.
It-is-written, made flesh, dwells among us. dies. My Victory.
Three words from the Word leap past Death to now become the final Word on Frank Sonnek. My Salvation.
Father, Holy Spirit AND Son raise Son from death. My Faith. May I die, in it, a blessed death!
May I be given His grace and be still. and know.
Grace to find His power in my weakness. and my power in His weakness.
Grace to receive My life in his death, and my death in his life.
Behold all things are new indeed!
Thanks pastor C. It hasn´t been a cakewalk church-wise here in Brasil. I REALLY needed this sermon from you. I am translating it into Portugues today and making it into a tract. I hope that I have your blessing and permission to do so?
Posted On: August 10th, 2007 at 9:34pm by Sarah Harrison
Amen. Amen. He did it all! What a comfort! This death was not tragic! I never thought of it this way before, but it wasn't a sad event for Him either. His "it is finished" is joyful, jubilent. Christ WANTED to die FOR ME! Is that amazing or is that amazing.
Thank you Pastor for sharing the simple yet profound message of Christ's death with me once again. So often I get distracted with 'trying to live like Jesus' and forget that I can't! That's why He died. And that's what I need to hear again every day, every hour, every minute.
If you're saying you tend to get all tangled up in yourself, I certainly do understand what you mean. (You're like the rest of us!)
But if we cannot live "like Jesus" at least by Hi grace we can live in and with Him, to the extent of our capability; and one effect of doing so will be to expand our capability.
This much, I'm sure love for Him cannot count distraction, yes?
Posted On: August 14th, 2007 at 6:31pm by revcwirla
Rom. 7:21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, 23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
I'd say that's pretty tangled up, if not at times, downright distracted.
St. Paul is describing the state of *fallen* man, unregenerate man, not Christians! When he wants to speak of Christians, he says, "I can do all things, through Christ who strengthens me."
Here is a snippet of St. John Chrysostom's homily on that passage (although not the exact verse):
Wherefore he went on to say, "but I am carnal;" giving us a sketch now of man, as comporting himself in the Law, and before the Law. Sold under sin." Because with death (he means) the throng of passions also came in. For when the body had become mortal, it was henceforth a necessary thing for it to receive concupiscence, and anger, and pain, and all the other passions ...
And observe the wisdom of Paul. For after praising the Law, he hastens immediately to the earlier period, that he may show the state of our race, both then and at the time it received the Law, and make it plain how necessary the presence of grace was, a thing he labored on every occasion to prove. For when he says, "sold under sin," he means it not of those who were under the Law only, but of those who had lived before the Law also, and of men from the very first. Next he mentions the way in which they were sold and made over.
A footnote remarks that St. John is here giving no hint of any controversy about this passage in his own day.
But even if St. Paul were describing us, surely it would be SIN that is the distraction, not the effort to follow Christ? As in, "If any man would be my disciple, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me" ???
I'm having trouble understanding any problem here. Does not love alone (even without being prompted by Scripture, I mean) prompt us to try our best to live for Him? Even knowing we cannot do it perfectly, isn't doing it imperfectly still very much worth doing, for love????
If one believes in interpreting the Bible by the Bible, one ought to take into account this footnote using that method, found in the same spot as the quote from St. John Chrysostom:
(beginning of quote)
In modern times the question has been greatly disputed: Whom does the apostle represent by the "I" who is waging such an unsuccessful combat with sin? ... two opinions have prevailed among interpreters (1) that he is representing the regenerate man ... (2) That he is here personating the unregenerate man who, however, has become awakened under the law to a sense of his sinful condition. This view is preferred on the following grounds.
(1) The connection of 14-25 with the argument of 7-13, which shows the power of the law to awaken the consciousness of sin and can therefore apply only to the Jew aroused by the law.
(2) The relation of the passage to chap. viii. In vii. 25 the apostle mounts to the Christian plane and in ch. viii. exults in the liberation from the conflict just described which Christ brings to the soul.
(3) Much of the language of vii. 14-25 is inconsistent with the consciousness of a regenerate man and especially with Paul's joyous and triumphant view of the Christian life.
(4) The language throughout is appropriate, not, indeed, to the morally indifferent man, but to the unconverted Jew whom the law has awakened to a knowledge of his sin and need, and this is precisely the subject under consideration in the earlier verses of the Chap... Chrys. rather takes for granted, than states the same view, in saying that it is "a sketch of man as comporting himself in the law and before the law."
(end of quote)
The conflict here, as noted above is precisely the one Christ is supposed to resolve for a person! If the regenerate man is undistinguishable in this respect from a conscientious Jew, one has to wonder whether his "baptism" had any effect. The sin in him is still unremedied. Is salvation something that rescues us only from punishment, and not from the sin itself???
But even if we were to agree that this passage does describe a very pathetic Christian not at all reflecting his Lord, are Lutherans telling me not to try to follow Christ? Is that thought to be a misguided effort that will only get me tangled up?
Posted On: August 15th, 2007 at 10:16am by revcwirla
Gal. 5:17 For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would.
Says precisely the same thing as Romans 7 in a single sentence.
I see no need to interpose any matrix on Romans 7 to make it fit someone's notion of what the "consciousness of a regenerate man" ought to be. The chapter should be treated as a whole in all its fulness, recognizing that sin remains in this flesh even as we are entirely sanctified in Christ, who is our victory over sin, death, and the law.
Romans 8? "But if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness."
Hardly "joyous and triumphant" with regard to the flesh, which last time I checked, we were still in. More like paradox, as in simul justus et peccator, at once dead and alive, sinner and saint. Platonists have a hard time with paradox.
Further, no Lutheran would tell you not to follow Jesus. Nothing in the original post indicates such. After all, Jesus says, "Follow me." And while you're following Him, don't forget to take up your cross, since dying and rising is the only way to follow Him.
(1) The connection of 14-25 with the argument of 7-13, which shows the power of the law to awaken the consciousness of sin and can therefore apply only to the Jew aroused by the law.
Except for the fact that this in the Epistle to the Romans, which has in it, a certain chapter 2, showing the law in affect on the gentile.
(2) The relation of the passage to chap. viii. In vii. 25 the apostle mounts to the Christian plane and in ch. viii. exults in the liberation from the conflict just described which Christ brings to the soul.
You seem to forget what context precedes chapter 7, which is a great discussion of why we should not let sin abound, that grace abound more. The peopel in context already were baptized.
(3) Much of the language of vii. 14-25 is inconsistent with the consciousness of a regenerate man and especially with Paul's joyous and triumphant view of the Christian life.
Inconsistent? Have you read 1 Corinthians? What about Revelation 2-4? Or for that matter, the life of King David? Or Peter's advice about the devil prowling about.
(4) The language throughout is appropriate, not, indeed, to the morally indifferent man, but to the unconverted Jew whom the law has awakened to a knowledge of his sin and need, and this is precisely the subject under consideration in the earlier verses of the Chap... Chrys. rather takes for granted, than states the same view, in saying that it is "a sketch of man as comporting himself in the law and before the law."
As to Patristics, try Jerome on this, "If Paul feared the lusts of the flesh, are we safe?" (homilies on Pslams. Again, you cannot claim, within the context, that this is not discussing the same man, united with Christ's death in Baptism, that Paul warns in 6:1.
Oh, sorry. Please forgive me, as trolling was the last thing I intended to do. Truly, I only wanted to understand what this thing is that we ought not to do because it is a distraction and we can get all tangled up. But I promise to stop asking and agree that 4 times is about 3 times too many.
Anathema to Platonism, and bring on the paradoxes. Orthodox prayers are stuffed with 'em.
Posted On: September 04th, 2007 at 7:43am by Sarah Harrison
Dear Anastasia
Sorry if I confused you as to my meaning.I don't mean that it's not important to live as Christians and strive to lead a holy life.That is a very important and lifelong struggle that we should never give up. What I meant is that so many times I lose sight of the fact that it is Christ's Death and Resurrection that forgives me my sins and grants life and salvation, and that those gifts are given to me in my baptism. Instead of living daily in my baptism, I am tempted to think of my own 'holy life' as enough to 'counterbalance' my sins. The only problem is that my 'holy life' is totally corrupted by sinful motives, and that even if it were not, doing good works cannot 'counterbalance' even one sin. For this reason I need to be reminded of Christ's forgiveness through His death and resurrection, and the grace given me in my baptism, each and every day. All praise to His mercy.
Thank you dtp
I was very confused after reading all the comments to this blog, especially because I treasure Romans 7 as a prayer of anguish and comfort that Jesus delivers from this body of death.
Thank you, Sarah, for clearing all that up. That was the kind of response I was looking and hoping for.
Yes, Christ does deliver us from "this body of death."
And of course you are right that nothing we can do could ever counterbalance a single sin.
What good works CAN do -- insofar as they are good, which isn't very far -- is strengthen us somewhat against sinning so much in the future. And the interesting thing is how, even when what we do is so little and so impure, God responds to the very effort all out of proportion to its worth, so we grow by it. We grow more like Christ and more mature as members of Him, bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh. (And in Orthodoxy, that is the definition of salvation.)
Posted On: September 04th, 2007 at 9:03pm by revcwirla
(And in Orthodoxy, that is the definition of salvation.)
And THAT, my friends, is why in Eastern Orthodoxy salvation is synergistic (synergeia).
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God — not because of works, lest any man should boast. Eph 2:8-9
Yes, indeed. And THAT is how you can tell we are using the same vocabulary to mean very different things, when we speak of salvation, works, faith, grace, or synergy.
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
Now if good works are prepared for us to walk in, then salvation necessarily implies walking in them. It isn't true salvation if it leaves us in the same, sinful condition as before. Salvation means rescuing us from continuing to walk in sin. It means walking in faith, which means doing faith's (not the Law's) works.
St. Paul never intends to oppose faith to its own works! Instead, he opposes faith specifically to the works of the Mosaic Law. He doesn't say this each and every time, but often enough to let us know what he always means. (Because the Jews were very frightened at the idea of giving up the Law.)
Life in Christ cannot be earned, but it does have to be learned. And that takes practice. To learn to live Christ means trying to live Christ.
But if Christ incorporates me into Himself in Holy Baptism, and if the Holy Spirit comes to dwell deep within me at Chrismation, then who is doing the works? Is it not the Vine, of which I am a branch? But then again, where does the branch end and the Vine begin? Where there is true, ontological union with Christ, union at the root of our being, one can no longer draw sharp distinctions between who is doing what. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. That's synergy. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do his good pleasure. That's synergy.
In a nutshell, the work is all God's. The effort, however, is all mine, even though that, too, is a gift of grace.
And I think Lutherans even include what you call sanctification, and glorification, too, as component parts of salvation, don't you? And you admit the former requires cooperating with grace, do you not? That's synergy.
Posted On: September 06th, 2007 at 1:12pm by revcwirla
I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. That's synergy. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do his good pleasure. That's synergy.
"Eph 2:10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. "
The preposition is epi with the dative ergois agathois. It usually means "upon," as in to build upon a foundation. Could the good works perhaps be the good works of Christ, which were prepared in Christ from before the foundations of the world, upon which we are made new creatures in Christ, and in which we walk by faith?
"Gal 2:19 For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose."
Paul says he's dead, crucified with Christ. Where's the "synergy"?
"Phil. 2:12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; 13 for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. "
The word in Phil 2:12 is katergazomai not synergazomai. No "synergy" there either. God is at work to will and to work.
None of this, of course, has anything whatsover to do with the original post, which was a sermon on the death of Christ for the salvation of the world.
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