The Sacrifice for Sin (Maundy Thursday)

John 13:1-17, 31-35
During Sundays in the Lenten season as we bring our offerings to the altar, we often pray: “Almighty God, you gave your Son both as a sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life…”

Of course, what’s most important about Jesus is not the life He models. You and I could repeatedly resolve that we are going to live like Jesus...and repeatedly fail.

Not that people haven’t tried. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, a deist who didn’t really believe in the God revealed in Jesus, decided to live his life around a set righteous virtues he had identified. Franklin wrote each of these virtues on the top of a piece of paper and gathered them in a small book. His plan was to conquer one virtue, then move to the next, conquering it, and so on. He never conquered the first one.

Without realizing it perhaps, Franklin had learned the truth of the apostle Paul’s words in Romans 7: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:19) Paul concludes: “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” (Romans 7:20) In other words, we cannot live a godly life in our own power.

When we try, we seem to get in the way.

Some of you know that last year, I was losing the weight I needed to shed. But more recently, I’ve been eating too much and putting weight back on. God’s Word says that our bodies are “temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). That means that the abuse to which I subject my body is a spiritual issue. It’s a sin issue.

Right now, I must report, that as it relates to the food I’m putting into my body, sin is winning out.

And why has this happened? Because I took my eyes off of Jesus.

To be sure, I took Jesus as an example of the godly life because Jesus was always self-disciplined in the use of His mind and body. I also became subtly proud of my virtuous self-discipline.

I forgot what Jesus tells all who want to follow Him: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” (John 15:5-6)

The point? If we see Jesus only or even primarily as our example as we set out to lead virtuous lives, we will fall on our faces every time.

We need help.

We need Jesus.

We need Him infinitely less as a model of the godly life than we need Him as the definitive sacrifice for our sin.

We need His righteousness because we are completely unrighteous.

We need His goodness, because God alone is good.

That’s why Jesus does and says things in the order in which He does and says them in tonight’s Maundy Thursday gospel lesson.

John is the most sacramentally minded of the four gospel writers. He begins his account of Jesus' earthly ministry with Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine, pointing to the two sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. He draws the curtain on Jesus' pre-resurrection earthly ministry with a soldier piercing Jesus' side and water and blood emanating from the wound, again pointing to Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

Yet in recounting events on Maundy Thursday, John doesn’t talk about Holy Communion, which Jesus instituted on that night. Instead, he focuses on three things from the events of Maundy Thursday:

• Jesus washing the feet of His disciples; 
• Jesus telling the disciples to serve each other similarly; 
• Jesus giving a new commandment, the only new commandment Jesus ever gave. 

Let’s look at each one of these.

During the course of the meal, Jesus ate with His disciples, got up, stripped down to nothing but a towel wrapped around His waist, and prepared to wash the disciples’ feet, starting with Peter’s. You’ve lived through enough Maundy Thursdays to know that washing people’s feet in the first century AD was the work of servants. It seems to get mentioned in every Maundy Thursday sermon.

But feet were seen predominantly in two ways in that culture.

One was to look on them with revulsion, encrusted as they were with dirt from walking in sandals through the sand and rocks of Judea.

The other was to regard feet as euphemistic representations of the most private places of the human body. This is what’s behind the otherwise cryptic passage of Ruth 3:14, which tells us that: “So [Ruth] lay at [Boaz’s] feet until morning, but got up before anyone could be recognized; and he said, ‘No one must know that a woman came to the threshing floor.’"

So, Jesus washing the feet of His disciples was not just an act of selfless servanthood, but also one of loving intimacy, the Bridegroom serving His Bride, the Church.

And Jesus points to His washing of the disciples’ feet as symbolizing the great act of servanthood and love that He’s about to accomplish at the cross. “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand,” Jesus tells Peter who, at first protests Jesus’ intention of washing the disciples’ feet.

Hebrews 10 tells us that through Christ’s act of servanthood and love on the cross, all who believe in Him “have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” (Hebrews 10:10)

And, Hebrews says that, through this sacrifice, we have an advocate for eternity: “...when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” (Hebrews 10:12-14)

Baptized believers in Christ are washed clean of their sin. That's why Jesus says that we don't need to be completely rewashed of our sin again and again; once we have been born as children of God in Baptism, we only need to come again to God in the name of the Lord in which we have been baptized to repent and be renewed as God's people.

Each time we repent and trust Christ with our sins and our lives, remembering that we are baptized into His death and resurrection, Jesus cleans us again from the grime of sin and death that’s always dogging us and attaching itself to us in this life.

Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for our sin and when we trust in Him, He takes up residence within us. We experience what Paul talks about in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Martin Luther may have had this passage in mind when he said: "When [the devil] comes knocking at the door of my heart, and asks, ‘Who lives here?’ Jesus goes to the door and says, 'Martin Luther used to live here, but he has moved out. Now I leave here.'”

After pointing to His cross, Jesus gives us two commands, one a re-expression of the Old Testament law regarding hospitality, the other a totally new law with Jesus.

Command one: “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:17) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Serve as I have served you. Without thought to your status in the world, or to how humbling it may be.”

Command two: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) In other words, Jesus is telling us, “Love your sisters and brothers in the faith sacrificially just as I have loved you.”

It’s no accident that Jesus gives these two commands after pointing to the cross, because it’s only after taking up residence in our lives through our faith in Him that Jesus can change the ways we live, the ways we respond to our neighbors.

Jesus may be an example for godly or wholesome living to the whole world, Christian and non-Christian alike; but unless Jesus lives in us and powers us, we cannot lead godly lives.

On Monday, I drove to Cincinnati, where God allowed me to administer Holy Baptism to Jameson, the little guy for whom we’ve been praying through his three years of life, and his older brother, Jackson.

After getting back to Dayton, I went to Columbus to be with my mom and my family at a hospital ICU, where mom died on Tuesday morning.

To tell you the truth, my thoughts weren't prone to focus on the homeless guy standing at the freeway off-ramp that day.

And the Old Mark battled with the Lord Jesus Who has taken up residence in my life. “Who knows if he’s really homeless,” I argued. “Besides, I’m out of the McDonald gift cards I keep for situations like this. And on top of that, I’m busy, I’m tired, I’m concerned about my family. Is this guy really that big a deal, God?”

But Jesus won the argument. (He usually does when you start talking with Him!)

I pulled out a five-dollar bill and handed it to the man at the ramp.

Listen: I would not have done that had I relied on my own reasoning. If I'd only been arguing with myself, I would have easily convinced myself to drive on by. Instead, because Jesus lives in me and I have the assurance that no matter how much duping, using, or humiliation this world may subject me to, I still belong to the God we meet in Jesus, Jesus set me free to part with a little of money.

It was, for all its simplicity and humanity, a divine moment that wasn’t done by me, but by Jesus living in me.

I’ve gotten to the point where I believe the line in the old Amy Grant singalong song: “If there’s anything good that happens in life, it’s from Jesus.”

And when you know that, in the words of the late Baptist pastor, Gerald Mann, through Christ you have "God's cosmic okie-dokie," the humiliations meted out by this world become less important to you. You know that the world cannot rob you of you dignity, because by God's grace through faith in Christ, your life is imbued with an eternity dignity.

I don’t have to know whether the ramp guy spent those five bucks on cigarettes, alcohol, drugs,  lottery tickets, or food.

I don’t care to know whether he was, from the standpoint of the world, “worthy” of my help.

But I do know two things.

First, I know that on the night of His betrayal, even though He knew what Judas was going to do, Jesus washed Judas’ feet. Jesus gives grace to all, worthy in the world’s eyes or not. Think of that!

Second, I know that, in the eyes of heaven, I’m not worthy of the grace, forgiveness, and love God makes available to us through Christ.

I’m a sinner. So, who am I to withhold from another person any smidge of grace God puts it in my power to give away?

Despite my sin, Christ served, loved, and died for me anyway. Romans 5:8 reminds us that, “...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Christ is the “sacrifice for sin and a model of the godly life.”

But Maundy Thursday reminds us that if we would live a godly life, a useful life, a life that even unbelievers would acknowledge to be a life filled with goodness, it doesn’t begin with any of us trying to be good. 

It begins and continues only with Christ loving us, serving us, dying for us, rising for us, and our day in, day out, letting Him into our lives so that God’s will becomes our will, God’s love for others becomes our love for others. 

It begins and ends with Jesus alone!

Jesus’ message for us tonight is simple. Don’t try to be a good person on your own steam. Let Jesus into your life, let Jesus live in you, and He will lead you in the godly life, empowering you to love and serve today and preparing you to joyfully love and serve for all eternity. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

About that "America is great because America is good" line

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton received a rousing response to a line in her acceptance speech on Thursday night: "America is great because America is good."

The statement alludes to, but is not a direction citation of, a line in Alexis de Tocqueville's famous observation in his 1835 book, Democracy in America.

The full quote, as usually cited, is: "America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

The Frenchman who traveled and studied the US in the early-nineteenth century said this in reference to the importance of Christian faith to Americans and how it impacted the way they conducted their personal and communal lives.

It's impossible to be great if you are not good. Hitler, for example, wielded great power; but he was not great. Being great has something to do with the good one does for others. (And with self-surrender.)

No Christian would claim that the good they may do comes from them. It comes from Christ living in them. Galatians 2:20 says, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

When, by faith, I submit to the daily crucifixion of my old sinful self, I make room for Christ to live within me. Whatever good I do comes from Christ, not from me, but from Christ alone.

Anything I do in my own wisdom will always be tinged by my intrinsic sinfulness. But when I let Christ in to daily destroy the old and create the new Christ-me, Christ impacts how I live my whole life. The Bible says that I bear good fruit.

De Tocqueville observed how important faith in Christ was to the people of the young republic and concluded that the American constitutional system could not survive without the goodness which God fosters in Christian people.

The French observer was not saying that the American people were intrinsically good. The way white Americans were treating Native Americans and African-American slaves alone would have argued against that.

But the fledgling, imperfect republic had the makings of goodness and the evidence of some level of goodness in a society steeped in Christ's death, resurrection, and words. Americans in those days were often communitarians, joiners, neighbor-helpers. Christ preached and trusted in and lived out was what accounted for whatever goodness that de Tocqueville observed, a contrast to the cynicism and self-interest that characterized French life at the time.

There is no human goodness apart from Christ. As Jesus, God in human flesh, said, "No one is good—except God alone" (Mark 10:18). And if we are to do anything good, it will require a faith connection to Jesus Christ. But we have this promise from Jesus: "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5).

America is good and human beings are good only when we let Jesus Christ into our lives. And then it's not our goodness but the goodness of God living in us. And that's what accounts for what greatness exists in us and in our country. Nothing else.

I ask you to consider letting Christ into every part of your life today and everyday.

Those Crucified with Christ, By Faith in Christ, Rise with Christ

[This was shared with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio during both worship services this morning.]

Galatians 2:15-21
Our second lesson for this morning, Galatians 2:15-21, is difficult, maybe too much so to tackle in a sermon on a Sunday in June. But I think it’s worth the effort.

To help understand this whole passage, it might make sense to first look at its conclusion. So, please turn to the next to last verse in our lesson, Galatians 2:20. Paul writes:

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

All who submit to Jesus Christ as their Savior and God submit to the crucifixion of their old sinful selves, so that we can rise with Jesus and live with God. No one, apart from Jesus living in their lives, can rise from the dead. And it’s only when we die with Jesus, dying to sin, dying to the selfish, self-concerned values of a world that is doomed for destruction, that we can rise with Jesus to a new life with God. That’s why Jesus says elsewhere, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

Fact is, we have no hope for this life or the one to come if we don’t submit to the death of our old selves and let Jesus Christ free us to be our true and best selves by taking up residence in our lives. That happens, Paul says, “by faith in the Son of God,” the One Who “loved me”--loves you--”and gave Himself for me”--and for you.

Is that Christianity 101?

Sure. But in what Paul writes in the rest of our lesson, he shows us just how deep and eternity-changing this truth is.

Go back to the beginning the lesson, Galatians 2:15. It helps us to understand this passage if we remember a few things.

First: After Paul founded the churches in Galatia and moved on to preach the Good News of new life for all who repent of sin and believe in the crucified and risen Jesus in other places, new preachers came in, teaching what Paul called a “false gospel.” Believing in Jesus is nice, they tell the non-Jews who make up the Galatian churches, but if they really wanted to be right with God, they needed to also become Jews and keep all the Old Testament ceremonial and dietary laws.

Now, as good confessional Lutherans, you know that there were three kinds of law in the Old Testament.

There was civil law, like the laws we pass at city hall or Congress. God laid down civil law in the Old Testament because ancient Israel was meant to be ruled directly by God. But the civil law of that old kingdom is no longer necessary; Jesus has established the kingdom of God, which we enter by His grace through faith in Him.

A second kind of Old Testament law was sacrificial, ceremonial law. These laws governed everything from the types of sacrifice made at the temple in Jerusalem to how people wore their hair. But Jesus has rendered this type of law unnecessary too, because He is the one and only sacrifice for sin. We trust in Him alone for freedom from sin, death, and the devil. John the Baptist recognized that Jesus spelled the end of sacrificial, ceremonial laws when he said of Jesus, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"

The third kind of Old Testament law is the one that remains valid to this day, the moral law, the ten commandments and the laws that flow from them. Jesus summarized this law with the great commandment: love God with your whole selves, love your neighbor as you love yourselves.

The moral law, which God has written on every human heart, can act as a bridle on the inborn sinful impulse of human beings to do whatever we want, no matter how we may hurt God or may hurt other people.

It can also be used by the Holy Spirit to drive us to repent and believe in Jesus as we come to understand that the demands of God’s moral law cannot be kept perfectly by any of us. This is our dilemma: The Ten Commandments remain in force. But we can’t keep them.

It’s when we realize this truth that we’re open to the Good News that the God we meet in Jesus Christ is willing to take us in, willing to cover our sin with His forgiveness, willing to grant us life with God, and willing to give us the power of the Holy Spirit to resist sin.

We are saved by God’s grace through our faith in the God we know in Jesus Christ, not by being “good” people, which not a single one of us can be anyway. As Jesus told a man who tried to suck up to Him one day: “No one is good but God alone.”

The teachers of the false gospel didn’t understand this. Paul writes to remind the Galatians (and us) of the true Gospel.

A second thing to remember when looking at this passage is that in the verses right before it, Paul talks about a run-in he’d had with Cephas, that is, Peter, in Antioch. When Peter first arrived in that city, he’d sat down for dinner with Gentile Christians, something the old ceremonial law had forbidden a Jew like him to do. Then, Peter stopped doing it, reverting to eating with only Jewish Christians for the rest of his stay in Antioch. There’s a lot of dispute about Peter’s motives for this. But whatever Peter’s reasons, Paul would have none of it. We are saved by grace through faith in the God we know in Christ alone, Paul told Peter, and you shouldn’t be shy about violating those parts of God’s Old Testament law that are no longer valid by eating with the Gentile Christians!

This is where our second lesson picks up. Paul writes, speaking for both he and Peter as Jews, starting at verse 15: “We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.”

Even we Jews have been made right with God--justified--not by being good Jews, Paul says, but by surrendering faith in Jesus Christ.

So, how, Paul asks, could we, these false preachers, or, as he put it in our lesson from last Sunday, even an angel from heaven (Galatians 1:8), dare to lay new religious laws on the Gentiles?

Christ has done all that is necessary for a person to be right with God. A right relationship with God is ours when we acknowledge our sin and helplessness over it and trust in Christ to place us in the arms of God the Father!

Paul then speaks to those who might recoil at the notion of a God Who cares so much about sinners. He asks: “But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin? Certainly not!” I like the way The Message translation of the Bible puts this verse: “Have some of you noticed that we [followers of Jesus] are not yet perfect? (No great surprise, right?) And are you ready to make the accusation that since people like me, who go through Christ in order to get things right with God, aren’t perfectly virtuous, Christ must therefore be an accessory to sin? The accusation is frivolous.”

You sometimes hear people say, “I won’t go to church because all those people are hypocrites and sinners.” Because Christians aren’t perfect, they insinuate that Christ or the faith we confess in Christ is imperfect. But the only person who can be a Christian is the person who acknowledges that she or he is far from perfect and needs Christ to be made right with God. As the old hymn puts it: “Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me.”

Paul then warns the Church against turning the relationship with God they enjoy by faith in Christ into a religion. As a preacher of the Gospel, Paul was in the business of dismantling the religions of the world that tell us we have to behave in certain ways in order to achieve whatever blessings that stingy deities or a stingy universe might otherwise withhold from us.

The God we meet in Jesus doesn’t want our religion. He wants a relationship with us that lasts for eternity. So, Paul writes in verse 18: “For if I build again those things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor.”

Religion is about being nice, being kind, being virtuous, or being good...or else. That's not Christianity at all!

Why would I want to go back to that crumbling edifice of human-centered religion when Jesus Christ  sets me free from sin and death simply when I trustingly take His outstretched hand and let Him lead me through this life and the next? 

It’s stunning to me the amount of suffering people cause themselves when they hold onto religion rather than holding onto Jesus! You’ve heard me tell before about the woman in her eighties who repeatedly refused to take Holy Communion when we offered it at a nursing home because of a sin she’d committed as a seventeen year old. She was clinging to the wreckage of a religion that insisted that she wasn’t good enough for God when all she had to do was take Christ’s offered grace. She insisted on being a a self-accused and self-convicted transgressor rather than a sinner set free from her sin by Jesus.

In verse 19, Paul says that something very different happens in the life of the person who lets faith in Christ lead them: “For I through the law died to the law that I might live with God.”

The law showed me I am a sinner, Paul is saying. It killed me. And now that my old self has been destroyed, I’ve been set free to rise with Christ and live with God forever. This happens in the lives of believers not by obeying God’s laws, but by the power that resides in God’s charity--His grace--for sinners like you and me.

If we dare to trust in our own goodness or our own religion to save us from sin, death, the devil, and hopelessness, our sins remain, along with hopelessness and separation from God. That’s why Paul writes in verse 21: “I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain."

Jesus Christ did not die in vain. Jesus Christ died for a reason. He died to set you free to be the very person God made you to be, for all eternity.

He died to give you grace. It’s the grace that wants the best for us and caused Jesus to cry from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Now, I feel that Jesus must have had me in mind when He prayed this prayer. I'm quite sure that 90% of the time in my life, I have no idea what I’m doing. And the older I get--I'll be sixty later this year, the more I realize all that I don’t know.

But I do know this: All the efforts we may put into being better people, more loving or understanding people, wiser people, will inevitably fail. Sinners cannot make themselves saints.

Now, we may be willing to accept that fact about ourselves if it weren’t for the haunting truth that only saints can live with God today or in eternity. “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

You and I would be totally out of hope if it weren’t for the truth about God that trumps all other truth: Christ died and rose to make sinners like us into saints and He does it for those with faith in Christ by His grace alone.

There will be times each day when, if we have any sensitivity to God and other human beings, we will recognize our sinfulness, our distance from God. And the closer we grow to Jesus Christ, the more sensitive to these realities will become.

But don’t let Satan use this realization to make you hopeless.

Turn instead to Christ.

Give your sins to Him.

Give your life to Him.

Let your old self be crucified and let your new self rise.

Jesus says in Revelation: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”

Let Jesus in.

Let His grace fill you.

Let Him claim you as His child every moment of every day.

Let Jesus in.

Amen

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UPDATE: Steve Martin, I think, did a nice job in tackling this text in his sermon for June 16. Check it out!