The Powerful Word of God

[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]

Luke 5:1-11

One of the recurring themes in the Bible is the mysterious, life-changing power of the Word of God. The preacher in the New Testament book of Hebrews speaks of this: 

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin. (Hebrews 4:12-15) 

The Word of God has the power both to lay us open, showing us our sin and limitations, and to give us the new life that God the Son, Jesus, died and rose to make possible for those who believe in Him.

This Word of God, imparted in the Scriptures, the sharing of the Gospel, the fellowship of the Church, and the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, creates faith in Christ within us. Not anything we do, only the Word of God. 

This is why the great commission, Jesus’ call to every Christian, to make disciples by sharing the Word of God--the Word of Jesus--is central to who we are as God’s people. Romans 10:13-14 reminds us, 

...'Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? 

Every Christian is called to share the Word, to be a preacher or proclaimer of the Word.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Luke 5:1-11, we see how the Word of God, ultimately Jesus Himself, the Word, God in human flesh, creates faith. 

It takes place back in Capernaum, the setting of last week’s lesson. Take a look at what happens with me now, please.

“One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God.” (Luke 5:1) 

One of the things I’ve learned in doing premarital counseling through the years is that people like hearing the Word of God. 

I’m not talking about the rote recitation of passages of Scripture, though that may sometimes come into play. I’m talking about letting people see the heart of God through our own encounter with God’s Word, including our own personal relationship with Jesus. 

Whether they know it or not, people are hungry for this Word. Peter speaks for others who encounter the Word when he says to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68) 

By the Lake of Gennesaret, also known as the Sea of Galilee or the Sea of Tiberias, crowds are hanging on Jesus’ every word. But they’re crowding Jesus, making it hard for everyone to hear.

The lesson goes on: “He saw at the water’s edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.” (Luke 5:2-3) 

On the shore near Capernaum, there is a series of inlets that create natural amphitheaters. Even today, I've read that a person can go out into one of the inlets and, speaking in a normal voice, be heard clearly by people on the shore. Jesus commandeers a boat owned by Simon, the fisherman in whose house He had earlier taught and healed Simon’s mother-in-law and sits down to teach.

Then Luke says: “When he had finished speaking, [Jesus] said to Simon, ‘Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.’” (Luke 15:4) 

Peter was an expert fisherman. He knew that the comb fish, the only large fish that swam in the shoals of these waters, couldn’t be caught in daylight hours. That’s why he and others who fished in this lake went out to do their work at night. 

Now, it’s generally true that only a fool fails to listen to experts. When my mechanic tells me that I need a new part for my car, I usually listen. When my doctor tells me I need a test, I listen. 

Jesus was no expert fisherman, but Simon listened to Jesus anyway. It seems that after hearing and observing Jesus on a few occasions, he’s beginning to think that Jesus is worth listening to and obeying.

Verse 5: “Simon answered, ‘Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.’” 

The word translated as master from the Greek in which Luke wrote his gospel is Ἐπιστάτα (epistata). It can mean things like commander or chief and carries the meaning of someone who has a higher status. Jesus, you’ll remember from last Sunday’s gospel lesson, taught as someone with authority. 

Simon recognizes that authority. But he doesn’t yet seem to fully understand who Jesus is. He understands enough though, to ignore that Jesus is no expert fisherman and simply take Jesus’ word as a command. So the nets are let down.

Verse 6: “When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!’ For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners.”

Listen: Even if you know that because of God’s deathless love for you, Jesus has come to save you from sin and death as a free gift you cannot earn and don’t deserve, encountering Jesus will still always bring with it awe and fear and a sense of the distance between you (or me) and Him. 

• Jesus is perfect; we’re not. 
• Jesus is omnipotent; we’re not. 
• Jesus is eternal; we’re not.
• Jesus is sinless; we’re not. 

No wonder after seeing Jesus command yet another impossible event into being, Simon fell at Jesus’ feet and begged Jesus to go away. Simon knew that as a human being, he had no intrinsic right to stand in Jesus’ presence or even to live.

Don’t you sometimes feel just this way? I know that I do. I read God’s Word or I pray, coming into God’s presence and realize again how unworthy I am of His love or attention or forgiveness I am, how small I am before the Creator of the universe. The Word of God--spoken, enacted, tasted, seen--can do that to us. 

As the preacher in Hebrews reminds us, it can lay us bare before the scrutiny of God and show us that we are wanting, that left to ourselves and our own devices, we are eternally dead in our sins, eternally separated from the God Who loves us and makes us.

But, this same Word can heal us and call us to new life. In Jesus, as that passage from Hebrews about the Word of God I mentioned earlier says, we “have a high priest who is [able] to empathize with our weaknesses,” Who has led a sinless life and died on a cross in order to be able to cover us with His goodness and eternal life. He gives us lives moving in a new direction, an eternal direction, lives infused with His grace and mercy. 

At the end of today’s lesson we read: “Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.’ So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.” (Luke 10b-11)

Friends, the Word of God has come to us again this morning to tell us not to be afraid because Jesus has given us new lives and new missions, new reasons for waking up in the morning and facing the world with hope from Christ. 

No longer do we have to march to the world’s tune; Jesus sets us free to follow Him to life with God. 

No longer do our lives need to be marked by the futility of dying people looking out only for ourselves and our own; grace blows our hearts open to God and to our neighbor. 

Knowing that we are eternally in Christ’s hands, we can concern ourselves with the spiritual and physical needs of our neighbors, including those in our own homes, schools, or places of work.

Simon and the others who left their nets to follow Jesus had no idea what lay ahead. They didn’t yet know the truth that Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified in The Cost of Discipleship: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” 

They didn’t know that the repentance and faith in Jesus that leads to new life which they experienced on the lakeshore that day would be their lifestyle until God raised them to life in eternity. 

The Word of God sets us free to die to concern for ourselves knowing that we have resurrection life with Jesus that cannot be taken from us. 

This Word might also make us willing to commit ourselves to doing things that will bring us little or no apparent benefit, like 

• going to Haiti on mission trips, 
• tutoring at Chevy Chase, 
• participating in Upward Sports, 
• inviting friends to participate in small groups, or 
• constructing a multipurpose facility to welcome the people of our community--the spiritually disconnected, the poor, the poor in spirit, those hungering and thirsting for God's righteousness--to encounter the Word of God, Jesus.

Simon Peter learned (and would have to learn again and again, just like us) that the Word of God, Jesus Himself, gives us new lives, lives with eternal purposes. May we, in the words of The Small Catechism*, always “gladly hear and learn” the Word of God. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

*The Small Catechism is one of the basic statements of the Lutheran Christian understanding of Biblical faith. It appears in The Book of Concord, also known as Concordia.

Knowing Jesus

John 9:1-41
In last Sunday’s gospel lesson, a Samaritan came to have life with God when, to her surprise, Jesus told her every sin she’d ever done while still reaching out to her with love and respect. In today’s lesson, a blind man comes to see that Jesus was “the Son of Man,” a phrase from the Old Testament book of Daniel for God Himself on the earth that He created.

Jesus promises that all who see Him for Who He is in this way and trust Him as their God and Savior will have life with God for eternity.

But as our gospel lesson shows us today, seeing Who Jesus is and trusting faith in Him are two different things. The gap between knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus can only be measured in eternity.

It isn’t easy to believe. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian, says: “Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life.”

The blind man in today’s lesson learned this truth the hard way, deserted and rejected by his family, his neighbors, and religious leaders. But at the end of the lesson, you realize that he became a true disciple, willing to give up on everything the world in which he lived held dear for the privilege of being Jesus’ disciple today and in eternity.

Let’s take a look at John 9:1-41.

In verses 1-7, at the beginning, Jesus and His disciples encounter a blind man. The disciples want to know whose sin was at fault for his blindness.

We human beings love to believe in neat explanations for the messiness that exists in our world. It helps us feel that we’ve got a handle on things we can’t explain. But this world is messy because the condition of sin has imprisoned the entire universe.

This means that bad things, hard things, and sad things happen even to faithful people.

So, Jesus says that it was neither the man’s parents or the man himself who caused the his blindness. But there was a purpose for Jesus encountering the man that day, Jesus says: “...this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).

Jesus then creates a bit of mud, smears it on the man’s eyes, and tells the man to wash himself in a nearby pool. He does so and, as John puts it understatedly, “[he]...came home seeing” (John 9:7).

When the once-blind man’s neighbors find out, they want to learn how it happened. They smell a conspiracy. “This isn’t really the blind man who used to beg,” some of them say. “Yeah,” others say, “he’s an impostor who just looks like the guy.”

The neighbors don’t like that this guy is healed. It upsets the status quo. It makes them envious that a miracle has happened to him. It introduces mystery into a world they thought they’d figured out. They don’t like it that something so good happened to a man who they, like the disciples, thought deserved his blindness. Most conspiracy theories start in this way, folks. But, in verse 9, the formerly blind man tells them: “I am the man.”

The neighbors still aren’t sold on the truth. Or, at least, they don’t want to see the truth that stands before them. So, in verses 10-12, they start to grill the healed man. “How did this happen?” they ask skeptically. The man replies: “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see” (John 9:11).

I love his simple testimony: He met Jesus. Jesus told him what to do. He did it. Now, he could see.

Such simplicity in this circumstance is noteworthy. This man isn’t stupid. He can tell, as surely as you and I can tell when we read John’s account of this “conversation,” that the neighbors are getting hostile. Who is this uppity man to claim that a miracle was done for him?

Instead of talking about some miracle wrought by the preacher they’d been hearing about, it would have been more acceptable to them for him to say, “I was never really blind. I only pretended to be blind so that I could spend my days begging.”

Or, he could have left Jesus out of it altogether: “I washed in the pool of Siloam and it cured me.”

But, instead, he attributes the miracle to Jesus.

The crowd doesn’t like this. Some of you know that an atheist once told me after I’d shared some of my story of coming to faith in Christ after years of atheism that I never could have been an atheist. “If you were an atheist,” he told me, “you still would be.” But God can break through the sin, pride, and pain of this fallen world and bring good.

That’s what Jesus did for the blind man.

It’s what He did when He died on the cross and rose from the dead, offering new, eternal life to all who trust in Him.

It’s what He did when He gave me faith in Him to replace my atheism.

In verses 13-16, the neighbors take the man to the Pharisees, the experts in God’s Law. When the situation is laid before them, they’re scandalized to learn that Jesus performed this miracle on the sabbath.

This proved, some of them say, that Jesus couldn’t be from God. Others disagree. The Pharisees are in gridlock.

They turn to the blind man and ask who he thinks Jesus is. The Pharisees don’t want the man’s real opinion. They’re pressuring him to turn on Jesus, to renounce the whole thing, to say that his blindness AND Jesus are frauds.

Once more, the man doesn’t buckle under pressure. Jesus, he says in verse 17, “is a prophet.” A prophet, of course, is a person called by God to speak God’s Word to the world. Now, you and I know that Jesus actually is the Word of God. Jesus is way more than just a prophet; but He is that too. The man says of Jesus what he so far knows of Him. He tells the simple truth. His honesty is moving.

After their pressure fails to cause the man to renounce Jesus, they enlist his parents’ help. “Yes,” they say in verses 18-19, showing the spines of jellyfish, “that’s our son. But we don’t know anything about his story. He’s old enough to fend for himself. Bye!”

In Matthew 10:36, Jesus warns those who would follow Him that “a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.” When we follow Jesus, we can’t expect that all of our family and friends will be happy about it. Being a Christian who seeks to humbly follow Jesus is not making a popular choice.

The formerly blind man is so innocent about the ways of power and going-along-to-get-along, that when the Pharisees ask him to tell them again how he’d come to be sighted, he doesn’t take the hint. He was supposed to admit that he was part of a hoax. Instead, he asks: “Do you want to become his disciples too?” (John 9:27).

At this, the Pharisees tell the man that he must be Jesus’ disciple and that there’s no way of knowing whether Jesus is from God or not.

Now the once blind man says what was becoming obvious to him: “If this man [Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing” [John 9:33].

At this, the once-blind man, alone among his neighbors and people, abandoned by his parents, condemned by the religious leaders of his country, was thrown out...excommunicated (John 9:34). The good religious leaders rejected him as one unworthy of God.

In the very next verse, we read about this exchange between Jesus and the formerly blind man: “Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ ‘Who is he, sir?’ the man asked. ‘Tell me so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said, ‘You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.’ Then the man said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshiped him.’”

The blind man saw Who Jesus was--God in the flesh--and so believed in Him and worshiped Him. This is the second miracle in our lesson.

The first was the miracle of restored sight.

The second was the gift of everlasting life when the man who had received his sight believed in Jesus.

This is the miracle that belongs to all who believe in Jesus. May we never lose our sense of awe and wonder at this miracle. The God Who made everything, Whose holiness we have repeatedly violated, became one of us, led a life free of sin despite temptation, and gave Himself on a cross we earned. Now He offers us life with God for eternity when we turn for sin and, like the once-blind man, believe in Him.

Jesus wasn’t done teaching others the way to life through this blind man, though.

In verse 39, Jesus says, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”

The Pharisees were offended. “Are we blind too?” they ask Jesus (John 9:40).

Jesus’ response: “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains” (John 9:41).

In other words, the Pharisees could see that Jesus was the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Christ, the King of kings, the Lord, God.

But if they admitted to knowing all of that, they would be compelled by faith to let go of the stranglehold they had on power, position, and the lives and consciences of the people they bullied.

The Pharisees who rejected Jesus knew about God, but they refused to know God when He stood in front of them.

They recognized that Jesus is God’s Son. But they were comfortable in living apart from the living God. (And do you know what you call living apart from God? Death.)

The Pharisees chose blindness and so, Jesus says, they were condemned.

But the blind man focused on Jesus.

In ancient days, the rabbis said that Adam and Eve were created blind. They said that the two were totally dependent on God to lead them and that He only led them to places of freedom and peace, places where they were set free to be all that God had made them to be.

But, when they caved into the temptations of the serpent, eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “...the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked...” (Genesis 3:7).

Now, the rabbis said, having fallen into sin, the two were cursed with sightedness. They experienced more than just the good in which God had led them; they now could also see the evil ways they could use their lives.

Sin ensnared them.

Sin fooled them (and has fooled every generation of human beings since) into thinking that it’s possible to live apart from God.

The vision of the entire human race has been clouded by a universe full of idols vying for our trust and our worship, leading us to selfishness, self-promotion, self-loathing, darkness, and death. Now, of course, the rabbis' teaching about this is a bit fanciful. But it does make an important point: When we take our eyes off of the God we know in Jesus Christ, making Him our True North, we lose sight of the only One Who can give us life. We go off course.

When the once blind man came to believe in Jesus, he was set free from his sin and from death. He didn’t just know about God; through Jesus, He came to know God Himself. He saw Jesus as His God and King.

That’s what Jesus makes possible for us see and experience too. May we follow Jesus and never lose sight of Him as “the [only] way, and the [only] truth, and the [only] life” (John 14:6). Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the message prepared for worship this morning.]