Bible Text: Matthew 22:15-22 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | St. Paul reminds us that our citizenship is in heaven. Jesus is our King. He has already conquered. His is a victorious Kingdom. It won’t fall and it won’t fail us. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.
It is heavenly when brothers dwell together in unity, as our Gradual says. It is hellish when they envy one another and hold grudges and refuse to forgive. This is what Jesus means when he speaks of hell as weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is the devil’s great aim, especially in these last days, to pit us against one another, to make us refuse reconciliation, to hold grudges, to withhold forgiveness from our brothers in the Kingdom of heaven. The world attacks us, entices us, lies to us, and we suffer this together, we must suffer it together. And we suffer it together strong and united, only when we rely on the forgiveness won by our Lord Jesus’ blood and given to us freely here in Christ’s Church, when this forms our faith and so our lives. Without this forgiveness, the wolf will scatter the sheep and there will be none to deliver. We rely on it completely. And if we are to meet the years ahead together, we need to live in forgiveness for one another. This is why Jesus tells us the parable he tells us today.
Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount so that you would have hope. Though you be powerless in this world, disenfranchised, ignored if not oppressed, though you suffer grave injustices, terrible pain and grief, though you have shamed yourself, committed grievous sins and errors, so that you hunger and thirst for righteousness, long for mercy, and dream of peace: you shall be filled. Your sorrows, even as your repentance, are not without purpose or without end. Nor should you think it strange. For you do not belong here. This is not your home. The Kingdom of heaven is yours. The earth itself will be yours. And you will be part of a great, joyous reunion in heaven. This is the point of the Beatitudes.
Come to the feast, the Lord says. He sends his servants out to invite the whole world. So, it’s not men and women and boys and girls who invite him into their hearts and their lives, it’s He who invites them into His. We need to reverse the vocabulary of our current American Christian scene; this talk of us inviting Jesus into our hearts. You won’t find the Bible talking that way. Instead, Jesus is consistently the inviter and we are the invitee. Come to me, He says. Come to the feast, He says.
The Word of Jesus is the most powerful thing in the world. The Gospel writer Matthew has been showing this in the events before today’s Gospel reading. There was a centurion whose servant was paralyzed, and he asked Jesus to do something. Jesus said, “I will come and heal him.” But the centurion said, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed.” Jesus marveled at the man’s faith, and said, “Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.” And the servant was healed at that very moment. The Word of Jesus is the most powerful thing in the world.
When we see our failure to love. When we see our great need for forgiveness from our God. Then we have no business asking about the law. It will only condemn, expose our pride and our envy and our resentment and our apathy, and knock us further down. But this question, the question on which the history of the world turns, is what we need asked, “Who is the Christ?”
“God resists the proud,
But gives grace to the humble. Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time.”
Jesus told his disciples that he saw the devil falling from heaven like lightning. God created the devil a good and beautiful angel in the beginning. But the devil rebelled and God cast him from his presence along with all the other angels who followed him.
There are things worse than death. There are things that we should never, ever put a price on.
Some punishments you can bring on yourself. But it’s also true that people suffer all sorts of horrible things not because they did anything, but because they were born a sinner into a sinful, corrupt world.
