Genesis 2:7-17; Romans 6:19-23; St Mark 8:1-9
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
Today’s first reading from Genesis tell us of our origins: God made man from the earth which He created. But man is not simply dust, not simply earth. You are not merely matter. Man is both body and soul together, not as two parts temporarily joined. Man is an embodied soul or an ensouled body. Our first father became a living being when God breathed into Adam’s face the breath of life.
And God gave to man all good things to eat. The whole world was God’s gift to His creature. God proclaimed everything a feast for him. He made from the man a woman, a wife, in whom to delight and with whom to enjoy the world and the fellowship together with and in the Blessed Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
But the fall into sin changed everything. It changed the character of this world. Animals became hostile to man. The earth grew thorns where vines once were. Man now gets his bread only with intense labor. He must sweat and bleed for his nourishment. And the man and his wife were divided from one another so that they sought to control and dominate each other. And their conception was filled with sorrow. Not only child bearing but child rearing became riddled with pain and loss. The first fruit of their bodies begat not a messiah but a murderer.
After many millennia, a virgin named Mary finally conceived and gave birth to that long awaited Messiah. He was of her flesh and so truly Man. But He was also begotten of the Father from eternity and thus truly God. When we speak of Jesus as the God-Man we are attempting to describe the great mystery that God has become incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity assuming the human nature into His person, without ceasing to be truly God. This confession is exclusive to Christianity. No other religion on earth believes, teaches and confesses this mystery. Not even other monotheistic religions like Judaism or Islam. They are subtle lies of the Deceiver.
This great mystery - God in the flesh - leads to another. Why? Why does God become Man? And the answer is in the first words we hear Jesus speak in today’s Gospel: I have compassion on the multitude. With these words of Jesus we learn the heart of the only true God, His will and intention and disposition toward us. I have compassion on the multitude. This mass of humanity that has become corrupt, ruined, mortal, shipwrecked.
St Paul describes this in the beginning of today’s Epistle: I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. A literal translation of the Apostle Pauls word there is because of the sickness [or disease] of your flesh. The result of the fall is that man’s flesh has become weak, sick, diseased. Our bodies are mortal. Tiny bacteria, unseen by the human eye, can do horrible damage to our flesh. Cancerous tumors, invisible, can quickly ravage their host.
But “flesh” in the New Testament often means something more than the skin on our bones. It refers to our human nature that is broken and hostile from our Creator’s intention. Instead of showing kindness to our neighbor, we are filled with anger. Instead of respecting a neighbor’s marriage, one man covets another’s wife. God’s name is used as a curse instead of in prayer. Our Reformation Confessions of Faith describe this condition with the Latin term concupiscence, an inherited contagion, a disease with which we are born.
A fundamental disease of the soul and sickness of the flesh, testifying to the deep separation between us and our Creator, is where a person’s will, mind, and spirit is overcome by anxiety about the body. This results in fearful questions: “What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear? What will happen regarding my job, my house, the Director of the FBI, my health insurance, my retirement income?
We are all so easily overcome by these concerns. And they are real, valid concerns from a worldly perspective. But such concerns and anxiety ultimately betray a lack of fear, love, and trust in God as both Creator of the world and sustainer of the world and us His creatures. What does the Small Catechism say? “I believe that God has made me and all creatures, that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my sense, and still takes care of them.”
When all is going well, those words don't mean much. But when we are on the verge of losing everything that is when the true confession of these words is tested. Can a blind man say, “God has given my my eyes?” What does a solider who has lost his leg think when he says, “God has given my all my members and still takes care of them?”
The Catechism continues: “He also gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all I have. He richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life.” Yet here is this crowd, listening to Jesus preach for three straight days. The food they have brought with them has run out. They cannot make it back.
This has happened before. Moses led the children of Israel through the Red Sea on dry ground, but life in the desert on the other side of the sea was not easy. That crowd grumbled and moaned, “You have brought us into this wilderness to die!” They longed to go back, to become slaves again, for at least in slavery there was food.
What is astonishing is that there is no similar report about the crowd following Jesus in today’s Gospel. They have run out of food, with not even enough remaining to get back home. They will die in this wilderness. From every external observation, we would have to call them fools. Fools to follow this Jesus and not put their material priorities first. We too are fools. Fools to be here on Sunday morning. Wasting our time on ancient liturgical mumbo-jumbo. Fools to take a wafer and call it the Body of Christ. Fools to pray to a God we have not seen.
But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise. God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things that are mighty. The base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should boast in His presence. But by Him you are in Christ Jesus who became for us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. As it is written, Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord (1 Cor 1:27-31).
What does the world obtain with its wisdom? Slavery to sin, leading to death. But this foolish message, following Jesus to His Cross, confessing your sins and gazing upon the corpse of the God-Man hanging on a tree, Himself made to be sin and a curse - where does that “foolishness” lead? To Resurrection and Everlasting Life!
So then, He who created the world ex nihilo, from nothing, by His Word, He who fashioned man from the dust and breathed into His face the breath of life, He who caused water to spring from the rock and fed the people with manna and quail in the wilderness, can He not also feed this people who have followed Jesus to the brink of death?
The order goes out: Take your seat on the earth and prepare to be fed. And these people, “strengthened by what they had heard, obeyed and sat at Christ’s empty table” (Walther). Taking bread, He gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to the disciples, and the disciples to the crowd. Seven loaves, the number of creation, for four thousand people: the number of the four winds, the Gentiles, each a thousand, a number of great fulness, gathered into seven baskets, again demonstrating the Creator, for God rested on the seventh day.
All this Jesus did to signify that as He fed the five thousand - five, the number of the Jews, for there are five books of Moses - with five loaves, and gathered the fragments into twelve baskets, one for each tribe of Israel, so He is not by the feeding of the four thousand bringing the Gentiles under the umbrella of His mercy, so that all, both Jews and Gentiles, might return to their Creator and be saved. It is written, He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one, that He might create in Himself one new man inlace of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us to God in one body through the Cross, thereby killing the hostility (Eph 2:14-16).
And interesting to note with the Gentiles, though they are less in number than the Jews, they have less remaining afterward. Only seven baskets compared to twelve. What does this mean when you have less people, but less leftovers? They were hungrier! They followed Jesus out into the wilderness, out to certain death, hanging on His every Word, because they hungered and thirsted for righteousness!
Now just as we are sent out from the liturgy with a prayer that we would be strengthened in faith towards God and fervent love for one another, so these people are sent back to their homes, to be disciples of Jesus in their vocations, to live as Christians in their work of being husband and wife, father and mother, child and citizen, accountant and pilot and teacher and craftsman. Thus one of the great fathers of early American Lutheranism, C.F.W. Walther, said this about today’s lessons: “If a person truly wants to be a Christian, he must always fight against sin, watch and pray, and strive after sanctification.” (Walther, God Grant It, p599)
Sanctification comes from the Latin word Sanctus, meaning “holy.” Sanctification means “holy-fication,” becoming holy. Because of that sinful contagion creeping in our minds and bodies, there is much about us that is not holy: the lusts and evil desires that plague us, the wicked words that form in our minds and sometimes burst out, aimed at those whom we should love the most. Do you truly want to be a Christian? Then take those words of Walther to heart: You “must always fight against sin, watch and pray, and strive after sanctification.”
This is not how you become a Christian or earn your salvation, for you can never do that by your own power. But by the power of the Holy Spirit, working through His means of the Gospel and the Sacraments, the slavery to sin that in the past has plagued you has now been broken; thus St. Paul in today’s reading from Romans says that the one who is set free from sin and has become a slave to God receives fruit that leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
The pattern our Small Catechism lays out in the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer is entirely consistent with Scripture: Repentance, Faith, Holy Living. That is the pattern of the Christian life: Repentance, Faith, Holy Living. Sanctification is Holy Living, and as that father in the faith, Walther, told us above, we are to strive after sanctification.
So when you are afraid of your sins, repent and run to the Creed, run to Confession, which is running back to your baptism, and rejoice in the Faith, the good news of what God in Christ has done for you. And having received that salvation, “fight against sin, watch and pray, and strive after sanctification,” holy living.
But the Catechism does not stop there. It moves on the Sacraments. As do you. From the drowning anew in baptismal repentance to the absolution to the Sacrament of the Altar. Here you receive the Bread that is the Body of Christ, earned by His blood and sweat, the labor of His nail scarred hands. Come, dear Christian, receive the free gift of God: forgiveness of sins, and where there is forgiveness of sins, there is life and salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
Today’s first reading from Genesis tell us of our origins: God made man from the earth which He created. But man is not simply dust, not simply earth. You are not merely matter. Man is both body and soul together, not as two parts temporarily joined. Man is an embodied soul or an ensouled body. Our first father became a living being when God breathed into Adam’s face the breath of life.
And God gave to man all good things to eat. The whole world was God’s gift to His creature. God proclaimed everything a feast for him. He made from the man a woman, a wife, in whom to delight and with whom to enjoy the world and the fellowship together with and in the Blessed Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
But the fall into sin changed everything. It changed the character of this world. Animals became hostile to man. The earth grew thorns where vines once were. Man now gets his bread only with intense labor. He must sweat and bleed for his nourishment. And the man and his wife were divided from one another so that they sought to control and dominate each other. And their conception was filled with sorrow. Not only child bearing but child rearing became riddled with pain and loss. The first fruit of their bodies begat not a messiah but a murderer.
After many millennia, a virgin named Mary finally conceived and gave birth to that long awaited Messiah. He was of her flesh and so truly Man. But He was also begotten of the Father from eternity and thus truly God. When we speak of Jesus as the God-Man we are attempting to describe the great mystery that God has become incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity assuming the human nature into His person, without ceasing to be truly God. This confession is exclusive to Christianity. No other religion on earth believes, teaches and confesses this mystery. Not even other monotheistic religions like Judaism or Islam. They are subtle lies of the Deceiver.
This great mystery - God in the flesh - leads to another. Why? Why does God become Man? And the answer is in the first words we hear Jesus speak in today’s Gospel: I have compassion on the multitude. With these words of Jesus we learn the heart of the only true God, His will and intention and disposition toward us. I have compassion on the multitude. This mass of humanity that has become corrupt, ruined, mortal, shipwrecked.
St Paul describes this in the beginning of today’s Epistle: I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. A literal translation of the Apostle Pauls word there is because of the sickness [or disease] of your flesh. The result of the fall is that man’s flesh has become weak, sick, diseased. Our bodies are mortal. Tiny bacteria, unseen by the human eye, can do horrible damage to our flesh. Cancerous tumors, invisible, can quickly ravage their host.
But “flesh” in the New Testament often means something more than the skin on our bones. It refers to our human nature that is broken and hostile from our Creator’s intention. Instead of showing kindness to our neighbor, we are filled with anger. Instead of respecting a neighbor’s marriage, one man covets another’s wife. God’s name is used as a curse instead of in prayer. Our Reformation Confessions of Faith describe this condition with the Latin term concupiscence, an inherited contagion, a disease with which we are born.
A fundamental disease of the soul and sickness of the flesh, testifying to the deep separation between us and our Creator, is where a person’s will, mind, and spirit is overcome by anxiety about the body. This results in fearful questions: “What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear? What will happen regarding my job, my house, the Director of the FBI, my health insurance, my retirement income?
We are all so easily overcome by these concerns. And they are real, valid concerns from a worldly perspective. But such concerns and anxiety ultimately betray a lack of fear, love, and trust in God as both Creator of the world and sustainer of the world and us His creatures. What does the Small Catechism say? “I believe that God has made me and all creatures, that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my sense, and still takes care of them.”
When all is going well, those words don't mean much. But when we are on the verge of losing everything that is when the true confession of these words is tested. Can a blind man say, “God has given my my eyes?” What does a solider who has lost his leg think when he says, “God has given my all my members and still takes care of them?”
The Catechism continues: “He also gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all I have. He richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life.” Yet here is this crowd, listening to Jesus preach for three straight days. The food they have brought with them has run out. They cannot make it back.
This has happened before. Moses led the children of Israel through the Red Sea on dry ground, but life in the desert on the other side of the sea was not easy. That crowd grumbled and moaned, “You have brought us into this wilderness to die!” They longed to go back, to become slaves again, for at least in slavery there was food.
What is astonishing is that there is no similar report about the crowd following Jesus in today’s Gospel. They have run out of food, with not even enough remaining to get back home. They will die in this wilderness. From every external observation, we would have to call them fools. Fools to follow this Jesus and not put their material priorities first. We too are fools. Fools to be here on Sunday morning. Wasting our time on ancient liturgical mumbo-jumbo. Fools to take a wafer and call it the Body of Christ. Fools to pray to a God we have not seen.
But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise. God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things that are mighty. The base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should boast in His presence. But by Him you are in Christ Jesus who became for us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. As it is written, Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord (1 Cor 1:27-31).
What does the world obtain with its wisdom? Slavery to sin, leading to death. But this foolish message, following Jesus to His Cross, confessing your sins and gazing upon the corpse of the God-Man hanging on a tree, Himself made to be sin and a curse - where does that “foolishness” lead? To Resurrection and Everlasting Life!
So then, He who created the world ex nihilo, from nothing, by His Word, He who fashioned man from the dust and breathed into His face the breath of life, He who caused water to spring from the rock and fed the people with manna and quail in the wilderness, can He not also feed this people who have followed Jesus to the brink of death?
The order goes out: Take your seat on the earth and prepare to be fed. And these people, “strengthened by what they had heard, obeyed and sat at Christ’s empty table” (Walther). Taking bread, He gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to the disciples, and the disciples to the crowd. Seven loaves, the number of creation, for four thousand people: the number of the four winds, the Gentiles, each a thousand, a number of great fulness, gathered into seven baskets, again demonstrating the Creator, for God rested on the seventh day.
All this Jesus did to signify that as He fed the five thousand - five, the number of the Jews, for there are five books of Moses - with five loaves, and gathered the fragments into twelve baskets, one for each tribe of Israel, so He is not by the feeding of the four thousand bringing the Gentiles under the umbrella of His mercy, so that all, both Jews and Gentiles, might return to their Creator and be saved. It is written, He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one, that He might create in Himself one new man inlace of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us to God in one body through the Cross, thereby killing the hostility (Eph 2:14-16).
And interesting to note with the Gentiles, though they are less in number than the Jews, they have less remaining afterward. Only seven baskets compared to twelve. What does this mean when you have less people, but less leftovers? They were hungrier! They followed Jesus out into the wilderness, out to certain death, hanging on His every Word, because they hungered and thirsted for righteousness!
Now just as we are sent out from the liturgy with a prayer that we would be strengthened in faith towards God and fervent love for one another, so these people are sent back to their homes, to be disciples of Jesus in their vocations, to live as Christians in their work of being husband and wife, father and mother, child and citizen, accountant and pilot and teacher and craftsman. Thus one of the great fathers of early American Lutheranism, C.F.W. Walther, said this about today’s lessons: “If a person truly wants to be a Christian, he must always fight against sin, watch and pray, and strive after sanctification.” (Walther, God Grant It, p599)
Sanctification comes from the Latin word Sanctus, meaning “holy.” Sanctification means “holy-fication,” becoming holy. Because of that sinful contagion creeping in our minds and bodies, there is much about us that is not holy: the lusts and evil desires that plague us, the wicked words that form in our minds and sometimes burst out, aimed at those whom we should love the most. Do you truly want to be a Christian? Then take those words of Walther to heart: You “must always fight against sin, watch and pray, and strive after sanctification.”
This is not how you become a Christian or earn your salvation, for you can never do that by your own power. But by the power of the Holy Spirit, working through His means of the Gospel and the Sacraments, the slavery to sin that in the past has plagued you has now been broken; thus St. Paul in today’s reading from Romans says that the one who is set free from sin and has become a slave to God receives fruit that leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
The pattern our Small Catechism lays out in the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer is entirely consistent with Scripture: Repentance, Faith, Holy Living. That is the pattern of the Christian life: Repentance, Faith, Holy Living. Sanctification is Holy Living, and as that father in the faith, Walther, told us above, we are to strive after sanctification.
So when you are afraid of your sins, repent and run to the Creed, run to Confession, which is running back to your baptism, and rejoice in the Faith, the good news of what God in Christ has done for you. And having received that salvation, “fight against sin, watch and pray, and strive after sanctification,” holy living.
But the Catechism does not stop there. It moves on the Sacraments. As do you. From the drowning anew in baptismal repentance to the absolution to the Sacrament of the Altar. Here you receive the Bread that is the Body of Christ, earned by His blood and sweat, the labor of His nail scarred hands. Come, dear Christian, receive the free gift of God: forgiveness of sins, and where there is forgiveness of sins, there is life and salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
RSS Feed