Sermons

Two men go up to the temple at the hour of the lamb, blood being shed a few steps away in plain sight. One of them never mentions it — his religion is complete without the blood, and that religion sits in the pew and climbs into the pulpit. The other says one sentence, and the word he uses is not the ordinary word for mercy. It is the mercy-seat word: let the blood be over me. And the mercy seat is no longer a gold lid in a room no one may enter. It is a Man.

The snare of the last day falls on those sitting — and you sit because you cannot carry what you already hold. Every program you have run, from the budget to the devotional with the ribbon, set one more thing on your back and told you to stand. But the verb in the Gospel is passive: you are told to beg that somebody would stand you up. Christ has done it, and He says so out of a preacher’s mouth — holy, blameless, above reproach, today, before you have improved by one ounce.

Jesus cries twice in the Gospels — once at a grave, and once outside a church. The grave we understand. The other one is worse, and it is the only thing in that whole city worth crying about. You can read God’s oath that He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked and still lie awake wondering whether He meant it about you — but the tears of your Savior settle it.

Jesus comes to dinner and will not wash His hands. The mint was never commanded — grain, wine, flock, that is what God said to tithe — but a tenth of the mint costs nothing, and being seen to give it is worth a great deal, so justice gets stepped over on the way to the herb garden. Christ does not cancel the mint; He keeps the weightier matters and the little ones both, and leaves not one undone. He keeps none of it for Himself: the hands He would not wash at that table are the hands they nailed down.

Jesus tells the parable of the unjust steward immediately after the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. Johann Gerhard saw why: Christ knows how easily we misuse that teaching for carnal security, taking the sweetest thing God ever said and turning it into a permission slip. Paul answers that man with a desert full of graves. Israel was baptized into Moses, ate the same spiritual food, drank from the Rock that was Christ, and two of them reached the Promised Land. The warning lands on the man who thinks he stands. So does the promise: God is faithful, the way of escape has an address, and the door behind you was never bolted.

The men haggling in the temple courtyard knew which oaths could be collected on. Swear by the gold and you’re bound; swear by the temple and you can walk away. Jesus calls that blindness: holiness runs down from God to the thing and never back up, and the temple is holy only for Him who dwells in it. We do the same arithmetic with our years and our giving, wanting a righteousness we can audit. But the altar was holy before you got here, and the gift on it is Christ’s own body and blood.

Two cries stand side by side in this Sunday’s readings: “Lord, Lord” and “Abba, Father.” The first belongs to an applicant outside the office door with his accomplishments in a folder; the second to a child who never wondered whether he was allowed in the house. Jesus doesn’t dispute the applicants’ resume. He disputes that it ever mattered. What every false prophet wants is to turn sons back into applicants.

On the Sabbath, the Pharisees found a rule to keep and lost the mercy it was meant to carry — husk without kernel. James diagnoses the same disease in the church: zeal that hides self-seeking envy. Christ, the One greater than the temple, was Himself crushed like the grain, so that guilty husk-keepers might be fed with mercy instead of judged by the letter.

The four thousand Jesus feeds in Mark 8 are Gentiles — outsiders with no claim on the God of Israel. Paul says the same of us: once strangers, far off, until brought near by the blood of Christ. What Christ did on that Gentile shore, He does again in the Sacrament, filling those who have no right to the table with more than enough.

The Gerasene demoniac was a man no one could bind. James names the wisdom that builds a life like that: earthly, unspiritual, demonic, breeding envy and self-seeking until it makes “every evil thing.” Then Jesus crosses the sea to unclean pagan ground for this one man, and with a single word, “Come out,” He drowns Legion under the water. The man is left sitting, clothed, in his right mind. That is his Baptism, and ours, where the same word of Christ still drowns what binds us and seats us at His table.