The Bridegroom gives you new wineskins. He gave them to you at the font, where He drowned the old garment and clothed you in His own. The robe you wear before God is His obedience, His death, His resurrection. He does not repair what you bring. He replaces it. This is the grace that cannot be patched onto anything — it must be received whole, given whole, or it is lost.

Paul's charge to Timothy exposes the fundamental choice: trust the uncertainty of riches, or trust the God who richly provides. Christ doesn't offer budgeting tips—He offers true life. The kingdom of heaven is the priceless treasure for which you sell everything else.

The hireling runs. That is the only fact Jesus gives you about him. He sees the wolf coming, and he runs. The sheep scatter, the wolf takes what it wants, and the hireling is already down the road. Jesus does not tell you the hireling's reasons. He does not need to. The man ran. That is his whole character, stated in a single act. Set that figure next to the Good Shepherd, and you have the entirety of the Gospel for this Sunday: He stayed.

Thesis 23: "The law works the wrath of God, kills, reviles, accuses, judges, and condemns everything that is not in Christ."

Thesis 24: "Yet that wisdom is not of itself evil, nor is the law to be evaded; but without the theology of the cross a person misuses the best things in the worst way."

You want joy without the terror of standing before the God who raises the dead. Or you settle for dread with no hope of mercy. The women leave the tomb with both, and Matthew does not apologize. He tells you: this is what the resurrection does. It gives you fear and joy together, because the One you meet at the empty tomb is both Judge and Savior, both Holy God and your Brother.

Christian speech follows the same shape: words grounded in what God has done and what God has promised. Some of those words are mercy. Some are warning. You need both to talk like Jesus.

Faith is born from the breath of God. The pneuma of Christ fills us. We live. We believe. We are blessed, because we have not seen and yet we have believed. The Spirit has breathed. The word has raised us. We stand. We confess. We live in His name.

Thesis 22: "The wisdom which sees the invisible things of God in works as understood by human beings is puffed up, blinded, and hardened."

Christians live in two kingdoms: Church and State. God gave each a different task. The State uses the sword to restrain evil; the Church proclaims Christ to save sinners. Confuse them and you get politics as religion or the pulpit as a campaign stop. Keep them straight and you're free to love your neighbor in both.

The risen Christ opens what we cannot. Christ opens Scripture. He opens understanding. He opens His hands and His feet to show the wounds. He opens His mouth to eat broiled fish. Through all this opening—this unveiling, this unlocking—He opens heaven itself and seats us there with Him. We cannot open our own eyes to see Him. We cannot unlock the meaning of Scripture on our own. We cannot break down the door that separates earth from glory. The risen Lamb who was slain has won the keys, and He opens what no man can shut.

This is the day the Lord has made. This is the day death lost its grip. This is the day the storm of God's wrath was stilled. This is the day the Father raised Christ, the new Jonah, from the grave to preach repentance and forgiveness to you. He is risen! He is not here! See the place where they laid Him. It is empty, because He is alive, and because He is alive, you will live also.

The tomb is empty. Christ is risen. He has called you by name. He has reconciled you to Himself and to one another. His Father is your Father. His God is your God. And in His presence there is fullness of joy forevermore.

John lays the old story of David over the Passion like one transparency laid on another, so that you see the pattern. The parallels are deliberate. Absalom gathered Israel against its rightful king, stealing the hearts of the people. The chief priests and the Pharisees did the same — they turned the crowds against the One whom the Father had anointed. Absalom's rebellion was the rebellion of a son against his father. The Passion is the rebellion of the creature against the Creator, of the children of Israel against the God who had carried them out of Egypt in His arms.

You are here this afternoon because the Holy Spirit has not finished building. He still calls by the Gospel. He still places stones. The cornerstone holds. The building rises. The Church endures — not by your effort, not by any human strategy, not by the wisdom of her architects — but by the blood of the Lamb laid into the earth's foundation, and raised again on the third day.

God is Most High. His eyes look down. He sees what you are — the poverty, the squalor, the weight of it all. He sees it, and He does not look away. He comes down. He comes all the way down, down to the floor, down to the cross, down to this altar. The Most High becomes the Most Low so that the lowly might be raised to the Most High.

"No One to Help” Isaiah saw it before it happened. Many centuries before Calvary, he asked the question that hangs over everything you have heard this morning: "I looked, but there was no one to help, and I wondered that there was no one to uphold." Look through the Passion, and you will see that he was right. There was no one.

The righteous Man is inconvenient. He reproaches their sins. His manner of life is unlike theirs. The very sight of Him is a burden. So they have made up their minds: He must go.

Jesus did not stumble into the Passion. He was not simply a good man who ran afoul of powerful enemies. He is the eternal Son of God who became flesh for the express purpose of offering that flesh to be broken. The Zechariah cento your ears received this morning is a mosaic of prophetic fragments, and together they tell the whole story of the week before it unfolds: the King riding in lowly; thirty pieces of silver weighed out; the shepherd struck; the sheep scattered; darkness at midday; living water flowing from the city. Zechariah saw it all. Isaiah saw it all. The thread running through every prophet points to this one Man, this one week, this one death.

This is what the church does when she reads the Passion over you. The Word does what it says. It puts you under the torn curtain, in the company of the saints who walked out of their graves, in the place of Barabbas. This is not a report on something that happened long ago to someone else. It is a delivery—to you, this morning, in this place.

Someone in every generation figures out that if you attach the word "tithe" to a percentage and then call non-compliance theft from God, you can get people to hand over money out of fear rather than love. The New Testament will not let that stand. Paul tells the Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver — which means the size of the gift matters far less than the heart behind it. You are not saved by your giving, and your giving is not stolen from God when it falls short of someone's formula. You were bought with a price. Give in response to that.