"No one is righteous, and Christ alone, the righteous one, makes you righteous" Trinity 4 2025

13. June 2025

Trinity 4

Luke 6:36-42

Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you. (Lk 6:36–38)

This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.

The forgiveness of sins is relatively easily confessed at the comfortable distance of the ancient Apostles' Creed: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen. The problems arise when we attempt to practice forgiving particular sins and particular sinners here and now. Who, then, can forgive sins? Who even wants to?

When absolution is declared to you by a Gospel servant authorized to forgive on earth as God forgives in heaven, this servant is using the keys to unlock our prison's door and open heaven for you. Not surprisingly, even people in churches resist what seems to be the indiscriminate outpouring of God's “glorious grace that he freely bestows on us in the Beloved in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us” (Ephesians 1:6-7). Who can approve of publicizing such grace to the ungodly, who do not deserve or want it? How can we, never mind God, forgive this or that gross and negligent sin?

When we Christians confess together our belief in the forgiveness of sin, it is like pinching ourselves to make sure that what we heard is not a dream. Absolution seems illicit, frightening, and joyful all at once. Can this be? Can God just forgive? Can a word of promise accomplish what is promised? Is it right? Is it binding? Will it last? Is it legal? Is it even possible for the God who knows all things and counts the hairs on our heads to forget something, especially something as undeniable as our selfishness?

Forgiveness of sins is frightening. Mercy disrupts good order. It perverts our sense of justice. Why doesn't forgiveness require the law, and the law its pound of flesh? If we join forgiveness to proportional punishment (“an eye for an eye”), how then can the scales of justice ever be balanced? With forgiveness, God appears to act freely — as if there were no law, no punishment, and no scales that need to be balanced. “Freely” really means “unfairly” to those who take seriously God's standard of fairness according to His law, His promise of punishment, and His scales of justice.

If you think God unfairly forgives those who don't deserve it, you're not alone. Scripture acknowledges the problem. The story of Jonah is the story of repentance worked by God’s absolute demand and irresistible mercy. It not only takes up the troubling issues of mercy outside Israel and mercy for enemies like evil Nineveh, but also of mercy outside the law.

The God whose wrath kills and whose mercy brings new life asked Jonah: “Is it right for you to be angry?” Jonah thought so. So God “appointed a worm” to be His prophet. “Jonah, if you care about the bush,” God said, “should I not care about Nineveh's people and even its animals?” (cf. Jonah 4:6-8). Forgiveness posed a special threat to Jonah because, according to the law and its demands of an eye for an eye, evil Nineveh seemed to be getting off without so much as a slap on the wrist.

Wisdom writings and the Prophets agreed. The problem with God's promise of grace is the same as with God's demand: it is unilateral and so reminds us that God is God and we are not. God reminded the prophet Job: “Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified?” (cf. Job 40:6-14). So Job repented in a way that makes us uncomfortable: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5) God's relationship with Job remains unchanged, whether He takes away Job's children unfairly or gives Job's new daughters an inheritance with their brothers (see Job 40-42).

The forgiveness of sins is entirely out of our control. We are utterly dependent on God’s decision to forgive or not to forgive. Even the law, with its demand of an eye for an eye, gives us no place to stand from which we can demand forgiveness. There is no way around this, and so Israel was driven increasingly towards God's judgment on sin and God's salvation of sinners.

On the one hand, “the LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth” (Genesis 6:5-8). And more than that: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies... Let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:21, 24). And again: “There is no one who does good, no, not one” (Psalm 14:3). Then the apostle Paul put the period on the end of that sentence: “Both Jews and Greeks are under the power of sin... All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). All means all!

On the other hand, there is God's salvation that is even more breathtaking than God's judgment on sin: “Your faithfulness comes from me.” (Hosea 14:2-8) “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new promise to the house of Israel and the house of Judah... I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts... because I will forgive their lawlessness, and remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

Can God forget? Yes, God promises to forget, but a costly memory remains: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all... The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities” (Isaiah 53:6, 11)

All! Both absolutes in our relationship with God come crashing into the present when God’s preacher declares that you are forgiven on account of Christ: No, not one is righteous, and Christ alone, the righteous one, shall make many of you righteous.

To those who want to get right with God on any other grounds, this kind of absolute declaration sounds either like a farce or blasphemy against all that is good, right, and holy. God’s forgiveness judges your achievements to be a worthless hope for finding peace with God. It cuts the central nerve in the quest to motivate you to be a moral person, to be self-righteous. It rejects spirituality as an elevated life beyond creation and the body. If God forgives, all your hopes for an alternative way to get right with God are exposed as an illusion and unnecessary.

Remember how the prophet Nathan declared to David: “Now the LORD has put away your sin; you shall not die” (2 Samuel 12:13). God's called and ordained preacher is the local forgiveness person, whose marching orders are to absolve real sinners by a simple promise: I forgive you all your sins!

In this exercise of the Office of the Keys, even though you are remarkably bad at the law’s requirement to forgive, your own prison is opened. Forgiveness is a real end and a new beginning. Applied to you, it means death and resurrection, and the end to the futility of taking little steps toward the big forgiveness.

Think of it this way: Sinners in yourself. Saint in Christ. This is the only freedom to live in this old, dying world with its partial forgiveness and petty mercies. This freedom allows you to live in a world that either forgets its sins too easily or can't seem to let them go. So you trust God absolutely when you pray: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

In faith, you take God at His word. And then, Forgiveness finds its way through you as holy servants to everyone, while in Christ, you remain subject to none—having sin, death, and the power of evil behind you. For where there is forgiveness of sin, there is not only salvation but life… real life as spouses, parents, children, teachers, students, farmers, and all the relationships in life where daily forgiveness is desperately needed.

Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom.

This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.

Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School - Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin