NOTE: This is the first in a ten sermon series entitled Law and Gospel.
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23, Psalm 125, James 2:1-17, Mark 7:24-37
“Law and Gospel,” that’s my sermon series for the next ten weeks. The interplay of these two words goes back at least to Martin Luther, and it’s still the Lutheran paradigm for how to preach the Bible.
In this paradigm the Law stands for all in the Bible that judges us, all that convicts us of our guilt, the perfect will of God that we fall short of, the good that we ought to do but do not do; the Law is all in the Bible that drives us to repentance and confess our sins.
By contrast the Gospel is all in the Bible of God’s mercy, God’s grace abounding to the chief of sinners, God’s forgiving us even before we repent. Law and Gospel work together—it’s the Law that drives you to the Gospel.
Of course we also mean by Gospel specifically those four books in the New Testament that tell us of the life of Our Lord, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But the word Gospel is also used in the larger sense of the whole good-news of grace, the proclamation of the Kingdom come, the apostolic message that the Lord has come to save us. And this good-news is found already in the Old Testament. I remember how thrilled I was by reading Martin Luther’s commentary on the life of the patriarch Jacob, how Luther worked the dialectic of Law and Gospel to interpret the story of this life-long deceiver whom God continually saved by grace.
So then, are Law and Gospel opposites? The angry face of God versus the loving heart of God? Or are they two sides of the same coin? Can these two be synthesized? That’s what John Calvin did. He said that the Law is not just to condemn us and to drive us to God’s mercy, it’s also to guide us in our life of thanksgiving for God’s mercy.
And this is where the Reformed tradition differs from the Lutherans, because we see Law more like Jews do, like Torah, like teaching, guidance, the way to live, the walk of righteousness, the pathway to peace and justice. But you cannot walk this way until you first have fallen to your knees in confession that you cannot walk it rightly on your own, and then been picked up lovingly from behind and set back on your feet and washed clean and fed with bread and wine to strengthen you on your way. Law and Gospel. I’m going to work the dialectic for the next few months.
And this is why. I want to get at our Christian witness in America right now. What’s our message: evangelism or resistance? Or both? Is our concern the law and order of our land, and who enforces the law, from the Supreme Court to the cops to the ICE, or is our concern teaching people to be good moral citizens, setting an example of ethics despite the abuses of the clergy and the churches’ cover-ups, or is it our concern to spread the gospel that no matter how abusive a person is, even that sinner is loved by God, and for saved sinners to be Christlike in our own voluntary service to the refugees and the homeless and the poor? Is our concern the laws or the gospel? Or both?
In our epistle lesson we get this phrase, “the royal law.” It’s royal because it’s kingdom law, the king’s law. It’s the moral will of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The royal law is this: that you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And if you don’t love your neighbor as yourself, if you show partiality, especially against the poor, then you commit sin and you are convicted by the law as a transgressor. That’s the Lutheran sense of the law right there, for who among us does not show partiality?
Showing partiality is the way of the world, even if it’s for good order. We build our societies to reward hard work and reward success. Especially a capitalist society. We build our education systems that way too, or why would students study hard and do their work? How else do we keep order in the world unless we reward good behavior and penalize the bad? Even the kingdom of God wants order. The way that God created the world was by giving order to the formless void. Let everything be done in good order, says the Apostle Paul. Law means order. Kingdom means order.
But what if the order of the kingdom is interrupted by human need! Like with the Lord Jesus in our gospel. Of course we are troubled by him comparing the woman and her daughter to dogs. Our Lord is obviously irritated. He’s exhausted, he’s on retreat outside of Israel, he needs some privacy and space. Back in Galilee the resistance is rising against him, and the very people that he came to save are beginning to oppose him. I can tell you personally that there’s no greater discouragement for a religious leader than to lose some of the people you were given. I’m sure he’s discouraged, but he must keep to his mission to be the Messiah for Israel, and the order of God’s plan is that he’s got to save the Jews first, and once he’s made the Jews a holy nation again then it will be the Gentiles’s turn. It’s all in the prophets—you can look it up. So all in good order. Call it trickle-down salvation!
He tells the woman she’s out of line. “It’s not your turn yet. Go to the back of the bus.” Nevertheless she persisted! She resists him, she turns the other cheek. “So you’re calling me a dog, so I’m under your table and it won’t cost you at all to let us have the crumbs your holy children trickle down. And some of the food dropping down is what you gave them but they don’t want! We dogs will take it.”
Her challenge was not against him like the scribes and Pharisees. It was a challenge forward, to the long game, an aggressive jumping of God’s orderly plan. And she challenged him to live by his faith. Yes, even Jesus had to live by his faith. By his heart and not his head.
I don’t want to be anachronistically psychological here, but notice the emotional transference going on. When he calls her a dog she doesn’t dispute him, she accepts his feelings and does not judge him, but she appeals to his heart, and he has to make a movement in his heart and soul. Her encounter has called him out of his privacy and his efficient strategy. Her confrontation has enlarged his soul.
Two applications, two take-homes. First, in God’s economy, the laws prioritize the poor. Even out of order.
Law and order has its place, but inevitably it serves best those who are well off. I teach my granddaughter to honor the police, but the very invention of policing in America was for the protection of property from the poor and from black people, and the bias seems built-in. Government is good, but finally it’s always biased on the side of privilege and class and wealth. So just as the need of the woman and her daughter subverted the order of the kingdom that Jesus had been following, so Christians should press the laws and the economic order of whatever country they are living in to serve the poor as a priority. True, the Gospel is not first political, but its political implications are inescapable. We bear witness to the Kingdom of God in our own political economies.
My second take-home is that for Christians it must also be personal and not just better laws and policies. This is why Christians minister directly to the poor, face to face, in personal engagement. Not just for their good, but for you own souls. For the emotional transference. For you to identify with them. To be among them. That’s gospel. Because of God’s preferential option for the poor. Because as our epistle says, God has chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom. You would want to be among them, even if your shyness makes you do it in a group. You do it to enlarge your soul.
You can make no progress without risk, you cannot explore without uncertainty, and you cannot move without vulnerability. For you to grow and cultivate your soul you need to step outside of your natural boundaries in order to have such encounters. It’s work. But our epistle says that without work your faith dies. Without service, your soul withers. Without loving your neighbor as yourself, your soul shrinks away. It isn’t easy. It’s often frustrating, and you wonder what difference you really make, which is why doing this work requires you to keep up on your faith. There is no contradiction between faith and good works. Faith is useless unless you exercise it in good work, and your good works will only frustrate you unless you do them by faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Royal Law is the law of love. It’s the power of love that makes it the law of liberty. Freedom from needing to score success, freedom from performance, freedom from guilt and sin. Because mercy triumphs over judgment. In the Kingdom of God the coin of the realm is love, and law and gospel are the two sides of that coin. The gospel sets you free to freely exercise the only binding law, which is the law of love.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment