“Christ Came Down to Be Lifted Up”
Fourth Sunday in Lent
St. John 3:14-21
March 22, 2009
IN NOMINE JESU
In the words of the Nicene Creed we confess our faith in
“one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God…Who for us men
and for our salvation came down from heaven…And was crucified also for
us under Pontius Pilate” (LSB, p. 191). To be crucified was to be
nailed to a large cross and hoisted in the air and left to die an
excruciatingly painful death. This was the Roman mode of execution.
Anyone who was crucified was lifted up on a cross to die in a public
spectacle. Such a fate awaited the Lord, but at the time of our text,
His time had not yet come. It was time, however, to catechize
Nicodemus, a member of the Pharisees and a secret follower of Jesus,
lest his fellow Jews find out about him and persecute him. Nicodemus
knew the Scriptures, but he did not understand them. He was unable to
see that the Scriptures have their fulfillment in the Person of Jesus
Christ, the long-promised Messiah. He wanted to understand, but he
had a large mental block: rabbinic Judaism. To the Jews at the time
of Jesus’ coming down to earth, the Scriptures were little more than a
set of laws. Consequently, Nicodemus could not understand the
necessity to be born again; he tried to comprehend this in a physical
sense, as if a grown man could re-enter his mother’s womb. But in the
verses preceding our text, Christ catechizes him on the necessity of
being born of water and of the Spirit, to believe in Jesus Christ as
the Messiah and to become baptized in and into His saving Name, even
as “All newborn soldiers of the Crucified Bear on their brows the seal
of Him who died” (LSB 837:3), the seal placed on us at our Baptism,
the means by which the Holy Spirit came down and entered our hearts,
creating and sustaining in us saving faith in Christ. By faith
produced through Holy Baptism are we born of water and of the Spirit.
In this Sacrament the Old Adam is brought down in the holy
water to the point that it drowns and dies. This baptismal drowning
must take place each day in the confession of sins. This means that
you must daily confess of your sins, as do I, for we daily sin much
and surely deserve nothing but God's temporal and eternal punishment,
for all our sins and iniquities have ever offended Him. We have
sinned against Him in thought, word, and deed by what we have done and
by what we have left undone. We have not loved the Lord our God with
all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our
strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We do not
fear, love, and trust in God above all things, but we give in to the
temptations of the unholy triad of the devil, the world, and our own
sinful nature, which do not want us to hallow God’s Name nor let His
kingdom come nor let His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We
have set ourselves up against the God who came down from heaven.
We have lifted ourselves up in our sinful pride, even as
the Israelites lifted themselves up in their own eyes, and in so doing
sinned against the Lord and against Moses, and they were bitten by
fiery serpents, just as Adam and Eve were spiritually bitten by the
great fiery serpent that is the devil himself. The Lord put down Adam
and Eve by putting them out of the Garden of Eden. He cast down the
Israelites with the serpents’ bites. He beats us down with the
preaching of His Law, for we too are full of sinful pride. He, who
has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts and has put
down the mighty from their thrones, has brought us down to our knees,
that we would repent of our sins, for without repentance and faith we
are, as Paul says in our Epistle, “dead in trespasses” (Eph. 2:5a),
and, as Christ says in our text, “He who does not believe is condemned
already, because he has not believed in the Name of the only begotten
Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come
into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light,
because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the
light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be
exposed” (vv. 18b-21). And when Christ, the Light of the world, comes
again on the Last Day, as we confess in the Athanasian Creed, “all
people will rise again with their bodies and give an account
concerning their own deeds. And those who have done good will enter
into eternal life, and those who have done evil, into eternal fire.
This is the catholic faith; whoever does not believe it faithfully and
firmly cannot be saved” (LSB, p. 320).
“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and
set it on a pole; and it shall be to everyone who is bitten, when he
looks at it, shall live’” (Num. 21:8). The Israelites who were bitten
and looked up to the serpent on the pole were saved. The Israelites
confessed their sins and placed their trust in the word the Lord gave
Moses, the word to erect the serpent on the pole. They were brought
down in their sins, and the Lord lifted them up in His grace. “And as
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of
Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but
have eternal life” (vv. 14-15), our Lord says in our text. In order
that Christ would be lifted up, He had to come down, coming down from
heaven and hiding His glory in human form, “for God so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him
should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His
Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through
Him might be saved” (vv. 16-17). Jesus Christ came down from heaven
to be born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in order that He would be
lifted up on the cross to die for the forgiveness of our sins. His
dead, lifeless body was taken down from the cross to be laid in the
tomb, in order that He would take it back up again by rising from the
dead. The Lord, once lifted on the glorious tree, as He has promised,
has drawn us now to Him. Christ our Good Shepherd has laid down His
life for us His sheep to take it up again. No one takes it from Him,
but He has laid it down of Himself. He alone has power to lay it down
and to take it back up again, and He has done so for you, the lowly in
heart, for He has lifted up you, the lowly. His mercy is on those who
fear Him from generation to generation, even to this present
generation, to you and me. “God…is rich in mercy, because of His
great love with which He [has] loved us, even when we were dead in
trespasses, [has] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you
have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together
in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4-6).
Until that Day when we will be seated in the heavenly
places, our Lord brings the heavenly places down to earth, that we
would be with Him as He comes to us in His Word and Sacraments. He
comes to us in Baptism not only to bring down the Old Adam in us to
its death, but to lift up the new man each day, to daily emerge and
arise, that we would live before God in righteousness and purity
forever. He lifts us up each day in the forgiveness of sins—the daily
living of our Baptism as we bear on our brows the seal of Him who
died, for we are marked with the sign of the cross to mark as redeemed
by Christ the crucified. As the baptized children of God, we have the
privilege of lifting up one another in prayer, praying for the whole
people of God in Christ Jesus and for all people according to their
needs, and lifting up one another through prayer, hymns, and psalms.
Our Lord brings the heavenly places down to earth, down to
us with the angels, archangels, and all the company of heaven as He
comes to us in His Supper, as the cup is lifted up, lifted up so that
you would taste and see that the Lord is good and that you would be
lifted up to receive the foretaste of the Feast to come and to catch a
glimpse of the heavenly places, for heaven and earth are full of His
glory here at His Table. Until that Day when we are lifted up into
the heavenly places for all eternity, we need not fear what the devil,
the world, and our sinful nature throw in our way, “For,” as the
Psalmist says in the Introit appointed for today, “in the time of
trouble He shall hide me in His pavilion; in the secret place of His
tabernacle He shall hide me; He shall set me high upon a rock” (Ps.
27:5), the Rock of our salvation, Jesus Christ, our Rock and our
Redeemer, our Mighty Fortress. God grant this in Jesus’ Name and for
His sake.
In the Name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
SOLI DEO GLORIA
The Rev. Pr. Mark A. Schlamann, Lincoln, Nebraska
Sermons available at http://lcmssermons.com/Schlamann
Catch the NEW "Issues, Etc." at http://www.issuesetc.org
1. O Lord, look down from heaven, behold And let Thy pity waken:
How few are we within Thy Fold, Thy saints by men forsaken!
True faith seems quenched on every hand, Men suffer not Thy Word to stand;
Dark times have us o'ertaken.
2. With fraud which they themselves invent Thy truth they have confounded;
Their hearts are not with one consent On Thy pure doctrine grounded.
While they parade with outward show, They lead the people to and fro,
In error's maze astounded.
3. May God root out all heresy And of false teachers rid us
Who proudly say: "Now, where is he That shall our speech forbid us?
By right or might we shall prevail; What we determine cannot fail;
We own no lord and master."
4. Therefore saith God, "I must arise, The poor My help are needing;
To Me ascend My people's cries, And I have heard their pleading.
For them My saving Word shall fight And fearlessly and sharply smite,
The poor with might defending."
5. As silver tried by fire is pure From all adulteration,
So through God's Word shall men endure Each trial and temptation.
Its light beams brighter through the cross, And, purified from human dross,
It shines through every nation.
6. Thy truth defend, O God, and stay This evil generation;
And from the error of their way Keep Thine own congregation.
The wicked everywhere abound And would Thy little flock confound;
But Thou art our Salvation. [Martin Luther, TLH 260]
--
The Rev. Pr. Mark A. Schlamann, Lincoln, NE
Sermons available at http://lcmssermons.com/Schlamann
Catch the NEW "Issues, Etc." at http://www.issuesetc.org
"When you are baptized, partake of Holy Communion, receive the
absolution, or listen to a sermon, heaven is open, and we hear the
voice of the Heavenly Father; all these works descend upon us from the
open heaven above us. God converses with us, provides for us; and
Christ hovers over us--but invisibly. And even though there were
clouds above us as impervious as iron or steel, obstructing our view
of heaven, this would not matter. Still we hear God speaking to us
from heaven; we call and cry to Him, and He answers us. Heaven is
open, as St. Stephen saw it open (Acts 7:55); and we hear God when He
addresses us in Baptism, in Holy Communion, in confession, and in His
Word as it proceeds from the mouth of the men who proclaim His message
to the people."--Martin Luther (1/19/1538 [LW 22:202])
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