“Christ the Fulfillment and the Giver”
Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
St. Matthew 5:13-20
February 6, 2011
Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church, Fullerton, Nebraska
IN NOMINE JESU
[Jesus said, 12“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or
the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”]
The Lectionary has been a tremendous blessing to the Church
throughout the centuries, and especially over the past few decades.
The Lectionary is a book of readings taken from the Holy Scriptures,
with different appointed readings for each Sunday and festival in the
church year, including today. The Readings for today differ from last
Sunday’s and will be different from next Sunday’s. Is it an absolute
requirement to read from a lectionary? No, because we are free in the
Gospel to read from anywhere in the Scriptures. Is it beneficial that
we read from a lectionary? Absolutely, because it gives us a certain
structure—a certain order—to the liturgical time we employ: the Fifth
Sunday after the Epiphany, the season of Epiphany, the Time of
Christmas, the Year of Our Lord—the Year of Grace—Two Thousand Eleven.
The Readings place a framework around where we are in the church
year. For centuries there has been in place a prescribed set of
readings of some sort in the worship life of the Church. What was
used in the Early Church is quite different from what is in use now in
the 21st century. The Church, in her wisdom, has made modifications
to the lectionary as she best believed would serve her people
throughout the generations. What we have today as our lectionary is
the result of decades of careful consideration and preparation by the
Church. Is it perfect? No. Nothing is on this side of heaven. Will
it serve the Church well over the course of time? Yes, because we are
being fed the very Word of God; we get to behold our Triune God coming
down to us in the public reading of His Word.
The use of three Readings each Sunday or festival is a practice we
inherited from the liturgy of the ancient synagogue. In that liturgy,
there were three readings from what we now know as the Old Testament:
one from the Torah, one from the Prophets, and one from the
Writings—with psalms prayed and sung between the readings. Today,
some 3,000 to 4,000 years later, we still hear three Readings in the
liturgy. Generally, one is from the Old Testament, one from the
Epistles, and one from the Gospels. During the “green” Sundays—and
today is one of those Sundays, as noted by the color of the paraments
and my stole—the Lectionary follows a lectio continua (a continuous
reading) of the Epistles and Gospels, picking up where the Readings
ended the previous Sunday. But what is interesting to note is that
the Old Testament Reading—generally from the Torah (the Law) or the
Prophets—is connected intimately with the Holy Gospel appointed for
the day. The Old Testament Reading and the Holy Gospel have a common
theme running through them, often accounts depicting similar events.
Quite often the connection is the Law or a prophecy being fulfilled in
Christ, who is the Center of the Scriptures.
Those who listened to our Lord as He preached His “Sermon on the
Mount” were familiar with the Law and the Prophets, as they had heard
them read each Sabbath. They heard the Five Books of Moses. They
heard the prophecies. They were waiting for the fulfillment of the
Law and the Prophets to come in the person of the Messiah. They were
surprised that this Johnny-come-lately—this Jesus—declared Himself to
be that very Messiah, the Anointed One of God. At the beginning of
His earthly ministry, the Lord returned to His hometown and read from
the scroll of Isaiah, as we hear in Luke 4:
16And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as was
His custom, He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and He stood
up to read. 17And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to Him.
He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
18“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to
proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to
the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty
those who are oppressed, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20And He rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and
sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him.
21And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been
fulfilled in your hearing.” [Lk. 4:16-21 ESV]
What do we hear our Lord saying to us in our text for today? He
says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the
Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (v.
12). What is more, He also says in John 5:
36“But the testimony which I have is greater than the testimony of
John; for the works which the Father has given Me to accomplish—the
very works that I do—testify about Me, that the Father has sent Me.
37And the Father who sent Me, He has testified of Me. You have
neither heard His voice at any time nor seen His form. … 39You search
the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life;
it is these that testify about Me.” [Jn. 5:36-37, 39 NASB]
The people were amazed because Jesus taught with authority, not like
His fellow rabbis, for His authority comes from His heavenly Father,
the Almighty God. They were astonished that this carpenter’s Son knew
the Scriptures so well and dared to call Himself the Fulfillment of
the Law and the Prophets. They were offended—scandalized—because He
was not the political Messiah they had mistakenly been seeking,
someone to come and free them from Roman oppression. What they got
was Someone who came to free them from the ravages of sin. What they
also got was mad—offended—scandalized!—because He did not give them
what they wanted to hear but what they needed to hear: namely, to
repent, for the kingdom of God was at hand, at hand in the Person of
Jesus Christ, the One from Nazareth, the Son of Mary and the foster
Son of Joseph the carpenter. Someone of such humble origins daring to
claim He fulfills the Scriptures—how offensive this was to their ears!
In their hardness of heart, stiffness of their necks, and
uncircumcision of their hearts they rejected Him. “He was in the
world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know
Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him” (Jn. 10-11
NKJV). They rejected Him. They rejected His message of repentance.
They rejected the fact that they were poor, miserable sinners. They
rejected Him and His message because they hated Him.
This happened almost 2,000 years ago, and, as the Preacher says in
the book of Ecclesiastes, “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor
the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is what will be,
that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new
under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, ‘See, this
is new’? It has already been in ancient times before us” (Eccl.
1:8b-10 NKJV). What happened then, two millennia ago, is happening
now. They hated God, and so do we. They were sinners, and so are we.
They rejected the Word, and so do we. They deserved to burn in hell
for their sins, and so do we for ours. You see, there is nothing
inherently good in us, for we have all been conceived and born in sin,
and to this day we remain spiritually blind, dead, and enemies of God,
and we don’t like to hear any of that. We cannot handle the truth.
We shall know the truth, and it shall make us mad—angry at God. Yes,
we are all poor, miserable sinners, by nature sinful and unclean, with
sins and iniquities too numerous to count, having sinned against God
by thought, word, and deed. We have offended—and continue to
offend—God and justly deserve His temporal and eternal punishment. We
like to think we’re pretty good people…decent folk. But the truth of
the matter is that “we are all like an unclean thing, and all our
righteousnesses are like filthy rags; we all fade as a leaf, and our
iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away” (Is. 64:6 NKJV), away
from the presence of the Lord…a very lonely place when He departs.
So that we would not perish, our Lord has come, calling us to repent,
for the kingdom of God is at hand. As a matter of fact, the kingdom
of God is here! It is here in your very midst. It comes upon your
foreheads and upon your hearts, for you have been baptized in and into
the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It
comes into your ears as you hear the grace of God announced to you and
your sins forgiven in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit. It comes into your ears again as the Word is publicly
read and proclaimed in your hearing, being condemned by the Law and
restored by the Gospel. It comes upon your lips as the Lord gives you
His body to eat and His blood to drink, given and shed for you for the
forgiveness of all your sins. Where the kingdom of God is, there the
King is as well. The King is here! Jesus has come and brings
pleasure eternal. He comes to bring us forgiveness of sins. He comes
to bring us eternal life. He comes to bring us salvation. He comes
to give you His gifts, for “the gifts Christ freely gives He gives to
you and me to be His Church, His bride, His chosen, saved, and free!”
(LSB 602:1). Christ gives us His gifts, for He truly is the
Fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. He is the fulfillment of the
promise God made to Adam and Eve, our first parents and the first
sinners. He promised them already in Genesis 3 that their Savior
would come from their bloodline, born true God and true Man.
For Christ to fulfill the Law, He had to keep and obey it perfectly,
down to the smallest iota and dot (the smallest Hebrew alphabet
characters). To keep the Law, He had to place Himself under it. The
Christ Child, who by His very birth fulfilled centuries-old
prophecies, willingly placed Himself under the old covenant of
circumcision and the new covenant of baptism, to fulfill all
righteousness. He entered the Jordan River clean as the spotless Lamb
of God, who takes away the sin of the world. He came out dirty with
our sins, “for [God] made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that
we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21 NKJV).
Because Christ became sin for us, He endured the separation from God
the Father—the hell—we by our sins have deserved. God forsook His
only-begotten Son so that He would not forsake us. As St. Paul tells
us in Romans 5:
6For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the
ungodly. 7For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though
perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—8but God shows
His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for
us. 9Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much
more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. [Rom. 5:6-9]
But because Christ is also the Incarnate Word, the flesh-and-bones
Word of God (God Himself), and even as Christ in the flesh died for
us. He fulfilled the Law and the Prophets with one word: tetelesthai,
a Greek word that means “The goal has been reached.” It means “It is
finished.” It means “It has been completed.” It means “It has been
perfected.” Our redemption, our justification, and our salvation have
been made perfect in Christ’s perfect death. Our dear Lord, with this
one word, proclaimed victory over sin and Satan. He paid our full
redemption price by shedding His blood and by dying on the cross for
us atop Mt. Calvary. The temple that was Christ’s body was destroyed,
but in three days it was raised, just as He Himself prophesied, as He
rose from the dead for us, declaring Himself victor over the grave.
His victory is ours! We too shall rise on the Last Day, when the Lord
comes in judgment and gathers all the faithful to Himself to spend
life in heaven with Him forever, where we will dine at the marriage
feast of the Lamb in His kingdom, which has no end.
Until that Day comes, our Lord invites us to come continually to His
house, for He has established His Word and Table fellowship with us.
He bids us to come in and hear of His great love for us, a love so
great that He had already in Eden promised and proclaimed the Good
News of Himself, the Fulfillment of the Scriptures. This is the
message our Lord wants you to hear is “Repent, and believe the Good
News.” Repent, and believe the Gospel. Repent, and believe that God
the Father has forgiven your sins for His Son’s sake, on account of
the blood He once shed on Calvary’s cross and now seeks to give you,
along with His body, at His Table, that you would receive His gifts
with great thanksgiving.
In our Epistle for today, Paul said to the Corinthians then and to us
today, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and
Him crucified” (2 Cor. 2:2 ESV). Why was this? Paul says in Romans
1: “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of
God to salvation for everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16a NKJV). Paul
says in his first letter to the Christians at Corinth:
21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not
know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message
preached to save those who believe. 22For Jews request a sign, and
Greeks seek after wisdom; 23but we preach Christ crucified, to the
Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, 24but to those
who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the
wisdom of God. [1 Cor. 1:21-24 NKJV]
Fellow redeemed, it doesn’t get much simpler than that: preaching
Christ crucified. Without His crucifixion, there would be no
resurrection. In the words of the great Easter hymn: “Had Christ, who
once was slain, not burst His three-day prison, our faith had been in
vain: but now has Christ arisen, arisen, arisen; but now has Christ
arisen!” (LSB 482:refrain). He did it for you, and His message of
repentance and forgiveness is just as powerful now as it was 2,000
years ago, announcing the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.
The preaching of the cross remains timeless, for it is given for those
and to those who crave God’s gifts, the craving made possible by the
Holy Spirit’s converting us to fear, love, and trust in God above all
things. The preaching is for you. We preach Christ the Fulfillment
of the Law and the Prophets—for you! We preach God in the flesh as a
little baby—for you! We preach Christ crucified—for you! We preach
Christ risen—for you! We preach Christ ascended—for you! We preach
Christ coming down to you through His read and preached Word—for you!
We preach Christ coming down to you in Baptism to drown your Old
Adam—for you! We preach repentance in His Name—for you! We preach
the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come—for
you! We preach Christ presenting His body and blood, in, with, and
under the bread and wine—for you, given and shed—for you—for the
forgiveness of sins. Amen.
SOLI DEO GLORIA
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