"To Know God Is to Know Grace" Twentieth Sunday after Trinity October 12, 2014 Matthew 22:1–14
To know God is to know grace. We naturally don’t understand grace. By nature we don’t operate according to grace. We want give and take. People should get what they deserve. But grace… we don’t understand grace. We don’t get it. The truth of it all is that we don’t want it. Grace means free. Grace means unconditional, no strings attached. Grace means there’s no regard for your merits, your accomplishments, the good you’ve done, the evil you haven’t done. Grace also means complete and full pardon for every heinous act a person could ever do. Who wants that kind of system? Where one who hurts others gets off scot-free? That’s why we don’t know who God is. We don’t want a god who operates according to grace but one who gives us what we deserve. And if we don’t deserve it, we can earn it. This is who we are by nature. By nature we are sinful and centered in on ourselves. We don’t see this because by nature we are blind to it. We don’t see our need. We may know something is wrong but we can’t see what it is. We keep fooling ourselves that we are not the problem. The only way you can understand grace is to see your need. The only way to know God is to know grace. Grace is not grace if it is conditional. God is not loving if He demands something of you in order to love you. This is why you need to see your need. You can’t truly see the extravagance of God’s grace until you see the enormity of your sin. Your sin stands between you and God. God sees this. You don’t. He sees your sin clearly. You are blinded to it. When God says, You shall have no other gods, it’s because no other gods can save you. No other deities or ways to eternal life are able to save you from your sin. Apart from grace you are left in your sin and you are condemned to eternal torment for your sin. God does not operate the way the deities of other religions do who demand of you. God operates purely by grace. He gives to you full and free salvation even though you don’t deserve it. He gives you eternal glory and eternal life because He loves you, not because you have somehow deserved it. We don’t understand grace because we think of God according to our way of understanding. We want Him to operate according to the way we operate. God tells us straight out that this is the case. He says in the Old Testament reading: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” Since we can’t understand Him, since we can’t attain to Him, what should we do about it? That’s just the point, nothing! We can’t do anything about it. It’s by grace. It’s by what He does. It’s by Him, who is higher than us, whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways, coming to us. How He does that is in His Son. Any attempt to understand God apart from His Son is a futile attempt. Any understanding of grace apart from Jesus Christ is no understanding of grace at all. This is what Jesus is helping us out here with in the Gospel reading today. Who is God like? He’s like a king who throws a huge wedding feast for His Son. His Son is His only-begotten, who was conceived and born of the Virgin, and who lived here on earth as we live here on earth. But His Son lived solely under the grace of God. He entrusted His life completely to His Heavenly Father’s will. He knew that though He is fully God nothing of what He did was by His power but by the grace of His Heavenly Father. That’s what grace is, it’s what God gives to you solely by His eternal love. And His eternal love is His love that is love through His Son, Jesus Christ. So God throws this huge party and because He loves people and wants them to share in His glory and His grace He sends out the message, Come to the party! There are no conditions or restrictions here, just a simple invitation. Come to the best party you will ever attend! It’s pure grace. And you know what happens when God operates according to grace? There is opposition. There is rejection. There is apathy. There is a simple refusal on the part of those given the invitation to make use of the gift offered. Grace is such a great thing, but it comes at the risk of rejection. But God is undaunted. He wants them to share in the feast. Go out again and tell them that everything is ready. Everything is prepared. Everything is better than anything you could experience and will ever be able to make for yourself. The response to this further extension of grace is ratcheted up: “they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them.” That may seem silly for a story. But this is no mere story Jesus is telling. This is Jesus proclaiming the Gospel. This is Jesus telling it the way it is. When God gives His grace, His pure Gospel that salvation is full and free on the part of God and it is for you, there is rejection. It’s not just, “No thanks, I don’t want Your salvation, God.” It’s responding to God in going your own way and even in treating shamefully and persecuting those messengers God sends with His Good News. The God of grace is the God who gives but who never forces. He never pulls people kicking and screaming into His eternal Wedding Feast of His Son. If people really don’t want to go to heaven, God will not force it upon them. And so it is that the One who created heaven for eternal joy and glory is also the one who created hell and sends there those who reject the gift of heaven. Jesus describes this with these words, “The king was angry, and He sent His troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.” Jesus goes on to say, “Then [the king] said to His servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests.” Even though there will always be people who reject the grace of God and who are condemned to hell for eternity, God continues to extend His grace. He sends His messengers to tell the Good News that the wedding feast is ready, and everyone is invited. To make this abundantly clear Jesus says, “both the bad and good.” He doesn’t scour the earth for those who are good, those who are worthy. He extends His grace to all. This is, after all, the Wedding Feast of His Son, the one who suffered and died for the sins of the whole world. The grace of the cross goes out to the whole world, to all people. And so “those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests.” They were gathered together, not forced. The wedding hall was filled with guests. This is a picture of the fullness of the glory of heaven, not a spatial description that there’s only so much room in heaven before there’s not enough room for others. There is always room for more. There is always more grace to abound. There is always more of the invitation to go out. This is knowing God. Knowing God is knowing grace. Knowing grace is knowing God. Jesus tells us that this King said to the servants that those originally invited were not worthy. When He sends out His servants to gather in those who are good and bad we are shown that they aren’t worthy either. So how is it that they are let in? Why does God even bring up worthiness if it is all by grace? Precisely because it is all by grace. It is true that those who are gathered in are not worthy, they receive eternal life solely by grace. It is also true that they are fully worthy, as is shown from the wedding garments given to them as they enter the Feast. When the King saw someone who didn’t have one he was thrown out and cast into the torment of the others who had rejected the invitation. When you get to heaven you will see that it was not by any worthiness of your own but yet indeed solely by worthiness. The worthiness is that of the Son, the only-begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ. It is His robe of righteousness that you are clothed with in Baptism and that is your worthiness. That is how your Heavenly Father sees you, as He sees His own Son whom He loves. That is how you are given grace to Feast at His Table in eternity. This grace is so abundant that it can’t wait until heaven and so He gives you the Feast now, in the Lord’s Supper, the Wedding Feast of Christ and His Bride, the Church. This is grace. The one who gave Himself up for His Bride, the spotless Lamb of God suffering on the cross, that you may be cleansed. Grace truly is God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense, which is an acronym for GRACE. Ultimately, it is simply who God is and how He acts toward you and how He loves you. Loving you and feasting with you in His Son forever. Amen. SDG -- Pastor Paul L. Willweber Prince of Peace Lutheran Church [LCMS] 6801 Easton Ct., San Diego, California 92120 619.583.1436 princeofpeacesd.net three-taverns.net It is the spirit and genius of Lutheranism to be liberal in everything except where the marks of the Church are concerned. [Henry Hamann, On Being a Christian] _______________________________________________ Sermons mailing list [email protected] http://cat41.org/mailman/listinfo/sermons
