Christ's Resurrection and You: Who Is Your Mother?

Texts:  Galatians 4:21-31; John 21:15-19

THERE'S A STORY ABOUT A little boy, maybe four or five years old, who goes Christmas shopping with his mother.  The store is crammed with customers, and he loses her in the crowd. The child looks around desperately.  He sees a woman with her back to him, wearing a blue coat.  Oh! His mother was wearing a blue coat!  That must be his mom!

    The little boy runs up to her and grabs her by the belt of her coat.  Whew, he's safe!  But she's busy and distracted and he can't get her attention, so he just holds onto that belt for dear life.  Eventually, the woman pays for her selections and makes her way out of the crowded store, the little boy in tow.  Out on the sidewalk, the woman notices the pull on her coat belt.  "Mommy!" she hears a little voice say.  She turns around-- and the child bursts into tears and wails, "You're not my mommy!!"

    Oh, dear.  We have to hope that if and when this happens in real life, the nice lady would take the boy back into the store and help him find his real mother.  But nice and helpful as she might be, as nice and helpful as babysitters and teachers and aunts might be, they are not your mother, they can never take the place of your mother.  A normal child knows who his mother is, and he looks to her for guidance, for teaching, for counsel, for nurture, for protection, and yes, for discipline.

    It's important for us children of God the Father to know who our mother is, too, for nobody and nothing can take her place, and only she can guide, teach, counsel, nurture, protect, and discipline us up to everlasting life.

    Trouble is, too often we children of God fail to recognize our mother.  We latch onto mother substitutes and follow them to spiritual disaster, even to perdition, if that could be possible for the elect.  As a Christian, it's important that you know: Who is your mother?

    This is the problem St. Paul confronts in the fourth chapter of his letter to the Galatians.  The members of the Galatian Church had forgotten who their true mother was.  You could say that the whole epistle is Paul is trying to wake this church up to the danger that's gotten them into.  At the very start he says

    Paul, an apostle-- sent not by men or from man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead--

Paul writes in the authority of the resurrected Son of God.  He speaks in the power of the gospel of Christ dead and risen again.  This is the gospel that gave us birth into new life with God in Christ.  In it we gain the freedom of God's household (as we read in the first part of Chapter 4).  This good news is "not from men nor by men."  For what human being could ever conceive of an actual living, breathing, walking-around personage dying, and then, all by Himself, under His own power, rising from the dead?    The resurrection put the final seal on the new covenant God had always intended to make with mankind.  It made good on all the promises the Lord made so long ago to Father Abraham, that through his seed all nations would be blessed.  The Holy Spirit Himself had enabled the Galatians to believe and accept that Christ's blood had been shed for them, and that now they were justified through faith in Him alone.

    All this was on their spiritual birth certificate, you might say, and yet now they were doubting their identity in Christ.  Maybe they needed something else to guide, counsel, and nurture them.  Maybe they should follow what those men who came from Jerusalem said, and be circumcised and follow the Law of Moses like good Jews!

    And Paul can only shake his head in frustration and say, "You foolish Galatians!  Who is your mother, anyway?"

    Which brings us to our passage in Chapter 4.  Here Paul compares two mothers, Hagar and Sarah.  You know the story from Genesis.  God promised Abraham a son from his own loins.  For years nothing happened, and Abraham and his wife Sarah grew older and older, till the time of childbearing had passed her by.  So Sarah and Abraham decided to help things along a little.  After all, doesn't God help those who help themselves?  They utilized a device prevalent among their Hittite neighbors, for a wife who was barren to give one of her maidservants to her husband to be a surrogate mother.  The child would count as the wife's own offspring and everything would be acceptable and legitimate according to the rules of  the time.

    You know what happened next.  Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman, got pregnant and proceeded to make herself insufferable.  She pushed it so far that Sarah punished her and Hagar ran away into the desert.  But she returned and bore Ishmael, Abraham's natural son.  Then in God's good time, He miraculously enabled Sarah and Abraham to make a baby together.  As it says in the Letter to the Hebrews, "And from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore."  The birth of Isaac was literally life from the dead!  But Hagar and Ishmael didn't appreciate the wonder God had brought about.  Ishmael mocked and persecuted his little half-brother, and so it was the Lord's will that he and his mother be sent away. 

    As it happened, Ishmael fathered a great nation of his own, the Arab people, but in Galatians Paul wants us to see how these two mothers and their sons are metaphors for the choice we have to make.  Who is our mother?  Is it Hagar, whose son was born in the ordinary way?  Or is it Sarah, who bore her child from the deadness of her womb by the resurrection power of God?

    I'm still working away at the family tree for my mom that I mentioned last week, and for a time I had a certain 4th great-grandmother down as the daughter of her own sister-in-law.  That's what comes of having sons named after their fathers.  So how did I make that mistake?  I took the word of several different websites that said that Mary was Catherine's mother.  Never mind that the dates didn't make a bit of sense, that's what they all said.  And for awhile, I believed it.

    The voices of this world unite to tell you that Hagar is your mother.  Hagar is human effort making us acceptable to God.  Hagar stands for us making things happen in our own time and by our own effort, instead of being patient and waiting for God to keep His promises.  If you're nice enough, if you give enough to charity, if you follow the rules-- especially God's rules!-- He'll accept you as His child and take you to heaven when you die.

    To claim Hagar as your mother is to reject the power of Christ in His resurrection.  It's to reject Him as the fulfillment of all the promises made to Abraham.  The men who were travelling throughout the Roman world trying to convince Gentiles they had to be circumcised were known as "Judaizers."  Their goal was to make sure that good Christians also became good Jews.  They didn't realize or didn't care that the covenant that God made with Moses at Mount Sinai was only provisional.  That all the ceremonies and sacrifices looked forward to the slaying of the perfect Lamb of God on Calvary's cross.  And that now that He, Jesus, is risen, there is no more need for Gentiles to convert to Judaism to be pleasing to God. In fact, all Jews need to welcome Jesus their risen Messiah in order to be the chosen people God always intended them to be!

    Hagar represents the old covenant of Law, but Sarah represents God's new covenant of grace, shown to us in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  We, too, have been born by the power of the Spirit.  We, too, are children of promise.  We are sons and daughters of the free woman, Sarah, and we share in the inheritance of God our Father through our Lord Jesus Christ.

    That is, if Sarah is your mother.  That is to say, if you accept that you are a child of God solely by His own life-giving power.

    In the same way, we must also choose whether our mother is the Jerusalem here on earth, or the Jerusalem that is above.  Remember that in the first century, Jerusalem was still the site of the Temple.  It was where the animal sacrifices were made.  It was where the men of Israel had to go to observe the appointed Feasts, like Passover and the Day of Atonement.  It was the heart of Jewish religious observance, the place where forgiveness of sins was to be found-- until the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ.  As Jesus said to the woman of Samaria,

    "A time is coming when you will worship God neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . . A time is coming and now is when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth." 

    Now that Christ has died, risen, and ascended into heaven, the place of our worship is in heaven with Him who is Spirit and Truth.  It is our mother the heavenly Jerusalem, which is above, and is free.

    But does that mean God has left us motherless here on earth?  By no means!  For the Scripture makes it clear that the Jerusalem above represents the Church of God in all her perfection.  In Revelation 21 it says, "I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband."  In Ephesians 6 we read that husbands should love their wives "as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, . . . to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless."  The Jerusalem above is the perfection of God's covenant people, His Church, and if you are in Christ through faith, she is your mother.

    To many, that's strictly a Roman Catholic concept.  And really, we have to avoid the idea that "the Church" is just the pastors and the presbytery and the General Assembly and not all of us gathered here as the body of Christ Sunday after Sunday.  But even we Protestants need to recognise the Church as our mother, for it is to her that God has entrusted His Word and Sacraments, that through them we might be guided, taught, counselled, nurtured, protected, and disciplined.  John Calvin says in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, that "the Church is she into whose bosom God is pleased to collect his children, not only that by her aid and ministry they may be nourished so long as they are babes and children, but may also be guided by her maternal care until they grow up to manhood, and, finally, attain to the perfection of faith. What God has thus joined, let not man put asunder (Mark 10:9)": to those to whom he is a Father, the Church must also be a mother. This was true not merely under the Law, but even now after the advent of Christ; since Paul declares that we are the children of a new, even a heavenly Jerusalem (Gal. 4:26).

And so our Lord Himself commanded the Apostle Peter on the shore of the Sea of Galilee to demonstrate his love for Christ by feeding His lambs, taking care of His sheep, and feeding His sheep.  Whatever else the leadership of the Church does, they must make sure that saints old and new are constantly being fed with the pure milk and the solid meat of the word of God.  Following their example, we must all teach and encourage one another, loving and caring for one another for the sake of our Elder Brother, Jesus Christ.  That's the only way we can grow up to be like Him.  There are many who think they can be Christians on their own, without being connected to any visible church.  But the Scripture utterly denies that this is possible.  You are either incorporated into God's covenant assembly, or you are still out in the desert, clinging like Ishmael to the robe of Hagar your slave woman mother.  You are either miraculously born of the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, and incorporated into His body by baptism, or you are dead in your trespasses and sins.  You can seek your own spiritual food and starve, or be richly nurtured by the hand of the mother God has given you.

    Who is your mother?  Your mother is the new covenant people, sealed in Christ's blood.  Your mother is the assembly of the children of God, given new birth by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  Your mother is the Church, the heavenly Jerusalem, the spotless bride that God has foreordained you to become.  Nothing can take her place.  Today and every day let us thank our earthly mothers for all they have done for us. But even more, let us thank and praise our Father in heaven for caring for us and loving us through His Church, our mother who is free. 

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Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Redemption Drawing Near

Texts: Jeremiah 33:14-22; Luke 21:5-36

A FEW YEARS AGO I WAS at a pastors’ conference where we were doing an in-depth study of the Book of Psalms. During one of the question and answer periods, one pastor gave his opinion that the psalms where God’s people complain of hardship, trouble, grief, oppression and so on simply shouldn’t be used in white middle-class American churches. Middle-class American Christians don’t have troubles like that, he said. Such psalms are irrelevant to our lives and we shouldn’t say them.

I wondered if he really knew what went on in his parish. True, we don’t tend to undergo suffering to the extent our brothers and sisters in Somalia or India or Saudi Arabia do. But we know what it’s like to have trouble. Especially with the economy as bad as it is and the future of our country as uncertain as it is, we find ourselves subject to worry, care, and for some of us, real hardship. The Psalms are given to us for our comfort, as is our passage from the Gospel of St. Luke.

. . . Comfort? Where’s the comfort in Luke chapter 21? It begins all right in verse 5, with the disciples pointing out the marvellous beauty of the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem. Life was hard and uncertain when you were a poor Galilean peasant, and being a follower of Rabbi Jesus could make things even harder. The Temple, at least, was something solid and permanent. An ordinary Jew could rely on it and feel sure about things, even when life wasn’t so good. That’s because it was a sign of God’s covenant with His people Israel. The disciples and all the Jews could look at the temple and know that in spite of the Roman occupation and everything else they were going through, God was still with them.

So does our Lord Jesus confirm their confidence? No. He says, "As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down."

What a knife in the gut! Good on the original disciples--they didn’t contradict Jesus (for once) or say, "But Lord! That’s impossible!" Instead, they asked, "Teacher, when will these things happen?" By now they’d learned to trust Jesus to know what He was talking about.

Jesus doesn’t answer their "When?" question. It wasn’t His will to give them an exact year and day and hour. Instead, He revealed to them and to us the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem with it. And at the same time, Jesus let us know how we can recognise the end of the age and the time of His coming as Judge and King.

We’re looking forward to that, right? His coming will be the end of all our trouble and the beginning of our eternal bliss. But before that Day comes, things on this earth will not get better, they will get much, much worse. Wars. Natural disasters. Pandemics. Terror. Cataclysms in the heavens and on the earth. Jesus said so, and He can be trusted to know what He’s talking about.

A lot of Bible commentators and ordinary Christians, too, get confused over this prophecy. Some say the whole thing applies to the time in A.D. 70 when the Romans marched in and destroyed Jerusalem and dispersed the Jews to the four corners of the world. While others say it all has to do with events that will happen sometime in the future, and the destruction of Jerusalem long ago has nothing to do with it.

But Bible prophecy again and again is fulfilled in a layered way. God revealed His will in pictures and mirrors. One event in the short term would serve as a symbol for something to happen thereafter. For instance, God’s great salvation in freeing His people from Egypt is a picture of what God would do in freeing us His people from slavery to sin by Christ’s death on the cross.

And here in Luke 21, the terrible events Jesus prophesied for Jerusalem were a picture of what will take place someday in the future when God’s judgement descends on all humanity when the Son of Man returns as King. We know from the text itself that the two events have been put together in one prophecy, for the Holy Spirit has Luke write very clearly in verse 24 that "Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles are fulfilled." These events couldn’t all happen at once, in the past or in the future. When Jesus talked about the destruction of Jerusalem and about the end of the age, He wasn’t talking about the same time. Rather, He was talking about the same thing. And that thing is the process by which our sovereign God will judge unfaithfulness and evil in this world, install Jesus the Righteous Branch of David as King on the throne of the universe, and bring relief and redemption to His faithful people.

Advent’s a lot like that. It also has two parts. We look for the coming of Christ, the King. We prepare ourselves to receive Him in memory as the human Child born over two thousand years ago. But we also must make ourselves ready for His coming again in glory. We don’t know when that will happen; our Lord didn’t give us the year or day or hour. But it’s all part of God’s sovereign act of judging unrighteousness, making Jesus King, and bringing us redemption that He started long, long ago.

Let this passage be a warning to us, not to load God’s symbols with our own meanings. The Jews thought the Temple would stand forever as a sign of God’s favor to them. We humans see the Christ Child in the manger and think it’s all right to make God out to be weak and manageable and subject to our wants and desires. We sinners can cope with Jesus as a helpless baby. We can even take the grown-up Rabbi preaching woe to the Pharisees-- as long as we think "the Pharisees" are always Those Other People. But in our rebellion and idolatry we cannot take the Son of God hanging on a cross; much less are we ready to welcome the Son of Man come to judge us and rule over us forever.

None of us can accept Christ as He really is-- until God by His own unfettered will and sovereign initiative moves in our hearts by the power of His Holy Spirit and converts us into His own people. But when He does, we become a whole new people! People of redemption, people of righteousness, people of hope! In our Jeremiah passage, verse 16 says, "In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord our Righteousness." But if you go to Jeremiah 23, it speaks there as well of the Righteous Branch raised up from David, and says "This is the name by which He will be called: The Lord our Righteousness." The Jerusalem Jeremiah foretells is not the city destroyed in his day. It’s not the rebuilt city overthrown by General Titus in A.D. 70. It is God’s new Jerusalem, His new Israel, His Church, and we can bear the name "The Lord our Righteousness" because it’s the name of our Redeemer Jesus, the righteous Son of David. We now belong to Him and live in Him, and because we do, we will escape the eternal judgement that will come on the God-hating generation of this world.

In verse 28 Jesus says, "Stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." Interestingly, this word "redemption" doesn’t mean "ransom"-- for the payment that bought us out of slavery to sin was the blood He shed long ago on His cross. Rather, the word means "release" or "deliverance." When all the world is melting in terror and hiding from the wrath of almighty God, His people can stand on their feet like free men and women liberated by Jesus’ blood and expect to be freed from the persecutions and hardships of those last days. Be of good hope, Christian people! No matter how terrible things may get, God is in control and will bring you through. You may give your physical body as a witness to Christ and His gospel, but as to your soul, not a hair of your head will perish.

However, this is no time for complacency, Christian friends. As our Lord says in verse 34, both pleasure and hardship can weigh down our hearts so we lose faith in the goodness and saving power of God. At this season of the year, it’s doubly heart-breaking to hear someone say, "I’ve lost my job; at our house we won’t have any Christmas." Oh, no, no! You’ve lost your livelihood; does that mean you’ve lost Jesus the living Lord as well? You say you can’t give your children any Christmas this year? But my sad friend, God has already given Christmas to your children and to you as well! Tell them the story of the Son of God who became flesh, who died and rose for their salvation, and you’ve given your children more of a rich and blessed Christmas than most of the richest households will get around this fallen world!

Or there are hearts touched by tragedy, who say Christmas has been destroyed for them because of the grief that has torn apart their lives. If that is you, I beg you to see that this is the time for you to lift up your head, for your redemption is drawing near! Sorrow may have invaded your life, but the Son of God has invaded this world of sin and pain and death; His arm is stronger than the worse that can happen to any of us, and by His cross the victory is already yours.

The Devil wants us to be distracted and not be watching for the second coming of our Lord. He wants us to stop being faithful to Jesus in our everyday lives. For what is it for us to be on the watch? In every other place in Scripture where the return of Christ is described, keeping watch means to keep doing the work He has given you to do, cheerfully, in His name and to His glory. To watch means to endure the ordinary hardships of human life gracefully, drawing always on the power of your Lord Jesus Christ, so that when the greater trials come we’re used to depending on Him. And always, always, to watch means for us to seek and enjoy the means of grace-- reading His word, hearing it preached, praying in Jesus’ name, celebrating and sharing the sacraments He has given us, assembling and serving with His people, the church. In this way Christ Himself will prepare you to be a witness to Him, both in times of peace and in times of persecution and hardship.

After our sermon hymn, we will administer the sacrament of holy baptism to D---, daughter of S--- and L--- and granddaughter of C--- and J---. Do not be deceived: You may see only something being done to an adorable baby. But baptism is a sign of the great conflict between heaven and hell that Jesus describes in the Gospels. War is waged over the souls of little ones such as this, and by baptism we signify that we claim her for Jesus Christ. Greater than that, in baptism God claims her for His own, that she might not be in terror on the Day when Christ comes as Judge, but lovingly look up and hail Him as Her Redeemer and King.

This is God’s promise to us in all our baptisms. If King Jesus comes soon, we will undergo a baptism of fire we never could endure on our own. But our God is strong. He is in control. And just as He brought us through the waters of baptism to new life in His Son, He will also bring us through the deathly fire of that Day to eternal life and peace with Him.

Be of good hope. Your sin was judged and destroyed on the cross of your Lord Jesus Christ. In this Advent season, prepare yourselves to relive the coming of your King as the Babe of Bethlehem. And at the same time, keep watch and live prepared to welcome Jesus your King when He comes to receive you into His glory. In His name and by His power, you can stand and look up, for your redemption is drawing near.