Dear friends in Christ at Peace and Grue,
God gave the Israelites the Commandments to provide order, safety, and security providing boundaries and blessings. If we read further in the story we see that the Commandments didn’t make the Israelites or us more moral or pious. They have never changed anyone’s heart. At best, they revealed how immoral, impious and unfaithful we are.
St. Paul knew our salvation is not the result of obeying God’s law. Paul pointed out that Abraham had trusted God and that God reckoned his faith as righteousness, nothing else required. The Commandments were not part of the equation.
The Commandments are not a checklist for our exit interview from this life or for a promotion to a higher heavenly calling after it. The law shows we don’t have the understanding or strength to do God’s will. We don’t act rightly. We neglect our neighbor. We don’t tend God’s word. We don’t rightly believe that's a problem.
We have only to look to Christ’s own words to see how deep this despair runs. In the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5), Jesus presents life’s disasters and losses as the place God finds us. Then as if he knows how little stock we’ll place in that promise, he goes on to destroy the illusion that our success means anything, He pushes the demands of the law beyond anything we could possibly do. “You have heard that it was said ... .But I say to you….” Eventually Jesus' listeners sink into despair and ask who could possibly be saved. Jesus responds that no one can-except God. Like blind Bartimaeus, we can only cry out ever louder, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
When Luther died, they found a scrap of paper on which he had written, “We are beggars. This is true.” In two short sentences, Luther summed up the essence of our situation before God. We can only come with empty hands, hoping for mercy, yet knowing full well that a righteous God could never overlook our sin. For Luther, progress in Christian living doesn’t move forward or upward, it goes deeper, driving us to Christ and the promise of Christ, moving us from fear to love.
In his explanation of the Commandments, Luther held up God’s law to show clearly that the gospel is fulfilled not through the old covenant that human beings broke with our faithless actions, but by God who takes on the entire burden apart from anything we do. Only then, when we face our beggarliness, do we see our own unrighteousness and God’s mercy. Only then do we see our Creator as slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Only then do we see our neighbors no longer as competition or threat but as gift. Only then do we see our good works not as evidence in proving our case for salvation to God, but as an opportunity to serve others.
Luther never had a problem with Christians doing good works or striving to keep God’s Commandments. He had a problem with our attempting to use our impotent efforts to keep the law as something we can use to justify ourselves. Luther had had his fill of that in his attempt to live a blameless life. He left all that behind, and saw that out of our failures comes faith as we turn to Christ. In that turning we can see the Commandments not just as boundaries but as blessings.
I’ll have more to say about that next month,
Pastor Dan
Pastor Dan