The Festival of All Saints + Matthew 5:1-12 + November 5, 2017
Grace
and Peace be unto you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
1) In the appointed Gospel text for All Saints Day, our Lord
Jesus explains to us that true blessedness is not what the world thinks it is.
In fact, true blessedness is the opposite of the things the world glories and
rejoices in. The world fosters an attitude of spiritual pride people
so that they imagine they are righteous and holy because of their good deeds
and the occasional good disposition of the heart. The world teaches everyone
that God should accept them because of their works and their goodness. To be
spiritually proud, so that a person thinks he needs nothing from God, the world
calls blessed. Not so Christ. He says, “Blessed
on the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Presumption and relying upon one’s own
goodness and righteousness is not blessed but damnable. Christ tells us that
the saints are spiritually poor. This means that they are humble and contrite.
Being spiritually poor means understanding that we have nothing we can offer to
God that will please Him, but that we are instead entirely empty handed before
Him. The Lord delights in such spiritual poverty. He says in Isaiah
66:2, “For all those things My hand has
made, And all those things exist," Says the LORD. "But on this one will
I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, And who trembles at My
word.” David sings in Psalm
51:17, “The sacrifices of God are a
broken spirit, A broken and a contrite heart -- These, O God, You will not
despise.” The world teaches people, even Christians, that God
wants spiritually strong people who only offer Him endless praise and worship. Yet
God does not call them blessed who think they are above daily repentance and
forgiveness, confession and absolution. Jesus wants something far better. He calls
them blessed who come before Him as penitent sinners and beggars, with no merit
or worthiness to offer. He calls them blessed because it is the poor and contrite
heart that seeks what receives the forgiveness of sins and rejoices in the
conscience cleansed from the guilt of sin.
2) The world teaches that people ought to be happy and jovial all the time,
and that if you aren’t, something is wrong with you. The world teaches men to
rejoice in the things of this life and “eat, drink, and be merry”
(Luke 12:19). The highest good is to be happy and pursue pleasure. The one who
does this, the world calls blessed. Not so with Christ. The one He calls
blessed is the one who mourns the things of the world. This doesn’t mean that the
things of this life shouldn’t be received with thanksgiving and enjoyed. We’re
not set our hearts on them and expect that if we have good things in this life,
then we have a gracious God. Instead of constantly seeking joy and happiness,
Christ calls us to see the pleasures of the world for what they are: fleeting.
He says we are blessed if we mourn when we look out at the world and see its
wickedness, its arrogance, its contempt and blasphemy against God. Yet this
does not mean that we go around all sour faced and downcast. St. Paul tells
describes himself and his companions as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many
rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing
all things” (2 Corinthians
6:10). For we mourn the world as we see its sinfulness and its deterioration. But
we believe the comforting words of Christ when He says in John
16:33, “In the world you will have
tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” The
Christian can, and should, find joy in the earthly blessings God gives, and we
should enjoy the work of this life that He gives our hands to do, but we mourn
the fact that this world is passing away and take true comfort in the life of
the world to come.
3) The
world teaches men to assert their rights and be forceful with one another, to
lie, cheat, and steal their way to success and fortune. Bookstores are full of
books on how to get what you want out of life by being more assertive, having
better goals, and the like. The world sees confidence and self-possession as
true blessedness. But Christ says, “Blessed are the meek, For
they shall inherit the earth.” The meek are those
who refuse to lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead. The meek are those who wait
upon the Lord to give them what they need for this body and life. David says in
Psalm 37:9, “evildoers shall be cut off;
but those who wait on the LORD, they shall inherit the earth.” There is
nothing wrong with hard work and perseverance. Waiting upon the Lord does not
mean sitting on your laurels and expecting God to provide for your needs. God
put Adam in the Garden to work it and tend to it. The apostle
says in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “If anyone
will not work, neither shall he eat,” and then encourages the saints to “work in quietness and eat their own bread.”
Meekness is similar to being poor in spirit. It is to acknowledge that all we
have comes from God as free gift, even our work, so that we put our hand to the
plow trusting that God will bless the work of our hands and give us what we
need when we need it. Jesus then says, “Blessed are those
who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled.” As the saints are meek toward the ways of this world, so they desire to
behave righteously. The man who strives after his lusts and covets more and
more in this life, that one is never satisfied. But the one who hungers and
thirsts for righteousness and desires to do what is right, he is satisfied with
what God gives Him and truly enjoys it as a blessing from His heavenly Father.
4) The world encourages man to be vengeful and harbor hatred in his heart
toward his neighbor. The world calls blessed the one who has something to hang
over his neighbor’s head so as to manipulate him. Christ says, “Blessed are the merciful, For they shall obtain mercy.” The saints
are merciful to their neighbor when they sin against them because they have
obtained already a great mercy from God. Christ teaches us elsewhere that we
are to forgive our brother “up to
seventy times seven” times (Matthew 18:22). This is because the saints,
being poor in spirit, daily confess their sins to their Father in heaven and
flee to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as a refuge from their sins. The saints
acknowledge that they daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment,
but they know that God is merciful and just to forgive their sins and cleanse
them from all unrighteousness. Because God is merciful to them, they are to be merciful
to their brother who sins against them. In this way they are peacemakers and
reconcile their neighbors to them, for mercy is often the best path to peace,
which is why Christ says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall
be called sons of God.”
5) The world imagines that the man who pursues his desires and fulfills them
is blessed and to be held in honor. Look at how the world treats Hugh Hefner
now that he has died! Yet lust is never satisfied by fulfilling it. Whether it
be lust, or covetousness, or greed, or anger, sin is never satisfied by fulling
it, only by extinguishing it in the heart. Those who pursue their lusts, no
matter what the object of that lust is, resists the Holy Spirit, or, if it’s a Christian,
drives the Holy Spirit out of the heart, for the Holy Spirit cannot dwell where
the heart is set on willfully sinning. Christ says, “Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God.” Christ wants the saints to strive for
purity of heart, which is more than simply the suppression of the flesh’s carnal
desires. To have a pure heart is to have a heart that has first been made pure
by God through faith. David cries out in Psalm 51, “Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in
me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” St. Peter
says in Acts 15 that God purifies our hearts by faith in the promise of the
Gospel. When we confess our sins and God forgives us freely for the sake of
Christ’s merits, then we have peace with God and a pure heart. The clean heart
He creates is us is one that sets itself on pure things. Luther wrote that a
pure heart is “one that is watching and
pondering what God says and replacing its own idea with the Word of God.”[1] Blessed is the one who daily
purifies himself from his sins by fleeing to Christ for forgiveness and a clean
heart which hears the Word of the Lord and lives according to it.
6) The life of the saint is far different from the life of the unbeliever, for
the life of the saint is not a life conformed to the pattern of this world, but
transformed through faith in Christ. The world persecutes this faith and the
one who possess faith in Christ as the only Savior from sin and God’s wrath.
The world attacks the saints in all sorts of different ways and then counts the
saints abandoned by God because they suffer. Yet Jesus says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for
righteousness' sake, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The saints are
persecuted because they confess the true God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The
saints are persecuted because they rely upon the righteousness of Christ and
not their own external righteousness. The saints are persecuted because they walk
by faith and not by sight, trusting the promise of the gospel and looking for “the city which has foundations,
whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews
11:10). The world bases it blessedness on what it sees, what it feels, and what
it experiences. This is the natural tendency of all of us because of our sinful
flesh. The sinful nature wants to determine if we are blessed or not by our
wealth, our possessions, our reputation, and our success. But none of these are
the things that Christ Jesus calls blessed. True blessedness is only given by
Christ and received by faith in His promise.
7) When
the evil of this world weighs heavy upon you, remember the word of Christ by
which He calls you blessed. When you find yourself in lack and great need,
remember that you are child of the heavenly Father, a son of God through faith
in Christ Jesus. When your sins oppress you and guilt burdens your soul, recall
that you have washed your robe and made it white in the blood of the lamb, for “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses
us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). You are a saint of God, one dearly beloved,
one for whom Christ has died. No matter what the world says, you are truly
blessed.
May
the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and
minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.