17th Sunday after Trinity + Luke 14:1-11 + September 23, 2018

In the Name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

While most people wouldn’t rebuke the false beliefs and selfishness of their dinner hosts, Jesus isn’t most people. He is God in human flesh. He’s come to bring sinners to repentance, even these Pharisees. The Pharisees misunderstand the purpose of God’s Law. They assume God’s Law is the way they show God how righteous they are. If they do the things God requires, God sees how good they are and rewards them. Because they view God’s Law like this, they are proud, selfish, and contemptuous of others. There just happens to be a man afflicted with dropsy at this meal. Perhaps it was a set up. The Pharisees were fond of putting Jesus in tight spots to see if He would break God’s Law and teach others to do so. They present Him with a third commandment conundrum. The third commandment is: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates” (Ex. 20:8-10). No work was to be done on the Sabbath. The Pharisees assume healing a man is such work.

Jesus sees the man with dropsy and asks the Pharisees the question they intend to ask Him. “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” With that question, the Pharisees have fallen into the pit they dug for Christ. They remain silent. So Jesus answers His own question by healing the afflicted man and letting him go. Of course it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath day! It’s always lawful to be about God’s business, even on the Sabbath day! On another occasion He asks another group of Pharisees, “Have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless?” (Matt. 12:5). So there was work which could be done, and even should be done, on the Sabbath. The Pharisees consider this commandment externally so that if a man abstains from work and is idle, he has sanctified the holy day. But idleness is not how things are sanctified. St. Paul says that “every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:4-5). Physical rest is not the point of the commandment. The point is God’s Word.

God commanded Old Testament Israelites to set aside their work, their labor, and their business each Sabbath in order to hear God’s Word, learn it, and believe it. It is faith in God’s Word, believing that it’s true, that sanctifies the day because God sanctifies men through faith in His Word. Rest alone doesn’t make anyone holy. Hearing God’s holy word with believing ears and hearts, that’s what makes people holy. The Pharisees thought that simply by resting on the Sabbath they were pleasing God. But their Sabbaths weren’t pleasing to God because they ignored what God Word taught them about faith in the coming Messiah and about love for their neighbor. If they truly loved God they wouldn’t have had to ask if it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath. If they truly believed God’s Word they would have brought the man to Jesus and asked Him to heal their friend. Jesus drives the point further into their hard hearts by pointing out that if any of them have an ox or donkey that has fallen into a pit on the Sabbath, they work diligently to get their animal out. They love their animals and despise their fellowman. And “he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (1 John 4:20).

The Pharisees can’t reply to any of this because it’s true. The only correct response is repentance but they refuse God’s will for themselves as they had since the days of John the Baptist (Luke 7:30). Because they do not hear God’s Word about the Messiah and believe it, since they reject repentance and faith in the Christ for their righteousness, they are proud, selfish, and contemptuous men. That much is obvious from the way they treat the man with dropsy. It becomes all the more evident by the way they jockey for positions of honor at the supper table. They think too highly of themselves and want others to know their importance by the seating arrangement. They hadn’t learned their lesson from the man with dropsy, so Jesus tells them a parable to the effect that they should not exalt themselves, either in man’s eyes or in God’s, because doing so will only bring humiliation. If you deem yourself worthy of the seats on honor, you will be dishonored at a wedding feast. If you honor yourself before God, thinking yourself holy because of your works and merits based on fulfilling the Law, God will humble you so that you stop looking to your own merits and worthiness, so that instead you seek righteousness and merits from Christ.

This episode at the house of the Pharisee was written for our learning so that we do not misuse the holy day as they did and so that we do not exalt ourselves over others. Christians aren’t obligated to rest on the Sabbath, the seventh day of each week, because the Sabbath was a shadow of the reality to come when Christ came. St. Paul says this much in Galatians 4 and Colossians 2. This means that the Sabbath rest served as an illustration of the rest Christ would bring to all who repent of their sins and look to His work for them. The Apostles chose Sunday as the chief day which Christians come together to be sanctified by hearing God’s Word preached and meditating on it. They chose Sunday to demonstrate the Christian’s freedom from Mosaic Law and as a memorial to Christ’s resurrection on the first day of the week. We must be careful so that we don’t profane the holy day as the Jews did to the Sabbath so that we think the only purpose of Sunday is to have a day off from our work. The commandment remains that we “Sanctify the holy day,” and we sanctify this day by being here, hearing God’s Word preached, receiving Christ’s sacrament after we’ve been properly instructed, remembering our baptisms by confessing our sins and believing the Gospel. Everything is sanctified by the Word of God and prayer, so we sanctify the holy day by hearing God’s Word, meditating upon it, applying it to ourselves in faith, and prayer.

Christ’s words are also written so that we humble ourselves before God and our fellowman, not thinking too highly of ourselves as the Pharisees did. They honored themselves before God by believing they did not need a Savior and that they were good enough to enter the kingdom without Christ. They honored themselves by treating others haughtily and arrogantly. This is not the life to which you have been called. St. Paul urges you to “walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:1-3). We are called to bear one another’s burdens and burdensome behavior because Christ our Lord is lowly, gentle, and longsuffering with us in spite of the fact that we daily sin much and deserve nothing but punishment. Knowing and believing the Gospel, that God has shown us compassion and mercy in Christ Jesus, we ought to be compassionate and merciful with those around us, doing all that is within our power to maintain unity and peace. The Pharisees rejected the hearing God’s Word and love for their neighbor. May this never be so among us, but may we, by God’s grace, sanctify the holy day by gladly hearing God’s Word and love one another as He has loved us.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.