“Rejected by His Own People”
Luke 13:31-35
3/4/07
Well, the world and the devil are at it again,
trying to disprove Christianity by attacking one of its central
teachings - the bodily resurrection of Christ. Perhaps
you’ve heard on the news recently that they have supposedly
discovered the bones of Jesus, whose remains were supposedly buried
with His wife, Mary Magdalene, and their children. For a full
presentation of this tale you can watch the Discovery Channel tonight
at 9:00 p.m.
It never ceases to amaze me how the world can get
away with these attacks on Christianity, while if they were to try
something like this on Islam heads would literally role! It is
also not coincidental that they just happen to introduce this finding
right before Easter, when the Church celebrates the bodily resurrection
of Jesus. But these kinds of attacks are not new. People
have been trying to disprove the resurrection of Christ for
centuries. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that it started on the
very day of His resurrection, when the leaders of His own people tried
to cover it up by telling the soldiers who were guarding Jesus’
tomb to say that His disciples had come and stolen the body. I
don’t know which would have been worse for those guys - to say
that they had fallen asleep on duty or that they had been overpowered
by a group of fishermen. Either way, their lives were probably
forfeit for their dereliction of duty.
It was the last thing that anyone but His disciples
wanted - to have Jesus rising again from the dead. Both the Roman
government and the Jews wanted to make sure that this did not
happen. The Romans didn’t want an insurrection on their
hands, and the Jewish leaders didn’t want to lose their religion
and their positions of authority among the people. So when the
soldiers at Calvary made sure Jesus was dead by stabbing Him in the
side with a spear, Pontius Pilate set a guard in front of the tomb
where they laid Him and sealed that tomb with his seal.
You have to remember that Jesus was a very public
figure. His death was very public, as was the place where He was
buried. There would have been absolutely no question as to where
His body had been laid. To say that His body after over 2,000
years has now been discovered is to say that the Romans and the Jews at
that time were complete idiots. They were such morons that they
couldn’t even keep track of Jesus’ body once they took it
down from the cross, and they ended up sealing the wrong tomb.
Not only are we to believe that they were mistaken about where Jesus
was buried, but so were the women, including Mary Magdalene, along with
His disciples. This just doesn’t make sense; it
doesn’t stand to reason. The Romans, the Jews, and the
disciples all knew where Jesus was buried.
That being the case, you then have to explain how it
was that nobody produced the body to discount the story that the
disciples were spreading about Jesus, that He had been raised from the
dead. It certainly would have been easy enough to do, since they
all knew where He’d been laid. But no one was able to
produce the body, because Jesus had indeed risen from the dead, a fact
to which the disciples and over 500 people at one time were
eye-witnesses. This testimony we have written for us in the N.T.
documents, and that witness has never been disproved. But the
line is, “You can’t trust those! They’re just
words of faith, not fact.” And so, these present day morons
discount the documents without ever investigating the proofs for their
truthfulness and historical accuracy. They dismiss the miraculous
out of hand, because “things like that just don’t
happen.” And so, Jesus can’t have risen from the
dead. There must be some other explanation. At best these
archaeologists are ignorant and deceived, at worst they are dishonest,
irresponsible, and deceptive themselves.
The fact is, there is an overabundance of textual,
historical, and archaeological evidence to support the truth claims of
the Bible. There are all kinds of books you can buy through
places like Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com that will lay out this
evidence for you. Check out Josh McDowell’s Evidence that
Demands a Verdict or Craig Parton’s The Defense Never Rests or
John W. Montgomery’s History, Law, and Christianity. The
real issue is not whether the facts reported in the N.T. documents can
be verified or not. They can be. It has been proven far
beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus Christ did indeed die on the
cross, was buried, and rose again bodily from the dead. If these
archaeologists would just investigate that body of evidence they would
have to conclude that what they have found is not the body of Jesus
Christ, no matter what names have been scribbled on the side of the
sarcophagus. The truth is, the problem lies not with the
evidence, but with the will. People will not believe in Jesus
Christ, regardless of the facts, because of the stubbornness of their
hearts.
This is the very thing that Jesus encountered with
His own people, and over which He mourned as He looked out over
Jerusalem saying, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills
the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would
I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under
her wings, and you would not!” God loved His people, whom
He had redeemed from slavery in Egypt. He took care of them,
nourished them, protected them from their enemies. But like
wayward children they constantly provoked Him to anger by going after
idols. They spurned God’s love, and when God sent prophets
to them to try to bring them to repentance, they killed them.
Still God loved them. He didn’t want to see them
perish. And so He sent them His Son, the Seed promised to
Abraham, the Son of David, the Servant of the Lord, the One to whom all
the Law and the Prophets pointed. And yet, they rejected Him just
as they had rejected His messengers.
When we read these words of Jesus we can hear the
sadness and sorrow that God has in His heart over those who reject His
love. And what’s more unbelievable is that it was
God’s own people who were guilty of rejecting that love, people
who should have embraced His Son when He came to them, knowing the
mercies that God had shown them in the past and the promises He had
made to Abraham and their fathers. Which makes us ask the
question, “Are we any better off than they?” We are
God’s people today, who have been redeemed with the blood of
Christ shed on the cross. God is our Father, who loves us more
than we could ever comprehend. He has given us new life through
holy Baptism and nourishes and strengthens our faith through His Word
and Sacraments. And yet, we as well often spurn His love.
Like the prodigal son, you too wish at times that He were out of your
life, wanting to strike out on your own and live for yourself, by
yourself, without any meddling on His part into your life.
You’re more than willing to accept His gifts; in fact, you think
He owes them to you. But to live under the shelter of His wings
where His will is being done instead of yours seems stifling and
confining. So, you squander His gifts, and end up finding
yourself stuck in the muck and mire of your sins among the pigs, and
you get angry when the Lord tries to send you help, revealing your sin
to you, so that you might repent of it. But then you
finally come to your senses and decide to return to your heavenly
Father, only you’re determined not to go back to Him
empty-handed. You’re going to try to bargain with Him,
offer Him some bribe, gift, vow, or service. You’re going
to try to wheel and deal with your Father, thinking that’s what
will get you back into His good graces. But like the prodigal
son’s father, your heavenly Father runs to you, arms stretched
out wide in love, mercy, and forgiveness, ready to receive you back
under His wings apart from and regardless of any bargaining or deal
making on your part. In fact, He doesn’t want to hear any
of that. All He wants to hear from you is your confession that
you are a sinner, unworthy of being called His child, that you have
insisted on your own will, not His, and that you have been unwilling to
be embraced by His love. But above all God wants to hear that you
trust in His mercy and forgiveness for Christ’s sake, that He
does not cast you His child away, but that He wills to receive you back
as a son, not as a slave. It’s when you return to God in
such repentance and faith, that your loving Father again has mercy upon
you, clothes you with robes of righteousness, and invites you to the
feast He’s set before us.
But sometimes you act like the prodigal son’s
older brother and you begrudge the Father’s mercy upon your
brothers and sisters. Like that older brother in the story, you
think God owes you for your good behavior and service. You think
it’s unjust that God is so free and reckless with His mercy
towards people who take such advantage of it. Then you’ll
withhold yourself from the congregation and the feast God is throwing
for us here, because you view your brothers and sisters as
hypocrites. In the story of the prodigal son, the Father comes to
this older son too, entreating him to come into the feast. But in
the end we are left wondering whether that son will come in or
not. Is he willing to be taken in by the Father’s love,
too? Are you? As it is, this brother stands outside,
keeping himself apart and aloof from the rest of the family. You
may be doing this right now, even though you’re sitting there
physically seated in the pew. Like the inhabitants of Jerusalem
over whom Jesus wept, this brother is unwilling to be brought under the
loving wings of Christ, but he insists on remaining alone to sulk in
his anger and disapproval.
Over such unrepentant sinners, over those who would
keep themselves from God’s love, Jesus weeps, because He knows
their end. Jerusalem and the temple would be destroyed in 70
A.D., a foretaste of the destruction of the world to come on the Last
Day. All those who are unwilling to be embraced by God’s
love in Jesus will fall under His judgment and wrath on the Last
Day. Lent is a time to confess that you, a sinner, deserve this
judgment and wrath, because like the prodigal sons, you too have
spurned God’s love and have insisted on your own way. But
out of His love for you God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to take that
destruction that you deserve upon Himself on the cross, so that for His
sake you might not perish, but live under the shelter of His wings,
where He forgives your sins, changes your hardened, unwilling heart of
stone into a believing, willing heart of flesh, and feeds you on His
body and blood.
And so the call goes out to all sinners, you and me
included, to come to Jesus to be embraced by His love, find refuge
under His wings, and join the party. Jesus says that those who
reject Him will not see Him until they say, “Blessed is He who
comes in the Name of the Lord.” This will be said by all on
the Last Day, when everyone bows the knee and confesses that Jesus
Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. But this is
confessed now by all those who believe that they have a merciful Father
who declares them righteous and heals them of all harms through His
Son, Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen one. We sinners today,
here and now, may and do say, “Blessed is He who comes in the
Name of the Lord,” because He comes to us through His Word, in
the forgiveness of our sins, and in His Holy Supper, where He is
feeding us on His true body and blood. Those who are looking for
Jesus’ body are looking in the wrong place. They
won’t find Him lying dead in some tomb. He’s not
there, as the angels said to the women. He’s risen and is
where He has promised to be - here at His Table. Here is where
His body and blood are. Here is where He is, arms open wide to
receive you His people under His wings. “Blessed is He who
comes in the Name of the Lord.” Amen.