“Bold Access to the Father”
John 16:23-33
5/13/07
As I read this text I was reminded of how as a child
I sometimes used to play one parent against another in order to get
what I wanted. I’m sure you used to do the same thing,
too. When you didn’t get what you wanted from dad,
you’d go to mom, or vice-versa when you didn’t get what you
wanted from mom. As kids we often felt like we needed at least
one of our parents to be the mediator between ourselves and the other
parent. Today the world celebrates one of those mediators -
mom. Most often it was she that we’d run to for sympathy,
compassion, and support. It also seemed like she was often more
willing than dad to comfort, understand, and listen to us when things
were going bad for us. Dad, on the other hand, often seemed more
distant, firm, and legalistic - a no-nonsense kind of guy. It was
harder to coax dad into something than it was mom. Dads are also
not usually as expressive in their love, compassion, or sympathy
towards us as moms are. For this reason, most of us have closer
relationships with our moms than with our dads. More people will
send out mothers’ day cards than fathers’ day cards.
More people will say, “Hi, mom!” on camera than they will
say “Hi, dad!” And so, dad is feared but mom is
revered.
Unfortunately, this has transferred over to our
ideas about how we relate to God. God is Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. All very masculine names, all referred to with masculine
pronouns. And knowing what earthly fathers are like, we tend to
transfer those ideas onto God our heavenly Father and often view Him as
hard, distant, unapproachable, and unsympathetic to our needs.
Yet it was He who sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to open the way for us to
come to Him and lay our requests before Him without fear.
Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross has reconciled us to the
Father. For Christ’s sake God forgives us our sins and
grants us His peace. He is not like the fathers of this world who
are weakened by their sinful flesh. Our heavenly Father is a
gracious, merciful, and loving Father whose ears are open to our cries
day and night for Christ’s sake. But because Jesus Himself
is a Man, many find it difficult to come to God even through Him and
instead try to use the mother of all mothers - Mary - to get to Jesus
to get to God. Mary is a woman and the mother of Jesus.
She’s one of us. If anyone is able to get her Son to do
something for us it’s she. And so, many (especially those
in the R.C. Church) try to bring their requests to Mary in the hopes
that through her intercession God will give them what they ask for.
Well, we Lutheran Christians don’t pray to
Mary. But that doesn’t mean we’re not guilty of
trying to get from God what we want from Him through other means.
Perhaps you too have trouble believing that God loves you and listens
to you when you pray to Him. Maybe you too feel like He’s
distant, unconcerned about your problems, unable or unwilling to help,
deaf to your cries for help. Perhaps He’d pay more
attention to you if you did something for Him, if you lived a good
life, if you helped others, if you prayed more fervently or attended
church more often. If God doesn’t listen to you, maybe
He’ll listen to the prayers of someone else on your behalf,
someone who’s more holy and devoted to prayer and God’s
Word than you are. Maybe the more you deprecate yourself before
Him the more He’ll be inclined to grant your requests, that is,
the more you confess your sins and tell Him how unworthy you are, the
more He’s bound to soften up and give you what you ask for.
And so, we or someone else other than Jesus ends up
becoming our mediator before God. We all share the inherant
sinful tendency to try to approach God by way of our own self-chosen
means - either through Mary, through any number of other saints and
Christians, or through our own works and efforts - rather than through
Jesus Christ. But as the Scripture states, “There is one
God and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all...” This
mediator and this mediator alone through His sinless life, sacrificial
death, bodily resurrection and ascension into heaven at the right hand
of the Father is our only access to God. He Himself is God, but
He is also one of us. He’s man, too. He, the God-Man
alone, is the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to the
Father but by Him - not by Mary, not by the Apostles, not by the
saints, not by ourselves. Jesus alone gives you audience with God
the Father, because with His blood applied to you at your Baptism He
has cleansed you from all sin and made you holy, so that you can now
stand before God without fear in all boldness and confidence and bring
your requests directly to Him. And this is what the writer of the
book of Hebrews tells us. After he explains that Jesus is our
high priest, whose blood shed on the cross has atoned for our sins, he
says, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of
grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of
need.” Later on he writes, “Since we have confidence
to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living
way that He opened for us through the curtain, that is, through His
flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us
draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts
sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure
water.” And the Apostle Paul writes, “Do not be
anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication
with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”
Jesus has made it possible for you to have bold and
confident access to God the Father Almighty, so that you might stand
before Him free of all your sins and bring your requests before Him
with the full assurance that He hears you and will answer you.
Jesus promises this to His disciples in today’s Gospel text where
He says, “Whatever you ask of the Father in my Name, He will give
it to you,” and “ In that day you will ask in my Name, and
I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf, for the
Father Himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed
that I came from God.” Based on this Luther also commented
on the Lord’s Prayer where we are taught to pray, “Our
Father...” Of this he says, “With these words God
tenderly invites us to believe that He is our true Father and that we
are His true children, so that with all boldness and confidence we may
ask Him as dear children ask their dear father.” Unlike our
earthly fathers who often don’t have time for us, are
unapproachable, distant, absent, or even forgetful, your heavenly
Father’s thoughts towards you out-number the grains of sand on
the beach. His love towards you is as high as the heavens are
above the earth. His eyes are always on you and His ears are
always open to your cries.
Now, Jesus says all this is possible only through
Him. For this reason He says if we ask of the Father in His Name
we have the requests for which we ask. What does this mean?
First, you can only approach God the Father when you are in
Jesus’ Name. That means that He has put His Name upon you
at your Baptism, that He has done His Name for you in saving you from
your sins, and that as a result you believe in His Name. Second,
to ask in Jesus’ Name is to ask according to His Word and His
will. The Apostle John writes, “This is the confidence that
we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will He
hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we
know that we have the requests that we have asked of Him.”
So, the more you know the Lord’s Word and will, the more you will
know what to ask for, the more confident you can be that you will get
what you ask for.
By His Name Jesus mediates between you and the
Father as He sits now at the Father’s right hand. There
with His blood He continually speaks you righteous before the Father
and continues to pray for you before the Father even when you forget to
pray. It is by way of His intercession at the Father’s
right hand that Jesus assures you, His disciples, that God is not only
His Father but also your Father. You are sons of God, brothers of
Jesus. God sees you now in Jesus and treats you as His beloved
children, as if you were Christ Himself. This doesn’t mean
that things will always go well for you or that you will never
suffer. On the contrary, the writer of the book of Hebrews writes
that those whom the Lord loves He disciplines. And Jesus here
says, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take
heart; I have overcome the world.” When you suffer, you
shouldn’t conclude, then, that God is angry with you or that He
doesn’t want to hear your prayers or that He is punishing you for
some particular sin. After all, Job suffered for no particular
reason, but that his faith in God and His promises might be
strengthened. When you suffer, it may seem like heaven is closed
to you, that God has turned away His face from you and is deaf to your
cries for help, but His Word assures you that this is not the
case. Jesus has taken God’s wrath away from you onto
Himself on the cross. For His sake you are at peace with God,
even when you have no peace in the world. You live now and always
under God’s favor by faith in His Son. Far from being a
sign that God hates you, suffering is more of a sign that God loves you
and uses suffering to bring you closer to Him. After all, how
often would you bring your requests to God in prayer if you lived a
care-free life and always had everything you needed or wanted?
On this mother’s day, then, while we are
reminded that moms might be good earthly mediators between us and our
earthly fathers, the only mediator between us and God the Father is
Jesus Christ, whose blood shed on the cross and sprinkled upon us at
Baptism has washed away our sins and cleansed us from all
unrighteousness, so that we might stand before God holy and blameless,
able with all boldness and confidence to lay our requests before Him,
claiming what He promises to us in His Word, knowing that such prayers
please Him, that He hears them, and that He will answer them.
Such is the Father we now have for Christ’s sake, our crucified,
risen, and ascended Savior. Amen.