I had the privilege of preaching this past Sunday in connection with the installation of a pastor. As it was the regular Sunday morning Divine Service, the lections and propers were those for the 10th. Sunday after Pentecost, in this case from Series C of the Three-Year Lectionary. While not necessarily the most difficult or challenging passages of Scripture, both the Old Testament and the Holy Gospel confronted us with particularly fierce and strong Words from our Lord.
From the Prophet Jeremiah (23:16-29), we heard the Lord’s indictment of those “prophets” who speak their own dreams and imaginings, who promise “peace” where there is no peace, who are not sent by the Lord and do not preach His Word. Indeed, the Lord God sends forth the whirling tempest of His wrath against all wicked unbelief and unrighteous disobedience, and He warns against the false reassurances of the false prophets, who should have announced His Word and turned the people back from their evil ways and deeds. For the Word of the Lord is like fire, He declares, and like a hammer which shatters rocks. And thus does He call, ordain, and send His servants to preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins, to purify the people by the fire of His Word and Spirit, as gold is purified by fire, and to change hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.
Similarly, in the Holy Gospel (St. Luke 12:49-56), we heard the Lord Jesus Himself declare in no uncertain terms that He has not come to bring peace on earth, but fire, a sword, and division, even within households and families. These are hard Words to hear and receive from our Lord, yet they are a necessary part of His preaching. Not that He is out to destroy us, but that He would call us to repentance, to die to ourselves, to our sins, and to the world around us, in order to live unto God in and with Him. He wounds in order to heal, He kills and makes alive (Deuteronomy 32:39, 1 Samuel 2:6, Job 5:18). And of course, the fire that He comes to cast upon the earth is kindled in His own Body of flesh and blood, bearing our sins from His Baptism to His Cross.
The Lord does not preach His Law as a means by which we are to justify or save ourselves, nor as though we could ever atone for our sins by any payment or improvement in our behavior. We are rather called to despair of ourselves and our own righteousness, in order to find and receive the forgiveness of all our sins, righteousness, life, and salvation in Christ Jesus alone.
Even so, the hard Word of the Law has its necessary place and its necessary work to do in us. It curbs the flesh of our old Adam and guides the spirit of our New Man in Christ Jesus. And in this body and life it is daily exposing our sin, in order to expose our idolatry and crush all our idols.
Ironically and paradoxically, the fire and hammer of God’s Word also guards and protects the beauty and sweetness of His life-giving Gospel, over against the constant temptation and danger of “Gospel reductionism.” That temptation reared its head and caused much spiritual damage and mischief in a variety of ways back in the 1960s, but I see and hear examples of the same danger in our own present day, as well. The irony is that, in reducing everything to the “Gospel,” the Gospel itself is reduced to a shallow and superficial cliché and platitude, which is soon replaced by a milquetoast law of “social justice,” “niceness,” “political correctness,” and “wokeness.” By contrast, where the Law is preached in all its fierceness, and it is taken with full seriousness that “God threatens to punish all those who break [His] Commandments,” there the real Gospel also shines forth with its full weight and glory, as the real forgiveness of real sins by a real Savior.
Like the Prophets and Apostles of the past, the called and ordained servants of Christ are sent to preach His Word in all its truth and purity – the Law in all its severity, and the Gospel in all its power and authority to rescue us from the righteous wrath and judgment of God. Let us fear and love God, so that both preachers and hearers would daily repent of their sins, trust Christ Jesus in His precious Means of Grace, and live and love in keeping with His Holy Word by faith in Him.