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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of Holy Spirit. Amen.

The most common way that people understand and interpret the parable of the Good Samaritan is that it’s pretty much just about being nice to other people and treating them with respect. And certainly, there is an aspect of that which is obviously true when you read it. After all, what did Jesus say to the lawyer at the end of our text today? He told him to “go and likewise,” meaning, “go and act like the Good Samaritan.” But the problem is that if that’s your only interpretation of this reading, or worse, if that is the essence of your entire religion, then you’re actually in big trouble. If the Bible, and Christianity in general, can be boiled down to simply “you should be nice to people,” then we’re really no different than the pagans, who also teach that, and Christ died for nothing. 

Every religion in the world, in some way or another, teaches a form of “do unto to others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s why Ghandi, who was a Hindu, said that he liked Christ, but not His Christians. He meant that he liked the moral and ethical teachings of the Bible, just not all that stuff about sin and salvation. Or what about the rise of Mormonism in the United States? How is it that a cult which historically teaches crazy stuff like polygamy, and all kinds of other fringe, ahistorical doctrines, is becoming so popular in our country? It’s because they don’t really talk about any of those doctrines at all. Nobody really knows what the Mormons teach. All that they know is that they’re nice people, and isn’t that was religion is really all about?

Well, the answer needs to be “no.” And again, that’s not because the Bible doesn’t teach us to be kind to others. It’s just that the main message of the Scriptures, and the purpose of Christ’s Incarnation, goes far beyond that. The Gospel is not about what you should do for other people. The Gospel is about what Christ has done for you in order to save you. 

So, in this morning’s sermon, with that in mind, I want you to reconsider some of the details of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and especially what they teach us about Jesus and how salvation works.

We’ll start out with the context, which sets things up nicely. The context of the parable of the Good Samaritan is a conversation that Jesus had with a lawyer about how it is that a person is saved. As we read, “a lawyer stood up to put Him to the test, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’” And since the man asked Jesus a question about what he had do if he wanted to save himself, Jesus told Him that answer, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” Then the lawyer summarized the Ten Commandments and Jesus said, “You have answered correctly, do this, and you will live.”

But then the lawyer proceeded to ask another question which revealed that he didn’t really understand what Jesus was trying to teach him at all. I want you to pay attention to the little detail that’s provided by the Holy Spirit here: “But he, desiring to justifying himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” So, the lawyer thought that he could justifying himself. Apparently, he even believed that he might have already done so. But that’s not what Jesus was trying to show him. He wasn’t telling him that you can save yourself through your own keeping of the law, he was telling him what it would take if you could. You would need to keep the law perfectly! You would need to love everyone, including your enemies, and including God, with a perfect selfless devotion that is completely free from all sin.

Is anyone able to do that? Has anyone even come close to that? Of course, not. Nobody can, but Jesus. And that is the point of the Good Samaritan. This text isn’t just about showing us what we should do for others, primarily, it’s about showing us what Christ has done for us. It gives us a picture of the perfect love of Jesus, which alone has the ability to justify us before God in heaven. 

So, look at it again, now. The parable begins with a man who fell among robbers and was left to die in a ditch. What is that other than a description of your sinful condition prior to your conversion? How does the Bible teach us that we all exist from the moment of our conception until we are delivered by the Lord? “I was brought forth in iniquity,” the psalmist says, “and in sin did my mother conceive me.” “You were dead in the sins and trespasses,” Saint Paul writes. “The intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” says the Old Testament. And “there is no one who does good, not even one,” we find in the New. Our spiritual condition prior to coming to faith in Jesus, which is God’s work, and not our own, is that we are completely dead. We have no spiritual power. We have no spiritual strength. Just like the guy that got the tar beat out of him, and everything stolen from him, we were completely helpless too, robbed of all of our spiritual abilities. There was absolutely nothing that we could do on our own to save ourselves, and our situation was completely lost.

And in come the priests and the Levites. Here are two men in the story that clearly represent the Law. Both of them served under the old covenant, which meant that they were responsible for teaching people to observe the laws of Moses, and the different rules and regulations that God had put into place before the coming of Christ. But where do those different laws get us? Can keeping the commandments, and trying harder to be better, or more holy, actually get us out of the ditch? No. And so, what did the priest and the Levite do? They passed the man by. They could not and would not help him be saved, because that is not something that the law is capable of doing. What does Saint Paul tell is in Galatians chapter 3? “If a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed by the law. But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin.”

The job of the law was never to save us. That’s not why God gave it to us. He gave it to us, and wrote it down on stone, so that we wouldn’t so easily forget that we can’t save ourselves at all. The law shows us our sins. Yes, it teaches us what we would need to do in order to get to heaven by our own works, but in teaching us that, it also shows us how none of us have truly done it. Who has kept the law perfectly? Who has truly, and always, and completely, loved God above all things and loved his neighbor as himself? When are person truly and honestly looks into the mirror of God’s Law they do not see salvation. They see damnation. They see their many sins which disqualify them from being saved by their works. Not only is the law incapable of saving us, just like the priest and the Levite passed the man by, but it points out the fact that we deserve to be there and there’s no one to blame for it but ourselves.

But then Someone else comes a long and rescues us. And outsider, who you wouldn’t think would care about miserable sinners like us, because of the way we’ve treated Him, looks past all that and has mercy on us anyway. Isn’t it interesting that one of the accusations that the Pharisees leveled against Jesus was that they called Him a Samaritan? Well, He is a Samaritan. He is the Good Samaritan.

Jesus was an outsider in this world. Heaven is home. And yet, He condescend from His throne of glory into our miserable existence to pull us out of the ditch of our sin and deliver us. As Saint John tells us in the prologue of His Gospel, “He came to His own, but His own received Him not. But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His Name, He gave the right to become the children of God.” 

Just like the Good Samaritan traded places with the man who was hurt, letting him ride on His own animal. Jesus trades place with you. He lifts you up from the death of your sins, and exalts you to the place of His honor. You don’t do anything. All that you do is sit there and let Him do the work for you. You get to ride, while He has to walk. He carries the cross, and you receive the benefit. You get a place in the inn, while He pays the price for your stay. Jesus keeps that law that condemns you, in your place, as your substitute, even dying the death that you deserve, and then through faith He gives you all the credit for it as if you were the one who really did everything. 

Martin Luther called this wonderful reality the “Great Exchange.” It’s the heart and soul of our Christian faith. Our hope is not in the good things that we do for others, but in the perfect sacrifice that Christ has made for us; the sacrifice He made on the cross, where He didn’t pass us by, but bore our sins as if they were His own so that we would be forgiven.

And there’s still more. What else did the Good Samaritan do in our reading? He didn’t just pull the man out of the ditch. He bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. From the earliest times many Christians have seen this as a reference to the Sacraments. How is it that Jesus binds up our wounds? How is it that he applies that saving balm of forgivness that He purchased for us on the cross? Is it not through Baptism and the Lord’s Supper? Is it not through the anointing of the Holy Spirit that we receive through water and the Word, and the cleaning grace given to us under the bread and the wine? Baptism washes away our sins. And the Lord’s Supper brings us healing for our souls. 

These are the ways that Jesus takes care of us, and keeps us in the faith until He returns. He doesn’t leave us all alone. He entrusts our care to an innkeeper, and makes sure that we’ll be provided for while He’s gone from our eyes. That’s what happens in church. Jesus gives us a pastor to preach the gospel to us, and keep on administering His sacraments so that our wounds won’t reopen and fester? 

And then, just like the Good Samaritan, Jesus promises to come back, doesn’t he? This has always been my favorite part of the story. How much money does Jesus say that the Good Samaritan left with inn keeper? It was 2 denarii. In the Bible, we learn that a denarius is a day’s wage. The Good Samaritan left 2 days wages with the man, and then promised to come back when it ran out. That means he was promising to come back on the third day, the day of the resurrection. After saving us from death and hell, and healing our wounds, keeping us fed and alive, Jesus promises to return in glory and take us to be with Himself forever.

So, yes, there are things that we can learn from this parable about how we should treat other people. But that’s because first and foremost it’s a reminder about how Jesus has already treated us. Jesus has saved us. He had mercy on you and took care of you in your deepest hour of need. When you were lost and dead in your sins, He found you and raised you up to new life. He rescued you from death and hell by forgiving you and the price you owed, a price you could never afford yourself. That’s why you forgive others and care for them too. You don’t do it to justify yourself, like the lawyer thought. You do it because Jesus has already justified you. You do it because of the love that He showed you first. We love, because He first loved us. That’s what the Bible says and the order matters.

Our love, or our kindness towards others, is never be the cause of our salvation. That’s because our love and kindness is never free from sin. But the love of Jesus is. He alone has fulfilled those words to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” He alone has kept the law perfectly, and is worthy of inheriting eternal life. But what does Jesus do with that inheritance? He shares it with you. He gives a portion of it to all believers. Just like the Good Samaritan shared what he had with the man in need, Christ has done the same thing for you. 

So now, with that peace, and that confidence in your heart, you can go and do likewise. You can begin to show the same kind of mercy that God has already shown you, because Jesus is your Good Samaritan. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

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n the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

At the end of the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector, Jesus says that it was the tax collector who went down to his house justified and not the pharisee. Our Lord explains why this was the case by adding, “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” So, here Jesus reminds us that it’s only humble people who are justified before God. To be justified before God, means to be declared right with Him. It means that God doesn’t count your sins against you, but rather He forgives them and you’re no longer responsible for them. When God justifies someone, He makes it so that their sins don’t condemn them. He makes it so that your sins don’t keep you out of heaven. And so, if only humble people are justified, meaning only humble people are saved, then obviously it’s very important for us to know what it means to be humble. We need to be certain of the exact kind of humility that is Jesus talking about, because humility comes in many different forms, and not every form of it is the same. 

In the first place, to be humble in the way that Jesus talks about it our text doesn’t just mean that you get embarrassed by things in general. Yes, the word humility has to do with humiliation, but not everyone who’s ever embarrassed themselves because they did something dumb should expect to be saved. To give a Biblical example, think about what happened with King Herod. When he got drunk at one of his parties and promised a pretty girl that he would give her up to half of his kingdom, he was clearly embarrassed when she asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. But that wasn’t true humility. Herod wasn’t sorry for what he did. He was sorry that he looked like a fool. And that obviously is not the type of humility that justifies you before God. Just because bad things happen to you in your life and you don’t always feel proud of yourself doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to something better once this life is over. 

Along those same lines, it isn’t even true humility simply to be embarrassed by your sins. To be sure, you should be embarrassed by your sins, and no one will be saved who isn’t sorry for them. As the prophet Jeremiah tells us in Jeremiah chapter 8 about the people of Israel, “Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore, they shall fall among the fallen, when I punish them, they shall be overthrown.” Cleary, God does want us to be ashamed of our sins. But shame by itself is not enough. We also need to acknowledge our shame before God. Lots of times even when people get embarrassed by their sins, they still refuse to admit them. Even when they’ve been shown from God’s Word that what they’re doing is wrong, and even if they know in their hearts that God’s Word is right, they still won’t come clean and stop doing it. They deny that they’re sinning because they are too embarrassed to confess it and too ashamed of what others would think if they made a change. They care more about the temporal consequences of what will happen to them when they repent than the eternal ones. King David describes this exact kind of situation in Psalm 32 when he writes, “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For night and day your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” Even though David knew that what he was doing was wrong, he still wouldn’t come clean and accept the consequences. So, David had no rest for his consciences. It was only when he confessed his sins to the prophet Nathan that he finally was able to be at peace. 

Whenever we’re talking about true justifying humility, we always need to keep in mind what the Bible says about repentance, and especially the fruits of repentance. There’s a very common false teaching in our day which totally overlooks the need for repentance and reduces it something like, “Nobody’s perfect” or “We are all broken.” But simply admitting that you’ve made mistakes before or that you’re a broken person isn’t the same thing as taking accountability for your sins and wanting God’s forgivness for them. It isn’t the same thing as trying to amend your life with the help of the Holy Spirit. Even the most devout atheist will probably still tell to you that they’re not perfect and that they’ve made mistakes before. But they’re not sorry for their sins. They don’t even think in terms of sin. 

Even Christians sometimes fall into this kind of thinking when they talk about their sins as if they’re no big deal, or even as if they’re a good thing. Have you ever heard this before? “I’m glad I made the mistakes that I did, because those mistakes helped turned me in to the person that I am today.” Well, that’s not how Christians are supposed to talk. Our sins aren’t what make us better people. Christ is the one who does that. And He does that not because of our sin, but in spite of it. So, we shouldn’t speak about sin as if it were a good thing by itself. We shouldn’t use the fact that we have a sinful nature, or that in our weakens we still sometimes fall into sin, as an excuse to sin even more. Our sin is what kills us, not what makes us alive. Our sin is what can drive away the Holy Spirit if we don’t repent of it, not what keeps the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Any kind of humility that avoids repentance and turning away from sin, is not the kind of humility that Jesus describes in our text. It is not the humility that justifies us.

Another kind of humility that doesn’t justify us is the kind of humility that demonizes good works. It’s true that the pharisee in our reading was not justified like the tax collector was, but that wasn’t because the pharisee was doing things that were bad in and of themselves. It was because he trusted what he did for righteousness. It’s not bad to try and avoid stealing, murdering, or committing adultery. It’s not bad to be faithful to your spouse and not sleep with people that you’re not married too. It’s not bad to tithe to the church and put ten percent of what you have in the offering plate. All of those things are good. But none of those things by themselves are what justify you before God. None of those things are what make you a Christian or give you God’s grace and eternal life. Thinking that not stealing, or not committing adultery, and giving money to the Church earns you a place in heaven is like a child thinking that not hitting his sibling or cleaning up his room means that he should automatically get dessert after dinner. Those are the things we are supposed to be doing anyway! They’re not something that we should get a reward for. As Jesus tell us elsewhere, “So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.”

The Pharisee’s problem was not that he tried to do the right thing, but that he thought that his righteous looking efforts were enough to save him and that he didn’t have any sin. The Pharisee forgot that the law was not given to show sinners how to justify themselves, but in order to show them that they can’t justify themselves, and that they need a Savior to do it for them. The Pharisee forgot that even if we think we’ve done a lot of good things, as God’s Word also tells us, “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” If the pharisee considered himself in the way that the Bible does, he would have known that he was just as guilty in the eyes of God as the tax collector. But we don’t need to demonize good works in order to prove that everyone is a sinner. In fact, a humble spirit lifts up good works, even though a humble spirit never trusts in them for salvation.

Similar to the kind of false humility that demonizes good works, there’s also a bad kind of humility that attacks the idea that we should have certainty in God’s Word or the assurance of our salvation. Now, certainly, we shouldn’t boast in ourselves for those things, or act as if we could never fall away from the faith, but that’s not the same thing as having confidence in the promises of God. As Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” And Jesus tells us in Mark chapter 16, “whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.” These passages are important for us to remember because we often hear the argument, especially as Lutherans, that it’s somehow arrogant for us to claim that we’re right about something and that others are wrong, or that it’s somehow bad to be confident that we’re going to heaven someday.

But it is never arrogant to stand on the clear testimony of God’s Word. In fact, that’s part of what it means to be truly humble. When God tells us something in the Bible, He wants us to believe it. For example, when He tells us that “whoever believes and is baptized will be saved,” that’s what He want us to think. Or, when He says that the bread in the Lord’s Supper is His Body, and that the wine is His Blood, that’s what He wants us to say too. And if others won’t say it, or say something else that disagrees with it, God wants us to disagree with them. He wants us to hold onto His Word and insist on it. It’s the people who teach against God’s Word that are not being truly humble, not the people who stand firm on it. They’re the ones putting themselves above the Scriptures, which is the most arrogant thing that you can do. But the most humble thing to do is to confess the Scriptures and not give them up for anything. So again, to be truly humble doesn’t mean that we doubt God’s Word or that we’re always unsure about our salvation. It means that we trust what God’s Word says. 

Ultimately, the kind of humility that justifies, and this is the main point of today’s sermon, is the humility of having faith in Jesus. It means to be repentant of your sin and trust in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. That’s the humility that Jesus is getting at in our reading. That is the true humility that God praises. When the tax collector prayed in the temple, he beat his chest and said, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” The word that he used for mercy, is the same word for propitiation. Literally, the tax collector said, “God be propitiated to me,” as is, “God be the remedy for my sin.” The tax collector wanted what Saint John describes for us in 1 John chapter 4 when he writes, “Jesus Christ is the propitiation for our sins and not for our sins only but also for the sins of the whole world.” What the tax collector was praying for was that God would forgive him of his sins on account of the blood that Jesus shed for them. That is what he clung to. That is what he put his trust in. Not himself, not his own works, not even his own faith, but the work of Jesus in his place.

The tax collector was a real sinner. He had done terrible things. He stolen from his own people and took sides against his own family. But Jesus says that he went home that day justified. That’s the most comforting message that there is in the whole world. It’s only thing that can give someone true and lasting peace. Because you’re a real sinner too. You’re just as guilty as the pharisee was, who looked down on the tax collector, and the tax collector who was ashamed of his past. You’ve also have treated others with contempt before and committed a whole litany of sins against God’s Word too. Pick any one of the ten commandments and you’ve have found a way to break it. You should be ashamed. It’s no one else’s fault but your own. You deserve to go to hell. But listen again to the words of Jesus, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Despite your many sins, God still makes you a promise. When you humble yourself before Him, meaning when you confess your sins and turn away from them, He promises to forgive you. He promises that regardless of how many or how bad your sins have been, you’ll still go down to your house justified. And when Jesus makes a promise, you can be certain that He’ll keep it. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sometimes people try and divide up the different characteristics of God and ignore the parts of Him that they don’t like. The most common way of doing this in our time is by talking exclusively about the love of God without ever addressing His justice or His wrath over sin. When that happens, though, we end up creating a different Jesus than the One that’s in the Bible. God’s love gets redefined into something that’s opposed to what we find in the Scriptures, and souls are led astray by a delusion. The solution to this problem, though, like every doctrinal error, is to return to the text of Scripture and pay careful attention to what it tells us.

Consider, for example, our Gospel lesson today from Luke chapter 19. That’s the account of when Jesus came into Jerusalem and predicted how it would one day be destroyed. This is an excellent passage not only for demonstrating God’s love toward sinners, and how, ultimately, He desires their salvation, but also His righteous anger towards sinners, and how eventually He will bring His judgment upon them if refuse to repent and receive His grace.

First, this text clearly shows us just how angry God can get with our sin. We see that both in the words of Jesus at the beginning of our text, as well as in His actions at the end of it. What did our Lord say about that holy city when He first saw it at the distance? “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

The name “Jerusalem” literally means the “place of peace.” It was the place that had the temple and the sacrifices. It was the place where God pictured the coming of the Savior through types and signs, and showed how He would one day suffer and die as a substitute for our sins. The people of Jerusalem had every opportunity to turn away from their sinful deeds and believe in Jesus. He taught among them. He did miracles among them. He was crucified and raised right before their eyes. And yet, as Jesus said, “they did not know the time of their visitation.” Even though they had the Scriptures that prophesied about Christ, and even though He fulfilled them at every turn, still they refused to recognize Him. Jesus came to die for them, He visited them in peace, but they wanted nothing to do with His salvation. And in response to that repeated rejection, God visited them with wrath. In 70 A.D., to be exact, at the hands of the Romans, the words of Jesus from our text came true. Jerusalem was invaded, many of its inhabitants were killed, and the temple was completely torn down. 

What happened to the people of that once great city, shows us what will happen to everyone who despises God’s Word and refuses to accept His grace during the time that God gives. Eventually, they’ll come into His judgment. It might not happen right away, because God is very merciful, but sooner or later, it will. It happened in the days of Noah. It happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. It happened to the citizens of Jerusalem. And it could also happen to us. In fact, eventually it will happen everyone who rejects God’s Word, when Jesus comes again on the last day.

Those who think of God purely in terms of modern categories like being nice, or tolerant, should also think about what Jesus did at the end of our text today and how He drove out the money changers from the temple. Elsewhere we learn that Christ made a whip of cords and physically turned over the tables there. If you can’t image your Jesus ever doing something like that, then maybe you’re not worshiping the right one. The real Jesus cares about sin. The real Jesus gets anger when people persist in their sin and won’t repent of it. This is especially true when it comes to those sins that undermine the Gospel. And that’s what was going on in Jerusalem. People were coming from all over the world to worship the Lord in His house. They traveled from faraway places and didn’t always bring with them the animals they need for the sacrifices. So, when they arrived at temple, they had to buy them from those who were already there. And what should have been an opportunity to help one’s neighbor, turned into an opportunity to make money. Whether it was through price gouging for the animals, or inflated exchange rates for the use of the mandatory Jewish currency, some people took advantage of the situation for their own personal gain. They turned God’s house into a den of thieves. And that made God mad.

Knowing and believing that God does actually get angry with sin, and that He will punish all those who refuse to repent of it, is an important truth to remember because there’s always the temptation to think that our sin really isn’t that big of a deal. That’s the most popular error of our time. It says that because God is love, that means that He must accept and approves of us no matter what we’re doing. It makes it seem as if God doesn’t care about our sin, which isn’t true at all. Of course, He cares about our sin! Just look at what Jesus did in the temple!

Even within the church we are face with the constant threat to think that we’re beyond the scope of God’s wrath. Because we’re good old Missouri Synod Lutherans, who got confirmed when we we’re younger, and take Communion a few times a year, sometimes the thought is, as long as I keep doing that, “I’m good to go no matter what else I do.” But no one is outside the possibility of falling away from the faith. No one can provoke the Lord to anger through unrepentant sin without facing consequences. The people of Jerusalem had the temple and God brought it to nothing. We our own gifts too, but if we don’t use them to worship the Lord in Spirit and in truth, which includes living lives according to His holy Word, then it’s only a matter of time before we’ll lose what we have too. What did the prophet Jeremiah say to the people in our Old Testament lesson, “Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known and then come and stand before me in this, which is called by my name, and say ‘We are delivered,’ only to go on doing all these abominations?” Showing up in church doesn’t mean squat if you are embracing a life of sin outside of it. Nothing will spare you from God’s wrath if you’re living in unrepentance.

Today’s readings, and the whole Bible for that matter, teaches us to take our sin seriously. They teach us that God hates sin, and that even though He wants us to have His forgivness, if we refuse it, He will eventually judge us. 

But God does not want to judge us! He wants to save us! That’s why Jesus reacted the way that He did when He saw the city of Jerusalem. How does our text tell us that Christ reacted when He predicted what would happen in that place? It says, “and when He drew near and saw the city, He wept over it.” Jesus wasn’t happy about what was about to take place. He was grieved by it. He the Lord of Glory, was so upset but it that He broke down into bitter tears at the mere sight of seeing them. As the Bible tells us, “[God] desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” He wants everyone to turn away from their sins before it’s too late and look to Him for forgivness. 

And not only does God want that, but He is very patient for it to happen. He puts up with our stubbornness all of the time and doesn’t destroy us immediately even though He has every right to do so. As the Psalmist also says, “He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.” God isn’t fair. And praise the Lord that He isn’t! Even when He eventually does bring His righteous judgment down upon someone, almost every time, that doesn’t happen without repeated warnings. It took Noah 100 years to build the Ark. God gave the Canaanites 400 years until their iniquity was complete. And Jesus preached and taught and did miracles in Jerusalem for 3.

Why does the Lord put up with our sin? He doesn’t do it that that we can persist in it, but so that we would have more time to turn away from it and be saved. As Saint Paul tells us in Romans chapter 2, “Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”

We see the patient and loving kindness of God above all in the person of Jesus Christ. Our Lord not only wept for the holy city of Jerusalem, but He went to the cross to die for sins of the people who lived there. He not only predicted how the temple would be destroyed, but He allowed His own body, the true Temple, to be torn down and raised up three days later too. Jesus bore the sins of the whole world in His flesh so that all those who repent and believe in Him would be spared from the wrath to come. He suffered God’s total judgment for sin, so that everyone who takes refuge in Him would never have to come into that judgment eternally. 

Just like there is the temptation to think that God doesn’t care about our sin, there’s also the temptation to think that He cares about it in such a way that He won’t ever forgive it. But that isn’t true either. The only reason why God shows us His wrath is for the sake of showing us His mercy. Again, He wants us to have His forgiveness. He wants to be with us. And nothing gives Him greater joy than when that actually happens. When we are sorry for our sins, God says that He’ll forgive them. When we turn away from our evil deeds, no matter how awful or how frequent they’ve been, God assures us that He’ll wash them away. That’s why His Son died. And that’s what He promises to give us in His Word and Sacraments. As we read in Isaiah chapter 55, “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that He may have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.”

So, being a Christian isn’t just about believing in God’s love, or just believing in His wrath. It’s about believing in both. Our Scriptures readings today put both of those truths in front of us so that we would learn to know God rightly and live by repentance and faith.

The city of Jerusalem is a great example. God destroyed in in 70 A.D.  by the hands of the Romans because the people there did not know the time of their visitation. Even though they had every opportunity to recognize Jesus for who He was, and what He came to do for them, they wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t turn away of their sins and instead embraced them despite God’s clear Word. May we not make the same mistake as them.

For today is the day of our visitation. Today is the day that Jesus comes to us to gives us the things that make for peace. Today God shows His loving kindness towards through His Word and Sacraments that offer us forgivness. He promises to abundantly pardon all of our sins by His grace when we come to Him for mercy. So, let us listen to the voice of our Savior, and run to Him for grace. Let us not bury our heads in the sand, and try and soothe our screaming consciences with false assurances of peace, but turn to the Price of Peace Himself who alone can give us cleansing for our souls. For just as Jesus drove out the money changes from the temple, when we come to Him in sorrow, He will drive our sins away from us as far as the east is from the west. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.