“THE LOWEST AND HIGHEST: THE EXALTATION OF CHRIST CRUCIFIED”
Saint Luke 14: 1-11
17th Sunday after Trinity: 13 October Anno Domini 2019
Father Jay Watson SSP
Nobody wants to live in the desert, monasticism notwithstanding. Wilderness is for wild animals but man was made by God for community and fellowship. You are place by God into families. Families: big, small, or parish-sized, live and grow in houses—homes. Place is all important to The Lord. Eden was the first and true house and home. The thorn-covered dust of the now decaying world is the result of Adam’s trespass and of your daily sins.
The devil lures all whom he can into the Potemkin villages of a fallen-fantasy. Satan’s homes are like mousetraps and Raid Roach Motels. They are baited with immoral entertainment and unrighteous mammon of all sorts. These diabolical dens of deceit include the world’s filth as well as your own lustful and blackened hearts. The devil white-washes these temporary tombs with a veneer of your own egos.
“I deserve some recognition and honor” you say to yourself. “I deserve to be appreciated” you bray…like an ass; until you fall into a pit.
Christ came to that house for a reason. Jesus comes to this house for the same reason. Jesus doesn’t come to chat or look at photos of your grandkids or talk about sports. And although The Lord cares about your temporal problems and concerns, He cares ultimately about your eternal destination. He does not want you to stay in the pit with the ox of stupidity and “hard work” or with the ass of stubbornness and noisy inanities. That pit leads only to a deeper and much hotter one.
The Lord comes to eat bread. This is not a solitary meal “on the run” but a banqueting on the finest bread at the Wedding Feast. He wants you to eat this bread. He is this bread!
Christ knows that His Bread—His Body given, and His Blood shed is the only thing that brings peace. The Lawyers and Pharisees hold their “peace” when Jesus asks about Mercy, about loving the neighbor. To be sure, these disbelieving adversaries “held their peace” by not answering His direct question. But they also withheld their Peace by withholding their compassion and confession of truth. Yes, the devil is a creature of babel and confusing noise, but the foul foe is also a beast of smug silence in the face of need and necessary action.
The pagan, heathen, and false-Christian will always focus on the trivial and arcane “seeming” inconsistencies of God’s Word. That’s where “wiggle-room” and exceptions can be constructed. How much, how long, how hard, how often, do I have to love my neighbor, put the best construction on things, stay with my sick spouse, forgive my sister, and on and on in self-justifying denial of Mercy. The Lawyers and Pharisees did not know Jesus because they did not know The Word. They thought (and taught) that the Sabbath day of rest took precedence over actually healing someone on the Sabbath and thus giving a real person real REST from pain, disfigurement, disease, and sorrow. They were loathsome, bureaucratic, closed-hearted leaches.
Jesus is The Sabbath. Jesus is rest—rest now from the stain and guilt of trespasses, and rest to come from eternal torments. The Peace that He gives now in His Bread—His Flesh and in His Word of Absolution, is but a portent of the heavenly Peace He will give at the Eschaton.
The Lawyers falsely worshiped the Law—Moses, and missed the forest for the + tree. The Pharisees thought they were themselves the only proper interpreters of the Law and their own regulations and glosses. They were self-satisfied—self-justified tree experts, all the while missing the point of The Law. Thus, they missed He would give the tree of cavalry its lasting import by turning it into the restored Tree of Life from Eden.
What is the Law? It’s the Word of God. What is the Law? It’s Christ Jesus on the cross—FOR YOU!
How do you do the Law? You don’t…look at this last week; look at your life; look at your heart since 9:00 am. Jesus does the Law. It’s Christ on the cross—FOR YOU!
Who is bidden to come to the wedding? Everyone. “For God so loved the world.” Not that God “loved the world soooo much….” But rather, God loved the world specifically in this way that He sent THE WAY—In the Flesh!
Drown your old ox, your old ass, your old Adam, not in a pit, but in repentance worked by Jesus The Law Keeper. He will keep you from desiring to sit in the highest room, the highest chair of “look at me” self and glory.
He Who went to the lowest room, the humblest house of a fallen earth; of a despoiled Bethlehem; of an enslaved Nazareth; and of an apostatized Jerusalem; also went to the lowest chair there could ever be—The Cross at Calvary—FOR YOU!
Where is real worship? Where is true Gottesdienst—"God’s service to you?” Where is real presence of Real Peace in Real Body from Bread and Real Blood from wine? Where is true humility and true exaltation? The Crucifix and only The Crucifix. From The Tree to the receptacles thereof this morning: font, altar, and communion rail.
You don’t just hear the preaching of Christ Crucified as Paul declares, you eat and drink Christ Crucified. At The Holy Mass you are exalted by the ever exalted Crucified God.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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