A, Post Pentecost 5 Proper 8 - Romans 7:1-13 A Worthy Wedding

The fullness of God’s Word dwells in Jesus Christ, because He is the Word made flesh.  In His flesh, Jesus bears the fullness of the Law: its holiness, rules, statutes, promises, testimonies, steadfast love, commands, and demands.  This is the Law we have spoken responsively in the Introit and confessed from Psalm 119.

God’s Law is His word of truth.  It exposes us and shines its light upon human reality.  Before God’s holy Law, is there anywhere to hide?

No, there is not.  We who hold to God’s Word must first be examined by the Law.  If the Law does not ask its questions of us, we will never hear the truth about ourselves.

So God’s holy Law asks, “Are you holy as God is holy?  Are you merciful as God is merciful?”  And the answer that comes back from us is sin. 

Or, to use Christ’s own words, the Law gives two answers: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37–40 ESV)

These words expose the simple reality of our humanity.  We love ourselves more than we love God and our neighbour.  When we hear the Law, we either turn away disheartened, or we reject it in favour of our own laws—laws that excuse us and condemn our enemies.

But because the Law is of God and is holy, rejecting the Law means rejecting God.  We either turn away from Him disheartened, or we stand in judgement over Him.  Either way, we make our Heavenly Father the enemy.

Jesus makes this clear in today’s Gospel reading.  Three times He says that if we love parents or children more than Him, or if we do not take up our cross and follow Him, we are not worthy of Him.  Jesus strikes hard with the Law, because He bears the fullness of God’s Word in His flesh.

Jesus also tells a parable in which the kingdom of heaven—the kingdom of God—is like a king giving a wedding feast for His son.  In that parable, those first invited prove unworthy, and another man, brought into the feast in their place, is also rejected because he is not wearing the wedding garment. (see Matthew 22:1–14)

Paul carries this wedding theme into his letter to the Romans, where he explains that in baptism we have… “died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to Him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.” (Romans 7:4 ESV)

What, then, is this fruit of God, and how are we to produce it?  These questions cannot be answered by ourselves.  When we trust our own understanding and feelings, we are tempted to return to another law, becoming a law unto ourselves.  That new law also threatens to turn us away from God and make us His enemies once again.

Left to ourselves, humanity produces the fruits of humanity.  We do human things because we are human beings; and because we are sinners, our human works are marked by sin.  Being human, after the fall, means being sinners who do sinful things. 

Yet the law is not sin, nor are we permitted to shrug our shoulders and carry on wilfully sinning.  Paul rejects that kind of self-justification for those who take the kingdom of God seriously and understand their marriage into it through baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Otherwise, we would be like an adulteress: rescued from sin and death revealed by the Law, only to return to justifying ourselves by what we do.

Rather, the Law serves its purpose in several ways.  After the Law shows us what we are and what we do, Jesus Christ is baptised into the law.  The Word made flesh comes in our flesh, sets aside His divine privilege, and lives in the same flesh as you and me.  Jesus is born into the same human condition, yet He does not succumb to sinful emotion, deed, or being.  He becomes what neither Israel nor humanity had been able to be: faithful to God in heaven and faithful to His human neighbours on earth—faithful even unto death.

In His birth, baptism, death, and resurrection, Jesus bears the fruit that fulfils all righteousness, so that we might flee the wrath to come and bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Jesus comes so that we are blessed and invited to “the marriage supper of the Lamb. These are the true words of God.” (Revelation 19:9 ESV)

This answers the question of why we produce fruit.  We produce it because Christ was baptised into the law and death, yet without sin, and because we have been baptised into His death and resurrection.  But the question of how this fruit is produced still needs to be answered, lest we try to justify our way into the kingdom of heaven through our works—making ourselves worthy by churchly charity, giving, prayer, praise, and other practises.  Do not misunderstand me: these are good works, but they do not justify us.  Rather, they are works the body of Christ does for the salvation and good of others.

So how do we do them?  How does this fruit happen within us?  The Law still works within us, and in Lutheran theology this is known as the third use, or third function, of the Law.  This is why the Ten Commandments remain a core teaching of Lutheran theology.  Yet this is not our use of the Law, even though the Law still functions within us to the glory of God and for the love of our neighbour.

Paul’s analogy of marriage reaches its fullness in something profound.  He says, “‘Therefore a man shall leave His father and mother and hold fast to His wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (Ephesians 5:31–32 ESV)

Notice that the man leaves His parents, not the woman.  We do not leave our place in order to become Christian; rather, in His incarnation, Jesus leaves His Father to be pledged to His bride.  In Jesus Christ, God has… “put His seal on us and given us His Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.” (2 Corinthians 1:22 ESV)

Just as Jesus was carried along by the Holy Spirit in His ministry, so for Jesus’ sake we who have been baptised into Christ… “are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.” (Romans 7:6 ESV)

The Holy Spirit is the body of Christ’s “how”.  All that glorifies God is done in us and through us by the Holy Spirit.  The new way, the new function of the Law, is the Holy Spirit using God’s Law within us so we can love God and serve our neighbour.

How, then, do we do the works Jesus did while on earth, and even the greater works He promises in John 14:12?  Jesus tells us, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive.” (John 14:15–17a ESV)

By the new way of the Holy Spirit, He works this new obedience of Jesus Christ within us, because… “the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:2 ESV)

This third function of the Law is not one that leads us to death.  Rather, the Holy Spirit leads us out of sin and into a righteousness in keeping with repentance.  It is the work of the Holy Spirit to help us flee wrath, run to Christ, and take up our cross to follow Him, who has fulfilled all righteousness in His death and resurrection.  Therefore, as Paul encourages Timothy, we too can be encouraged: “By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” (2 Timothy 1:14 ESV)

This is God’s gift of grace upon grace to those who are human upon human, sinners upon sinners.  It does not justify our sin; it forgives sin in those who know they cannot justify themselves, and who are made worthy to enter the wedding feast of the Lamb of God. Amen.