Gospel Harmony Joy Note 12...

As much time as I spent reading all that came before this next section, I have spent reading this one.  I want to move on, but I didn't want to do so until I could write about it.  Only, how do you write when you are not sure of the words or the Word?

Deli meat.  Deli meat is what finally came to mind.

I do not know another person who views deli meat the way I do.  All my life, I have watched others make a sandwich with deli meat where the bread and fixings vastly out proportioned the meat.  Economics always came up if I dared to bring up having just one or two slices of deli meat on a sandwich.  Me? I pile the stuff on.  Pile.  My philosophy is that if you are having a meat sandwich, the meat ought to be the primary focus, not everything else.  Not anything else.

The funny thing is, to me, that those who use but a single slice or two, would mightily protest at such parsimony were they to be purchasing a sandwich from a deli.  If they are craving a turkey sandwich, they do not want to be served a sandwich consisting primarily of bread, lettuce, tomatoes, and/or condiments.

In a way, you could think of the meat sandwich as the Good News.  If the bread is the Law, then the meat is the Gospel.  Of course, Jesus being the bread of life probably negates the metaphor from the start, but consider overlooking that one literary flaw.

Sometimes, it seems to me that the Good News sandwiches being served up these days are rather light on meat.  As if economics are at play ... as  if too much Jesus might be bad somehow.

Right now, in many places in the online Lutheran community, there is this war waging over sanctification.  Too much to write about save for the fact that, in my opinion, few even note the fact that it is the Holy Spirit who sanctifies, not how a pastor preaches or what a Christian does.  We are sanctified by the Holy Spirit through the Living Word and the Sacraments.

So, for me, it is ... strange ... that I came upon this section about the Law in my parallel Gospels at just such a time.

I left off finding that it was fitting how Jesus followed the sermon on the mount, on telling us who we are in Him, by teaching that He came to fulfill the Law, not abolish it.  I have been dwelling up such a marvel, but even so I still cannot puzzle out the next set of passages.

1. Matthew 5: 21-48 / Luke 6:27-30, 32-36   
2. Matthew 6:1-18                                          
3. Matthew 6: 19-7:6 / Luke 6:37-42
4. Matthew 7:7-27 / Luke 6:31, 43-49
5. Matthew 7:28-29

One of the features of this book are section headers.  I find them to be very different from the headings in my Bibles.  They are more of an outline, one for which I am extremely grateful in the help it provides in comprehension of the Gospels as a whole.  In fact, at the front of the book is a listing of all of the headings, major and minor, with a five columns listing references from the Gospels and then the page on which the section begins.  I have already gone back to that listing to more easily review previous topics, and I anticipate it being a help long after I am finished with my initial reading of this parallel Gospel.

The five section headings for the passages above are below.  I will note that they are all minor sections continuing the major section entitled Appointment of the Twelve and Sermon on the Mount.

1. Six contrasts in comparing the Law
2. Three hypocritical practices to be avoided
3. Three prohibitions against avarice, harsh judgment, and unwise exposure of sacred things
4. Application and conclusion
5. Reaction of the multitudes

While I was reading the first set of passages listed above, my heart sang.  My very first thought was So, this is where Luther got the idea for how he wrote Part One of the Large Catechism!  If you are a writer, once you get over the utter shock of reading how there is no escape from the Law, you marvel at the craftsmanship of how Luther wends his way from the letter of the Law to its spirit.  For me, I especially marvel at his skillful use of juxtaposition of a simple sentence following either a rich and full of description passage or a deep, complex sentence.

But I digressed.  Craftsmanship aside, take the commandment not to steal.  You read the commandment and immediately start congratulating yourself for not being a thief.  But Luther teaches us that not only are we not to steal, we are also to prevent others from stealing from our neighbors, to protect our neighbors' wealth, and to help our neighbors increase wealth.  Not stealing is actually all that?  Luther spins out the fullness of the Law from something we might erroneously believe is in our grasp until he leaves us gasping with the weight of the knowledge that we cannot keep the Law.  Only Jesus can.

In the passages I read (and have been re-reading again and again), Jesus spins out the depth of the commandments about murder and adultery, about deceit and about loving our neighbors.  As the verses piled one upon the other, I thought of the Large Catechism and laughed.  I thought of the Large Catechism and wept.  I know my sin. How could anyone entertain any notion of participating in sanctification, in making themselves holier.  In reading these passages of the Gospel, I understood them for the first time and rejoiced that Jesus is my keeping of the Law before God.

And while I do not wholly understand Matthew 5:48, "Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect," I assumed this was Jesus' way of coming full circle. Obviously, I, as a sinner, cannot possibly be perfect. This, this teaching of the Law from the Living Word, is why the angels proclaimed in Luke 2:14, “Glory to God in the highest. And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”  I cannot be perfect, but Jesus is.  His teaching demonstrates the impossibility of man keeping the Law, but we already know that with God all things are possible (Luke 1:37).  Maybe a better way to put it is that, for me, Matthew 5:48 was an Alpha and Omega moment.  Jesus is the beginning and the end.  I came to fulfill the Law ... because to do so you must be perfect.

But with the next section and the ones following, the clarity began to fade.  I am not seeing the Gospel within them. I do not understand what Jesus is saying.  At least with most of it.

The parts about giving and praying, again reminded me of Luther's writing, especially all the points he made about the foolishness of the members of monasteries who assumed their lifestyles made them more righteous, more holy, so much so that they sold their "extra" holiness to others.  That sounds so absurd, but all the talk about sanctification bruited about, talk that to me is just the other side of the coin of works righteousness (not that righteousness and holiness are synonymous), sounds just as absurd.  If all talk of salvation, justification, and righteousness must have its beginning, middle, and end with Christ crucified, then all talk of sanctification must have its beginning, middle, and end with the Holy Spirit.  Yet so often then end of sanctification talk is with man and what he does, rather than with the Holy Spirit and what He does through man.

However, the third section and the fourth become more confusing to me, for they read as instructions on how to live, instructions as absolutes.  We are sinners.  We live in a fallen world.  We simply cannot do all of these things.  Do not judge.  Oh, how we judge! Give more than is asked.  Oh, how we are misers. Treat others as we want them to treat us.  Oh how we hurt even the ones we love!  Ignore the false prophets.  Much of the Church in America is enamored with the teaching of a woman who declares she is no longer a sinner. Build your house upon rock. The rocks we oft use are ones of our own fashioning and thus really are sand.

Jesus also speaks of dogs and swine and narrow gates and treasure and fruit and those who think they are His sheep but are not.  Yet in the middle of this instruction piled upon instruction we have Jesus declaring, "Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened" (Matthew 7:7-8).

That, too, sounds like doing, even if it is filled with promise.  Only is not Jesus the verb of a life of faith?

On an aside, one of the things I find fascinating about Matthew 7:7-8 is its symmetry with Revelation 3:20, 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me."  In Matthew, it reads as if I am to knock. However, in Revelation it reads that Jesus is knocking.  In Matthew, it reads as if Jesus is opening the door.  However, in Revelation it reads as I am to open the door.

For me, I choose to put these two passages squarely in the category of one of the mysteries of God of which we (or is it pastors?) are to be stewards of, as Paul writes 1 Corinthians 4:1.  Perhaps I should care more who exactly is to serve as steward, but my focus is on the fact that mysteries of God exist in the first place.  Not all  is revealed to us.  We truly do see but in part, see through a glass darkly (I Corinthians 13:12, at the moment.  Perhaps it is not a coincidence the imagery of mysteries and dark glass resides in the same epistle?

Alas, though, all those thoughts reside in single verses, when what I at least have learned is: context, context, context!

I do not understand most of the sections in this part of my reading in the harmonized Gospels.  As I have read and re-read, other verses and bits of the pure doctrine I read in the Book of Concord flit into my mind, but I have not grasped the Gospel of this part of the Gospels.  I see Law ... or rather I see Gospel as Law, and I know that it not correct, not what is truly being presented here.

The final minor section (of the larger one), just two verses, concludes with the notation that the multitudes marveled that Jesus was teaching as one with authority instead of as a mere scribe.  The multitude did not know, did not understand, that the Living Word was teaching the Word of God.  What greater authority is there than the One through whom and by whom all things came into being, the One who came to fulfill the Law?

I suppose the crux of this note is that while I still am confused, and lack the clarity with which I had rejoiced in all the previous sections I have read thus far, I believe it is time to stop lingering here.  The Holy Spirit will reveal what should be revealed, eventually.  This I believe.  This is my cognitive rest when it comes to reading the Bible.  So, I am working on resting in that part of the Promise given to me, and I moved my bookmark to the beginning of the next section for when I open the parallel Gospel again.


Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief!