Author: Rev. Eric Brown

“No one can serve two masters… therefore I tell you….”

Today we can miss the point of what Jesus says in Matthew 6 because we are a culture intoxicated on the idea of personal choice. We choose and create so many aspects of our lives and are encouraged to do so by society today. I’ve even noticed that when my 1^st grader comes home from school having been in trouble, he describes that as “I made a bad choice.” The only thing authority today seems to say is “make good choices”.

Jesus is not calling you to make good choices. This text is not a list of decisions Jesus wishes you would make. This is not advice. Rather, Jesus is stating concrete fact. We don’t get to serve two masters; we don’t get to pick willy nilly between them. We are either driven by the lust for money (or a plethora of other sins as noted in the rest of the sermon on the mount) or by God and His Word. One or the other is driving us.

And having said that, Jesus doesn’t say, “make a good choice.” He doesn’t ask, “what is your decision?” Instead, He says, “Therefore I tell you.” You can’t have two masters, therefore I AM your master, and this is what I say to you. And will all the following, it’s not optional. It’s not “you shouldn’t worry” – it’s “do not worry.”

Jesus tells it like it is. You do not have two masters to choose from. Christ Jesus is your master. With His death and resurrection He destroyed the old masters of Sin, Death, and the Devil. They lie broken and destroyed from the events of Good Friday and Easter. And lest they think they still have power over; you have been Baptized. You have been claimed by Christ Jesus as His own, forgiven and redeemed. You do not belong to sin; you belong to Christ. Your flesh might try to tell you otherwise, but Jesus is your Lord and Master, and He is your Lord and Master in order to forgive you and raise you to everlasting life.

“And one of them, when he saw that he was healed…”

It always astonishes me that the lepers head off to see the priests before they are healed. Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests, and they go, even though their skin is still nasty and gross. And as they walk, they are healed – it happens without their notice at first.

The workings of God often slide by past us unnoticed. This is true even for us who are Christians. We who ought to be most prepared to recognize the gifts that God gives both in creation and salvation often let them slide by unawares. We don’t continually marvel at all the blessings God gives us simply out of His Fatherly divine goodness and mercy. There are times when hearing His Word or heading to Church doesn’t excite us or astonish us. We so often overlook God, even when He has told us what He is doing in the Scriptures.

And here is one of the key differences between God’s goodness and our sinfulness. I know that if I that I am being overlooked or under-appreciated, I tend to want to pull back on what I’m doing. I’m tempted to “take my ball and go home” as it were. And yet, consider Jesus. He doesn’t pout or sulk. 10 are still cleansed, even if only 1 comes back. This is what Jesus does constantly – He shows love because that’s what He does, not in order to garner praise.

God’s love for you is not determined by how thankful you are. He doesn’t give you more if you promise to praise Him more. Jesus Christ has already done it all, and He still pours out His Word and Spirit upon you. Sometimes we are distracted (and even sometimes distracted by good things) and don’t always focus upon this, but know that His love for you remains constant, and He continues to be your Savior.

“But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus…”

So often when considering the story of the Good Samaritan, we forget the setup. There is a lawyer who wants to test Jesus, and he fails. Hard. Jesus shows that his “difficult” question was silly. And this fellow is embarrassed, and he wants to justify himself. He asks a question not to learn but to try to prove how good he is.

The tale of the Good Samaritan is a response to self-justification. Do you want to pretend that you’re good – so, do you risk life and limb for those who hate you, and do you give up all that you have and then take out loans to care for them? Because that’s what the Samaritan does – that’s what we all ought to do. If you want to be justified by the law, if you want to justify yourself, there’s the standard.

And we can’t match it. Jesus holds this up to the lawyer to just get him to shut his trap, to stop his plotting and self-congratulation. You are not good. Period.

And yet, there is One who is Good – God. There is One who is Good – Christ Jesus who comes down from heaven and takes up human life and limb not merely to risk them but specifically to suffer and die for miserable sinners. There is One who gives all that He has to rescue and redeem people battered and broken by sin.

And that is what Jesus has done for you. You don’t need to talk, you don’t need to prove yourself to God. You don’t need to demonstrate anything – because Christ is the One who has done it all for you. He has found you broken and beaten, dead in sin and trespasses, and He gives you life and forgiveness and salvation in His Word. Simple as that, with nothing more for us to say.

“And taking him aside from the crowd privately…”

Often when we think of Jesus performing miracles, we can think of big, showy things – almost like it would be like a summer blockbuster. Pyrotechnics, giant crowds cheering like mad. And often that was what people wanted.

Yet when the crowd brings a deaf man who can’t talk to Jesus, Jesus doesn’t put on a show for them. Instead, Jesus pulls the man off privately. Then, Jesus communicates with the man – I’m going to pop open these ears here, I’m going to fix this tongue here. See, I’m going to pray now – and “Be opened.” And it was good.

Jesus isn’t worried about entertaining the crowd. He isn’t worried about proving how great He is. When He healed, it wasn’t 1^st century virtue signaling. It was personal and direct care for the benefit of the person Jesus was dealing with at that moment. Plain and simple, it was love.

When you hear from the Scriptures that Jesus loves you, that isn’t Jesus trying to impress people or improve His reputation – far from it, His love for you led to Him being crucified by the people of power and status. No, Jesus simply is determined to do what is good for you, to win you forgiveness with His death, to personally call you by name in Holy Baptism, to give you Himself in His Supper. And if the crowds don’t like it, so be it. His focus is you, being your Savior. And that He is.

“Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”

Beat them into submission. Spread rumors and “facts” about them until they shut up and go away. No, I’m not talking about how we work today in dealing with our “friends” or classmates – or at least I’m not just talking about that. This is how the priests and scribes were hoping to deal with Jesus, and when that didn’t work, they were determined to kill him.

That’s the pattern – someone annoys us, and we try to silence them. That way we’ll have some “peace and quiet” in our lives. And we’ll justify our actions against them – we’ll find some speck that is wrong (or make one up if we have to), and then our campaign against them starts. Most of the time it’s only verbal… but sometimes it gets physical and violent too (maybe more often than we’d like to admit).

Jesus sees all that as He enters Jerusalem, and He laments over Jerusalem. Peace doesn’t come about by silencing all those who disagree with you. Peace doesn’t come by belittling them or grinding them under your heel, and certainly not by the back of you hand. Peace, true peace, only comes by forgiveness. Peace only comes by the forgiveness won when Christ went silently to the cross, bearing our sins as He was belittled, heels and hands nailed to the cross.

So consider your neighbor who is annoying you, or aggravating you? How shall you make for peace – with might of your own? Hardly! No. Instead, by the eyes of faith see He who makes for peace – look at your “enemy” and see one for whom Christ Jesus died! See all the sins that impact you – both your own and those done to you – on Christ Jesus upon the Cross. Because that is reality – that is what Christ Jesus has done. He has won and established peace for you with His death and resurrection.

“The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.”

How in the world does Jesus tell a story where a liar and cheat gets praised? That is the question that has vexed generations of moralists concerning the story of the dishonest manager. The problem comes in when focus on the story so much that we don’t listen to Jesus. He tells us what the point is – the dishonest manager is shrewd, while so often Christians are not.

Consider – that rotten cheat was utterly honest about his situation. He had played things fast and loose, and now the noose was around his neck. He was stuck in a pit, and there was no way he was going to dig his way out – so he didn’t trust in his own power. Instead, he sponged off the master’s name, wealth, and credit, and that is how he survived.

Now, consider us Christians. Here we are, people who have received the gift of life and salvation from Christ Jesus. We are baptized children of God… and yet, what so often is our gut reaction when we have gotten our hand caught in the cookie jar of some sin or vice? We deny that we did anything wrong, or we blame our neighbor, or we promise to do better, or we make vain promises about how we’ll behave in the future. All of these are foolish things. So often we try foolishly to talk our way out of our sin.

This is why Christ Jesus calls us to be shrewd – this is why we are to fix our eyes upon Christ Jesus and remember that we live only by the forgiveness, life, and salvation that He gives. We don’t need to posture or plot; rather we confess our sin and He is faithful and just to forgive us. God grant us wisdom and shrewdness to remember this!

“You will recognize them by their fruits.”

You’ll know them by their fruits. That’s what Jesus tells us – that false prophets will be easy to spot by their fruits. Here’s the problem; we hear “fruits” and simply think “works”. If someone is nice or does something neat, surely they’re spot on theologically, right?

Yet, right after mentioning “fruits” Jesus talks about folks who are able to say, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name” and says that they are condemned! What in the world is going on here?

You tell a tree by its fruit. If you see an apple, you know it came from an apple tree. You see a peach, it came from a peach tree. And if we are looking for a Christian, the fruit we’d expect is Christ Jesus. Christ’s forgiveness and love and mercy – or even all the fruits of the Spirit that Paul mentions later on. The fruit that comes from Christ should give you Christ and His mercy.  It should be the fruit of the Cross.

The false folks pointed to themselves and their own works – see what we did! See all that we did in Your name and for You, Jesus… look at MEEEEE! That’s not good fruit; that’s the selfish, self-centered and self-praising trash sin always produces. But the fruit that we ought to seek that we should long for is this: Christ Jesus died for you, and so your sin is forgiven. The fruit we ought to seek sounds like, “take and eat, this is My Body; take and drink, this is My Blood.” That way we know we are getting the real deal.

Because that is the will of the Father – that Christ Jesus wins you salvation from sin, and that this salvation is given to you again. God wills that mercy and love from Christ be poured into you over and over again by His Word and Spirit, that you are returned again to your baptismal grace. That’s the good fruit – Christ, not our works. Listen and look for Christ, and ignore the works righteous bragging of the ravenous wolves.

“I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat.”

They were stupid. They were the wrong race. They were just the worst of the worst. That is how one could be tempted to view the crowd gathered in Mark 8. Jesus had been preaching in the Decapolis, among the gentile nations. And they had followed Jesus out into the wilderness to listen to Him, but they hadn’t brought enough supplies. Now they were hungry, on the verge of fainting. Even the disciples themselves were running low – Jesus had preached so long that they were down to seven loaves.

Jesus, though, doesn’t see foolish people. He doesn’t see them as “other” or any of the many myriad ways we in our sinfulness can come up with to denigrate people, especially when they are inconveniencing us. No, Jesus has compassion. Literally in Greek, His guts are wrenched, twisted. He sees them not on the basis of any sin or strife or folly, but Jesus sees them as people who have been with Him for three days. And He cares for them, so He feeds them.

How does Jesus see you? Does He see you with a harsh and critical eye, like the one that we use to judge our neighbor? Does Jesus look at you and facepalm over the repeated stupidity you show (because let’s be honest, we all have our pet stupid sins that we repeat)? No – He has compassion upon you, because you have been with Him three days.

Paul writes, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?” You too have been with Jesus three days. You have been united to Him by baptism, and He cannot but have compassion on you. He cannot but help to care for you and forgive you your sins. You have Jesus’ love all of your days, even unto the life of the world to come.

“Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” – Luke 5:8

Simon Peter may have been a sinful man, but he was no fool. When there was the amazing catch of fish, he knew this wasn’t just a quirk of nature or a bit of random chance – this was Messianic. This Jesus in the boat with him, this boat now filled with fish and sinking, was the Messiah. And so Peter does the only logical thing – he begs Jesus to leave.

This isn’t because he hates God or is an unbeliever. Oh no, to the contrary. Peter is a pious man, and he is well aware of his own sin. And he knows his Scripture well enough to know that sinful men who wander into God’s way get dragged down into death. Quickly. And so at that moment he begs for God to be merciful – and he thinks God’s mercy means God will just go and leave him alone.

That’s not why Jesus had come. He came to put an end to the separation between God and man that sin had brought about. Mercy would not be God stepping away and not smiting sinful man; mercy would be God Himself becoming man and taking up all the sin of the world and smiting it in His own body upon the Cross.

And so Jesus, Peter’s Savior, simply looks at Peter and says, “Do not be afraid; from now one you will be catching men.” Not only am I not sending you out of my presence, Peter, but you will be bringing more and more people into My presence – My merciful and forgiving and saving presence.

And that’s where we are. We are those who have been caught up by God by the power of the Word. And now, we enter His presence knowing that our sin is forgiven by Christ Jesus. And Christ in His true mercy continues to come to us in His Word and in His Supper, so that we would be forgiven and live with Him eternally. Jesus does not depart from you – He catches you and makes you His own!

“Be Merciful, even as your Father is merciful” – Luke 6:36

So what is God like? If someone asks you what God is like, what do you say? You might say mighty or powerful or omnipotent (if you did well with vocab in Confirmation Class). But that doesn’t really say much about what God is like – lots of people are strong, some for good and some for ill. You might say He’s the Creator – but if someone thinks their life stinks on ice, they might just be rather angry at their Creator. We could say He’s awesome or that He’s love – but what does that mean?

Jesus gives us a better and more direct answer. God is merciful. If you want to understand God, if you want to know what makes Him tick, the answer is mercy. His strength, His might, His creation and awesome love are all tied and focused together into this great truth: your Father is merciful. And everything that He does is shaped and formed towards showing you mercy, towards forgiving your sins in Christ Jesus.

And if you don’t look at God as merciful, you won’t understand anything. You’ll turn the Bible into a judgy-condemny book. You’ll be a blind man just dragging other people into pits with you. You’ll be a busybody complaining about specks when you have a log in your own eye. But when there is mercy – when you see how great a log has been forgiven you, then you will be ready to show mercy, to live in the mercy that God has for you.

Because Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn it but to save it, to show it mercy. And likewise, we are shown mercy by God not so that we can be arrogant jerks to the sinners, but so that we can show them mercy. So that we can show them Christ crucified for them, for their sin, to give them life. If you want to know what makes God tick – the answer is mercy, the mercy shown forth by your Crucified Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.