Author: Rev. Eric Brown

“Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”

So much fear. Understandable fear. The disciples had just seen Jesus killed in a most horrific way by an angry mob, so they were hiding for their lives. Even having heard of the resurrection, they hide. Yet, the fear of man has never stopped Jesus from being a merciful and gracious Lord. He shows on up right there in the middle of that locked room and proclaims peace. Peace – you are forgiven. See, I’ve died and I have been raised. The strife is o’er, the battle done! And you will be proclaimers of that same peace!

And yet, what do we see a week later? Still locked doors. Still fear. Of course there is – the world still is a scary place. The disciples have lived a week full of that fear, full of doubt and disbelief. And so the doors get locked again – but Jesus is persistent. He shows up anyway and proclaims His peace again. He even does so to poor fearful Thomas. Yes, Jesus’ peace is really for you, even you hiding in fear.

In the meaning to the first commandment, we say that we should “fear” God above all things. With these words we are actually acknowledging that there is a lot in this world that we could (and to a certain extent should) be afraid of. And there are a lot of people who gain power and profit off of making you afraid. And our fears drive us to do crazy and strange, horrible things. Things that are destructive to ourselves and to our neighbor. Yet, in reality, rather than listening to our fears, the One that we should fear, the One we should be most worried about ticking off or annoying, is God.

And we think He’s going to just hammer us, but there comes Jesus, striding into this rat’s nest of fear, and He says, “Peace be with you.” Peace – I’m not here to smite, I’m here to establish peace and conquer sin, death, and Satan. I’m here to show that all the punishment has been taken up by Me. Fear has to do with punishment (1 Jn 4:18), but you are in My perfect love. You are mine, you are in Me, and so there is no condemnation (Rm 8:1). This is where you live. This is the truth that the world and your sinful flesh want you to forget. You are baptized into Christ – and He says Peace be with you. And He means it. And His peace is stronger than any fear you face in this world – His peace raises folks from the dead.

Of course Mary was weeping. It wasn’t just that she loved Jesus – we skirt by that idea so quickly that it almost doesn’t really mean anything. Mary knew that Jesus loved her, that her life was better because of Jesus. She had been isolated, possessed by demons, and many think trapped in prostitution. Then Jesus came to Mary, and He loved her. And suddenly, because of Jesus she was cleansed, she had friends and companions, she had good relationships. Jesus loved her. And Jesus is dead. Is this all going to fall apart, is it all going to go back to the way it was? Jesus had held everything together; now is it all going to fall apart?

It looks that way. A scattered panic. Even when she goes to Peter and John for help, they just ditch her, leaving her sobbing by the tomb. When she turns and sees the “gardener” the best Mary thinks she can hope for is to drag a dead body across a garden all by herself.

Then it all shifts for the good. Jesus, her risen Lord and Savior, calls her by name. It is only when she hears Christ Jesus, now raised from the dead, call out, “Mary” that Mary is ripped away from her fear and sorrow. Her Jesus is not gone – He is here. For her.

Jesus is not gone – He is still here and present for you in His Word. In fact, He tied that Word to water and called you by your name at your Baptism, bringing you into the joys of His resurrection, sealing you with a promise that you would always be His, that not even sin or death or anything in this world would be able to separate you from His love. And He promised you a resurrection like His. And we shall see it. Until that day when we see Jesus face to face, we whom He has called by name are still called to gather around His Word, the preaching of the Gospel, and His Supper, where we hear and receive Him again and again. In a world that tries to rip everything asunder, the Risen Christ calls us together by name.

Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed, alleluia!

The rage and hatred of Satan is palpable. Satan’s hatred of God is so strong, so intense, that whenever He sees something good from God, he wants to ruin it, crush it. And then comes Jesus, and all throughout Jesus’ ministry Satan is frustrated and defeated. He tried to tempt Jesus into wickedness – that normally worked with humans – but it didn’t work with Christ Jesus, the Son of God. And Jesus leaves the wilderness, heads back into Israel – and Jesus,the Holy One of God, messes with Satan. Where illness corrupted the body, Jesus would heal. Where lack and hunger brought sorrow, Jesus would bring plenty. Where demons held people in bondage, Jesus would set free. On and on it goes, until Jesus even rides on into Jerusalem, the abode of peace.

Enraged, Satan is determined to strike at Christ. There is nothing the devil would love more than to wound the Holy one, than to get at Him somehow. And an opportunity presents itself, and Satan strikes. This loyal Jesus is betrayed. This just Jesus suffers injustice, both of a sham court as well as rulers who would not protect Him. This Jesus, the Lord of Life, is handed over to death. And there, at the Cross, Satan thought he had finally gotten the upper hand – the ultimate defilement. The Living One of Israel would die.

Satan knew the scriptures, but he did not believe them. He did not understand them. What Satan thought was his victory over Jesus and His holiness, His righteousness, His purity was in fact an invasion. The strong man thought his goods were safe, but He just dragged the stronger Man, Christ Jesus, into His palace. With His death, Jesus would wreck and destroy death. He would shatter the power and terror of Satan. Satan bruised Christ, but Christ crushed the Devil. Satan pierced Christ’s side, but Jesus deranged the old serpent. This One you foolishly killed, Satan – He will rise, and because He rises, we all do with Him.

“Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear My word.” – John 8:43

The end of John 8 has Jesus in one of the great arguments in Scripture. It is such a bad argument that by the end people are ready to stone Him. So why? What gets folks so angry? Well, Jesus notes that they cannot bear to hear His word – but what word is that? In verse 32 Jesus had said, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” This should be a good thing, right? Except their pride was pricked. They didn’t want to be helped; they wanted to do it on their own. They didn’t like being told that they were actually enslaved to sin and that they needed a real rescue from sin and death.

We can have a hard time hearing God’s word in its full, unbridled power. We don’t like the full, unabashed Law that shows us our sin and that we deserve death; we will often instead try to water it down into mere moral advice. We fight against the full, unabashed Gospel where Jesus does everything; we will instead try to water Him down into a mere teacher who gives us a gentle push in the right direction. That’s what all false teaching is – a blunting of the law and a gutting of the Gospel. That’s what our sinful flesh likes. We want to be the hero of the story, and when Jesus tells us that He is the One who does the saving (and that we really needed some real saving), our flesh gets all riled up.

Yet Jesus is persistent in His desire to save you. He has baptized you, not just to forgive your sins once, but so that daily His word would drown and beat down your sinful flesh that wants to get all proud and boisterous. He continually and repeatedly gives you His Word and Spirit, so that you would have His life. He comes to you and gives you His Body and Blood so that He does in fact rescue you from sin and death, both now and eternally. He opens your ears to hear, so that you receive from Him every good gift.

“Jesus said, ‘Have the people sit down.’ Now there was much grass in that place.” – John 6:10

What does Jesus see when He sees this crowd coming towards Him? We could say that they are people who are simply following Him because He’s being doing miracles. Or that they don’t understand yet that He’s the Savior. And even when they do figure out that He is the great and promised Prophet, they’ll only want to make Jesus king by force. Jesus will have to run away to keep this from happening. In fact, by the end of this chapter, most of the folks here will be flat out mad at Jesus – that’s the rest of the discussion in John 6.

So what does Jesus see when He looks out over that crowd? Is it people who are foolish and troublesome? Is it the failure of generations worth of teaching? Is it a bunch of greedy and needy people who view Him not for who He is but just for the stuff He might give them? While those might be the things we’d be most inclined to see, Jesus sees something else. He sees people to love. The Good Shepherd sees His (often wayward) sheep, and He makes them to lie down in green pasture. And He will care for them now. And He will care for them upon the Cross. Jesus sees people to love.

So often the way that we view the world, life, ourselves, and certainly other people is dominated by sin. We see, we assess, we judge and categorize people on the basis of their sin and how annoying their particular sins are to us. These folks are just mildly annoying, but these over here are too much trouble. And we easily and readily write of people and discard them (especially in these days of rising tribalism).

That person you disdain; that’s just another person Jesus actually and truly loves. That’s another person Jesus loves and died for. And you know what? Those times when the person you disdain is the one you see in the mirror, those times when you are disgusted with yourself – well, guess what? You still are a person Jesus loves. Still a person Jesus died for. Still a person whom Jesus washed in the waters of Holy Baptism and made holy and blameless without spot or blemish.

Jesus sees you truly as His own beloved. That’s the truth, that’s the highest reality. He went to the cross to make it real. God grant us more and more to see this truth!

“But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”

What does it mean if a kingdom comes upon you? That’s not how we normally think of it. You think of a kingdom coming TO you or you coming TO a kingdom. But upon? Upon is battle language. When the Marines come landing on to your island, when the army hits the beach on D-Day, that means the US Military has come upon you.

The world sees Jesus preach and heal, cast out demons. Those don’t generally seem like violent actions (maybe the casting out of demons), but in reality they are acts of war against Satan and his kingdom. They are the Kingdom of God and His might and power bursting in upon this world that Satan had claimed as his own, upon people that Satan had claimed as his own. Jesus, throughout His earthly ministry was constantly waging warfare against Satan and his powers.

Jesus continues to wage this war against Satan, Sin, the world, and our flesh, whenever His Word is preached. The Word of Christ breaks down the powers of evil and rescues us from Satan. Baptism drowns the old Adam. The word of forgiveness destroys sin. And the Supper gives us life and strength for the week to come as we venture into hostile territory. This is the battle Christ fights for you, this is the battle He wages even against your own sin, as He takes it away from you and kills it upon the Cross.

It’s a battle. And battles often become loud and scary and confusing. Yet take heart; the victory remains with Jesus, and you are won to eternal life by Him!

“Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these I will give You, if you fall down and worship me.” – Matthew 4:8-9

Satan here lays out for Jesus a very simple fact. One that we don’t like. Satan owned us. Satan is ‘this world’s prince’ as Luther has us sing it. And that’s not something we think about. It’s not something we ponder. We toss Satan off into a corner and like to forget about him once the Sunday service is over. We don’t talk about evil either – even when there’s a disaster we can’t say that someone was evil; there’s surely some systemic flaw or we were lacking some law that would have kept everyone safe.

Satan cuts across all that. See this world, Jesus? It’s mine, and its full of wickedness and evil and I like it that way. And yet, Satan seeks to cut a deal. The Evil One knows that Jesus is out to win you and I away from Satan’s clutches. He knows Jesus comes to take us out of Satan’s Kingdom into God’s Kingdom. So, Satan offers a solution. Jesus, just be my number two fella. You can have all of these people to do with as you please. All you have to do in return is worship me instead of destroying me.

Satan offers Jesus a plan of “salvation” (if you can even call it that) without the Cross. No messy Good Friday. No battle stupendous. No pain. But, you could still gain, Jesus! And as we know from the Gospel account, Jesus will have none of it. Of course He wouldn’t. It was false worship that got mankind into this mess, therefore false worship won’t fix it. We were not created by God just to spend a few years living out lives of sin. We were created to live forever with God.

And so Jesus Christ came down from heaven into a world full of real sin and violence and wickedness. A world that always tries to justify and explain all that sin away. But, instead of mollycoddling sin and death, Jesus took it all up and destroyed sin and death upon the cross. He rose on the Third Day to trample Satan under His feet. From this alone, we can believe that Jesus is determined to deliver us from evil, no matter what, all thanks be to God.

“And after flogging Him, they will kill Him, and on the third day He will rise.”

Even when Jesus spelled it out, even when He told them point blank about His death and resurrection for a third time, the disciples didn’t get it. They didn’t want a suffering and dying Messiah, they wanted a Messiah who was going to kick some backside and take some names! They wanted a Messiah who was going to rule and give them goodies galore. Isn’t that what we want a Messiah, a “god” to do? Give us more and more “blessings” – by which we mean stuff and might and power? By nature, we’d prefer a God who is like a kindly uncle who shows up, gives us a bunch of gifts, and then leaves us alone.

Jesus can’t do that, though. He won’t. Why? Because Jesus knows what sin is. Sin isn’t something to be brushed off lightly – sin is death. Sin breaks and destroys and kills. How often has sin broken friendships, destroyed your joy and peace, killed things you hold dear? We try to brush that under the rug, move on; pretend it never happened, and pretend it will never happen again. But Jesus doesn’t ignore sin. He doesn’t pat it on the head. Jesus doesn’t affirm sin. Instead, He becomes man and takes up your sin onto Himself, and He drags it to the cross in His own flesh, and He kills sin even with His own death.

Then, He will rise. He will rise triumphant over sin and give you life. True life. Life that isn’t defined by how much money you have, or how many likes and favorites. No, Jesus gives you true life – Himself. Jesus gives Himself to you. Having taken away your sin, He doesn’t leave you empty and on your own, He makes you to be His own holy temple. He promises to be with you all your days, because He knows that you still wander a sinful world and still have your own sinful flesh that fights against you. And He will not abandon you to that, He won’t treat your temptations lightly. Instead, He will be with you to return you to your Baptism and strengthen you with His Body and Blood over and over – even until you die and rise and sin is made truly a thing of the past. This is the blessing, this is the victory Jesus is determined to win for you, and He will let nothing get in the way of His love and salvation for you.