Called by Jesus, Our Ransom
In a world filled with trouble, we all need the Church and we need a preacher who will crucify us with God's Law and set us free with Gospel of Jesus Christ
[This is the sermon shared today with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on the Installation of Pastor Andrew Prin as senior pastor of the congregation. The text was Mark 10:35-45.]
After the Vietnam War Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., a slightly smaller replica toured the country. When the replica wall went to Chicago, a local television station sent a crew to talk with visitors. Why, a reporter asked a veteran of the war, standing by the wall, had he come to see it? “Because,” he said, as he ran fingers across one name, “this man saved my life.”
Friends in Christ, Jesus, God the Son did even more–infinitely more–than the soldier, even with all his heroism and selflessness, did who saved a buddy’s life in Vietnam. John the Baptist said of Jesus, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29) Jesus took the condemnation for sin and our inborn separation from God into Himself, to give righteousness and eternal life to those who hear His incredible promise which sparks and empowers faith in Christ within us: ”your sins are forgiven.” (Mark 9:2)
Jesus did that by giving His life for us. Jesus, in the most important verse of our lesson, says of Himself, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45)
The word translated as ransom is, in the original Greek of the New Testament, λύτρον. This word usually refers to the ransom money paid to set slaves or POWs free. The ransom Jesus pays to give us freedom from sin, death, and condemnation is Jesus
Himself. Jesus is our ransom money! Though truly God and truly human, He acceded to death, damnation, and hell and emptied Himself of the privileges of deity and heaven, so that He could fill you with His righteousness and His life now and for eternity. Only after Jesus had been dead in the grave from Good Friday to Easter Sunday did the Father raise Him, confirming that death did not imprison Jesus or those who trust in Him.
Of Jesus, we can truly say, “This Man saved my life!”
But why did Jesus need to remind the disciples and us of all of this?
Just before the start of our lesson, Jesus shares for the third time what the Bible scholars call His “passion prediction.” “See,” Jesus tells the twelve we know as apostles, “we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise.” (Mark 10:33-34) You’ll remember that the first time Jesus made a similar statement, Peter shook Jesus and said, “This will never happen to You, Lord.” Peter was chastising Jesus because, as any good Jew who believed that God would send a Messiah–a Christ, an Anointed King–knew, no self-respecting Messiah would ever be captured, rejected, wounded, or killed. Jesus tells Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan.” That’s because Peter wanted to impede Jesus from doing what He came to this earth to do: to offer His life as our Ransom.
Listen, we all, Christians and non-Christians alike, tend to underestimate the gravity of our sin. We’re not sure we really need a Savior to ransom us from hell and condemnation. We think that we’re basically good people and that with a bit of tweaking on our parts–a few things like prayer, a bit of groveling to God, some nice things done for others, donations to churches and charities, and providing for our families, we’ll be heaven-bound…that is, if we really believe there’s a heaven.
But no amount of tweaking or good works done by us will ever change you and me. Our sinful condition is deep and damning. Speaking of the human race after the flood, when there were only eight human survivors on the planet, each of them worshipers of God, God says in Genesis: “the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth.” (Genesis 8:21)
Yet we all harbor the illusion that maybe we can evade our death, our cross, and skip ahead to a resurrection. We think this even though Jesus tells us: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) There is no life with God, no resurrection, no life in God’s kingdom, without death.
Even before we physically die, which, unless Jesus comes back before we do so, we must die daily to our sin.
If we were blessed with caring parents, the dying that leads to rising with Christ started at our Baptism as infants or children.
Galatians 8:21 says of Baptism: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
When we are baptized in the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are fully claimed by God. But until we’re set free from this old flesh and Jesus gives us new bodies in the new heaven and the new earth, we will remain subject to temptation. We will sin. The devil will still use the political and religious beasts he unleashed after the risen Jesus ascended into heaven and the devil was tossed out of heaven to tempt us to put our faith in other gods: security, money, political isms and personalities, entertainments, our own brains.
When James and John heard Jesus predict His passion for a third time, their minds slipped past Jesus’ suffering and death. “Whatever,” they think, “Jesus is going to come out on top. I want a piece of that action.” That’s when they ask Jesus that once He goes through whatever He’s going to go through, they could be his right and left hand men.
Jesus asks them: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” (Mark 10:38)
When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, it was to “fulfill all righteousness,” that is to make our sins His own, which is what Paul means when he says, “[God the Father] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) And the cup to which Jesus refers is the cup of suffering and condemnation He mentions to God in His prayer at Gethsemane: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42) “Are you able to bear these things that lie before you in this life before any resurrection victory?’ Jesus is asking. James and John answer glibly, “We are able.”
Jesus says that only the Father will decide where their places will be in the kingdom. But He can tell them that they will endure the same baptism He underwent and drink from the same cup. He tells you and me the same thing.
And this is why we need the Church and we need a preacher.
We need to know, as James, martyred for his faith in Christ, and John, who died in exile on the island of Patmos for that same faith, came to know: “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)
More than to be told the Word of God though, we need the Word of God to be done to us again and again, because we are weak sinners who, like stupid sheep, chasing after the next thatch of grass, easily drift from our Savior.
You need a preacher who, in the administration of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion and in the loving handling of the Word, will crucify you for your sin, and then raise you from the dead as through the preacher, Jesus tells you, as only a crucified AND RISEN LORD can, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” (Luke 5:20)
Pastor Prin, called to be the pastor who preaches the crucifying, resurrecting Word of Jesus in this congregation, and people of Living Water, sisters and brothers in Christ, Ann and I are glad to be here to celebrate your recently-formed partnership.
I ask, Living Water, that you will be open to your pastor, as you always were to me, as he does the work that the Holy Spirit and you have called him to do.
Pastor Prin, simply give this people God’s Word that, called to repentance and faith, they too will know that in Christ, all their sins are completely forgiven. Amen