Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

Give any human institution enough time, and it will eventually become so complicated that normal people no longer have a clue how things run. Fallen human nature and bureaucracy always go together. Take the tax code, for example. Only professionals who study it for a living can understand it. The same is true for our legal and civil codes. You might know all the words that you are reading, but only a lawyer can tell you what they actually mean. When God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai, they were easy to understand. God’s Law is not complicated. It boils down to this: “Love God and love your neighbor.” It doesn’t get much simpler than that. But by the time of Jesus’ ministry on earth, the Pharisees had made the Law of God so complicated that they needed a whole army of religious lawyers to interpret it.

Imagine if lawyers ran the church! That’s how things were in Israel at the time of Christ. And the lawyers saw Jesus as a threat. He didn’t seem to care about their hundreds of addendums and amendments to the Law of God. Not only that, Jesus like to eat dinner with sinners and lawbreakers. He went around forgiving people and even invited a tax collector to be his disciple. So the religious lawyers came up with a plan to trap Jesus. He liked to eat dinner, did he? Good. They would invite him to dinner, and then they would spring the trap.

And so they did. They waited until the Sabbath. Why? Well, that’s part of the trap. Then they found a man with dropsy, or edema, a disfiguring disease that causes the body to retain excess fluids, and put him right when Jesus couldn’t miss him. Finally, once all the pieces were in place, they waited for Jesus to come, knowing that they had him cornered no matter what he did. The Holy Law of God forbade doing any work on the Sabbath. Therefore, if Jesus healed the man, which certainly qualified as work, he was a godless lawbreaker. But if he didn’t heal the man, they could accuse Jesus of being unmerciful and neglecting others. Catch-22. Then they watched with bated breath to see what Jesus would do.

Jesus knew exactly what they were up to, even though nobody had said a word. He answered their unspoken question, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” (Lk 14:3). The question exposes the ridiculous nature of the legal system that the lawyers had constructed. Only God has the power to perform a miraculous healing. What incredible arrogance the lawyers and Pharisees had to presume to tell God he is not allowed to heal on the day of rest that he appointed? “Does the Law of God allow me to heal on the Sabbath day?” Jesus asked. They couldn’t answer. If they did, they would fall into the trap they had set for Jesus.

The lawyers claimed to be experts in God’s Law, and yet, they didn’t know the first thing about it. They thought, “God gave me his Law so that I can help myself look good and make my neighbor look bad.” But that’s a misuse of God’s Law. The Law is not meant to be a weapon against my neighbor. The Law is designed to teach me how to help my neighbor. If I use God’s holy Law to hurt my neighbor and help myself, I am actually denying the whole law and placing myself under its judgment. The Law teaches me to love God above all things and to love my neighbor as myself.

It’s very common today to hear people say, “You need to learn to love yourself.” Guess what? You will never find that in the Bible. Never. No matter what the secular therapists say, your problem is not that you don’t love yourself. Quite the opposite. The problem that every sinful man or woman has is that we love ourselves and not our neighbors. That’s why Jesus says, “Love your neighbor in the same way that you love yourself.” Of course, I already know how to love myself. I don’t need help with that! What I need to learn is how to love and help my neighbor!

Did the Pharisees love their neighbor and dinner guest, Jesus? Of course not. In fact, they hated him and wanted to trap him. Did they love the man with dropsy? Nope. They were only using him to get at Jesus. And did they love the Law of God? No. To them God’s holy Law was only a tool to help them destroy Jesus and promote themselves.

Many Christians try to use the Bible in the same way. The Bible is a useful book because it helps me win arguments. When my brother asks me to pay the $100 that I owe him, I can tell him, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” When my friend says, “Quit being a jerk!” I can answer, “Judge not!” But we often misuse God’s Law in an even more subtle and dangerous way. “See, I did something nice for my neighbor. What a good person I am. What a good Christian I am.” This is simply more self-love, using the Law to promote and advance myself.

The Pharisees were quick to condemn Jesus for healing on the Sabbath, for loving and serving his neighbor, and yet, they were busy working every day of the week to climb to the top of the pile, to promote themselves, to make themselves look good at the expense of their neighbors. They were guilty of breaking the very law they accused Jesus of not keeping.

It’s very easy to be just like the Pharisees, to have the outward appearance of being a very good Christian, a keeper of the Law, and yet to have no love for one’s neighbor. Ask yourself? Is that me? Do I actually love my neighbor as the Law demands, or do I just go through the motions in order to be known and recognized as a good person? In other words, does my heart have the love that God requires, or is my heart full of self-interest and self-promotion? The answer is yes on both counts. Yes, you have the Holy Spirit and so the love of God has been shed abroad in your heart. Because you have the love of God, you can love your neighbor. You can put his needs before your own and you do. And yet, you are painfully aware that this side of heaven, you will always have that old sinful nature that only loves itself. Every day that Old Adam rears his ugly head and says, “There’s one item on the agenda today – me! Taking care of #1!”

This is why Jesus goes on to say, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk 14:11). It’s easy to find someone who likes to exalt himself. Look no further than your own heart. But where can you find the one who humbles himself? It’s hard, no it’s impossible for sinful man to do that. But there is one who did. There is only one who could. While the Pharisees were plotting how to trap him, while we were busy arguing about who would get the best seat, our Lord Jesus Christ took the lowest seat of all, the cross. He humbled himself and suffered death at the hands of his own people. He loved you, his neighbor, even when you did not love him.

Want to know what obedience to the Law looks like? Look to the perfect life of Jesus. Want to know what it means to keep the Sabbath perfectly? Consider the Holy Saturday during which the Son of God rested in his tomb after completing his labor of love upon the cross. Here is the measure of God’s love towards man, that while we were his enemies, Christ died for us. The Law that we could not keep, he kept perfectly in our place. This means that you are free. You are free from needing to misuse the Law in order to make yourself look good. Why? Because Jesus has already made you perfect. You are now free to use the Law of God to help your neighbor instead of judging him. Because God has loved you, you are free to truly love your neighbor. Amen.

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