Sexagesima
Dear friends in Christ. We are in the midst of the season of Pre-Lent—a season of the Church Year in which we are preparing ourselves for the rigors of Lent’s repentance. When in a week and a half we hear the call of Lent to examine heart and life and to repent of our sin, pre-Lent will have prepared us for that call. The psalmist and apostle write [Psalm 95.7, Heb. 3.15]: Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts. Yes, God’s holy law and to be accused of and condemned by sin is unpleasant. The natural, sinful, reaction is to try to explain away, deny, or minimize our sin; or in the word of Scripture: to harden your hearts against the voice of God in His Law.
Pre-Lent prepares us for the Law’s accusation. The Sundays of pre-Lent have Latin names telling us about how many days we are from Easter—like today has the name Sexagesima, which means we are about 60 days from Easter. So Pre-Lent, then, directs us ahead toward Easter, to Jesus’ resurrection victory over sin, death, devil and hell for us. That means, assured and certain of the forgiveness of sins, we, then, can enter the season of Lent boldly and hear His voice and so honestly examine our heart and life, not fearing what we will find and when we do find sin, we boldly confess it and trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of that sin and are certain that we are, in Christ, God’s dear child and heir of heaven. That is doing nothing more than remembering our baptism and what God does for us in and through it. Then, recognizing our sin and full of sorrow over it, we then run to our Lord’s altar to receive there, in our very mouths, His very body and blood for the forgiveness of that sin. In joy over that forgiveness and strengthened by the Lord we fight all the more against sin and strive to live a holy life.
Today’s Gospel is our Lord’s parable of the Sower. In this parable Jesus warns us that although the word of God has been preached to us and although we may even believe it, we dare not take that word for granted; we dare not take our faith for granted. We can lose our faith and thus our eternal salvation.
The point of Jesus’ parable is that even He, the “heavenly Sower”, as He goes out and through His Church scatters the seed of His word, suffers futility: not all who hear believe; some welcome and believe His word but as soon as it “gets tough” they fall away and no longer believe; others hear it but are too concerned with earthly cares and worries so that any faith they do have is soon choked out. Only the minority hears the word and believes it and remains in it.
What is this parable about? It’s about the final state of the word in the person’s heart. It’s a call to each of us look at his/her own heart: what is the state of God’s word in my heart? Do I hear and believe it? Is it number one? Our text is a call to us to take seriously and treasure God’s word—both His Law and His Gospel. When we do so, the season of Lent will yield its blessed fruits of greater faith and holiness in our lives.
Our text is a wonderful example of the seed of the word that Jesus sowed by His preaching bearing blessed fruit in the lives of the disciples. May our prayer be that we be like the disciples here: And when his disciples kept asking him what this parable meant… They didn’t want to be left in the dark/ confused; they didn’t want to understand His word incorrectly; they wanted to know and grow in their knowledge and faith so they kept asking him what this parable meant.
What was Jesus’ response? He said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’” The first thing that Jesus drives home to them is that it is purely by His grace that they hear and understand His word.
So what does it mean that God’s word is a word of grace? Simply this: truly to understand the word of God rightly is not an intellectual process. That means that we just cannot sit down and by using our own thought processes come to know the true God aright—that He is one God, one divine essence, but three distinct persons Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yes, reason, conscience, nature all tell us that there is a God but not Who that God is. Reason, conscience, nature can tell us nothing about God’s love for us and His desire and His work to save us from our sins. Who the true God is and His saving work for us is not something we can figure out, left to ourselves; it is something that God has to reveal to us—and He does so through His holy word, that very word through which the Holy Spirit is mightily at work. Luther puts it this way in the catechism: I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him.
What else does it mean that God’s word is a word of grace? –Simply this: none of us is more worthy than another, none of us is smarter than another, and so that’s why we are Christians. Instead, we are Christians and know the true God rightly and trust in Him for the forgiveness of sins and eternal life because He showed us grace and mercy and brought us to this faith and knowledge. That we are Christians is all God’s work; that we are Christians is not a feather in our cap so that God is obligated to us somehow. That we are Christians is great cause for us to give all praise, thanks, honor to our gracious Triune God.
That, then, leads us to what is so vital: to treasure the word of God that Jesus planted in our ears and hearts, because it’s His grace, it’s something we don’t/ can’t come to ourselves. As we treasure that word of God, it means that we like his disciples[, keep] asking him what this parable meant, that is, that we are faithfully and regularly in church hearing that word and its proclamation; it means that we keep reading and studying His word; it means that we read doctrinally correct devotional books; it means we study the bible in bible class here at church; in short, we keep delving into the word of God.
As we keep delving into the word of God—not relegating it to one corner of our life—but making it central and with the disciples keep asking him what this parable meant, the Lord will continue to lead us into further and further understanding. We can never get to the bottom of all that our Lord teaches us/ reveals about Himself in His holy word. What is essential, yes, is simple and can be grasped in faith by a child. What beauty there is in seeing how all the doctrines fit together into a seamless whole! And how faith is strengthened as we [keep] asking him what this parable meant, and so grow in faith and understanding.
The truths of Scripture must be revealed because they are mysteries. To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God. Again, everything about Jesus and His saving work is a secret/ mystery/ hidden to natural man, to people as they come into the word—it’s not something obvious like the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Instead, everything about Jesus and His saving work is a secret/ mystery that God has to reveal, and He does so in His word. And so what a treasure and privilege it is for us [keep] asking him what this parable meant. Because the more we ask the Lord to grow in our faith and understanding, the more He will grant it—like the disciples in our text were granted their prayer: his disciples [keep] asking him what this parable meant. What joy Jesus has as He leads us further and further into the truth. St. Matthew 11.25 records Jesus words of thanksgiving: I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. We, dear Christian, are the babes and what joy our Lord has in revealing Himself and His saving work to us!
But because the things of God, Jesus and His saving work, must be revealed and are not by human wisdom, that’s why God’s gracious word is rejected by so many. That’s the warning of our text: “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’” Jesus here quotes the prophet Isaiah.
Notice the contrast between the disciples/ Christians: To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God and the others. The very same sweet word of Jesus, the very same Gospel is preached to both. But what do the babes, the believers do? His disciples kept asking him what this parable meant. Yes, they had little spiritual knowledge/ understanding but kept asking him what this parable meant; they cared for the truth, they were open to what the Lord reveals. The others, though, they equally had little knowledge/ understanding but they hardened themselves; they did not care for the truth; although they heard Jesus and they saw Him perform miracles that confirmed His word they were not willing to believe.
So when Jesus taught them in parables—that great divide became clear. His disciples wanted to know, they wanted to grow in their faith and understanding so they kept asking him what this parable meant. And to them were given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God—because in the humility of faith they wanted to know and so they asked. And God in grace continues to reveal.
The rest/ others, took the opportunity of the parable that according to human reasoning was difficult/ impossible to understand to reject Jesus and His word. They did not want to understand—their hardness of heart caused their lack of understanding—and so they were not permitted to understand. Seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand: God allows—not causes—those who do not want to believe to be blinded; He lets them have it their way.
Will we always understand everything rightly and fully since we Christians will keep asking him what this parable meant? Hardly! For example, first after Easter and then fully at Pentecost, did Jesus’ disciples understand that Jesus had to suffer and die and rise again. Before that, when Jesus would talk about it and that it was all prophesied already in the OT, Peter, for example [Mt. 16.22], took [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, ‘Far be it from You, Lord; this shall not happen to You!” Yes, there will always be doctrines that we struggle with, that we will wrestle with—maybe even for the rest of our lives. But like the disciples that day, we keep asking him what this parable means. Don’t be afraid to. Yes, there will be things that we will simply have to accept on faith and continue to wrestle with all the how’s and whys. But as we do so, let us going to the word and asking him what this means.
Another comforting thing from our text is this: Jesus told His disciples, To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God. The Apostles were specifically chosen by Jesus to understand the mysteries He revealed in the parables and in all His teaching and to share them with the Church. In the body of doctrine that the Church has in the Holy Scriptures, there is everything that God has revealed and that is necessary for our faith and our salvation. Jesus sent His Holy Spirit to His apostles to keep them in their preaching and writing from any error. That’s why we can go to the Holy Scriptures and there find all that is necessary for our faith and life and be sure that it is truth. That’s why we continue to go back to the Scriptures, daily examining what we hear society telling us so that our minds and consciences are formed as to what is right and wrong, as to what is truth, not by human word and wisdom but by God and so live our lives accordingly.
Dear Christian, may our lives always be ones of, in the joy of faith, asking him what this parable means. For His word and His teachings are a word and teaching of grace, which He must reveal and which we, by His grace, will continue to grow in. INJ