Lent 4—Laetare
Beloved. Today we are at the midpoint of the holy and penitential season of Lent. Soon our attention will turn in particular to our Lord’s suffering and death, towards Holy Week and the events leading up to it. It is my prayer that you have not let these three weeks of Lent go to waste but have taken the opportunity Lent gives to examine heart and life again and anew in the mirror of God’s holy law and also to use this season to reflect and ponder again and anew Jesus’ work for us and our salvation, for you and for your sins that Lent’s time of quiet and reflection has brought to light. Here we see the beauty of taking our time to quietly ponder both our sin, which condemns us, and our Savior and His work, who has saved us. The more we recognize our sin, the more we desire and love our Savior from sin, Jesus Christ. The more we ponder Jesus and His saving work, the more we see the love and mercy of God toward us sinners; and recognizing and experiencing that love, how we love the Lord all the more!
Lent is not something to be rushed through to get it over with so we can move on to the joyous time of Easter. For there to be joy, there must first be sorrow. To truly understand and grasp the joy, sorrow must be first. We must fight against this urge to blow past Lent’s quiet reflection on our sin and Jesus’ suffering.
We see an example in the Gospel account of Jesus feeding the 5000. It ends with these words: When the people saw the miraculous sign Jesus did, they said, “This really is the Prophet who is coming into the world.” When Jesus realized that they intended to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself. Did you notice that? By this miracle the people recognized that Jesus is the Prophet who is coming into the world, the long awaited Messiah. So rushing things, they wanted to take him by force to make him king. This, too, was a temptation of the devil for Jesus—the way Jesus was to be King and gather a nation/ peoples/ subjects to Himself was by His suffering and death on the cross. The devil was tempting Jesus to glory/ kingship but without the suffering and death.
Today, people still want to blow past Lent, blow past repentance and want the glories of Jesus and all what they think He will give them—earthly/ material blessing. That’s not the type of king Jesus is; that’s not what His kingdom is about. Instead, it is as the apostles taught [Ac 14.22]: through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God, and that includes the tribulations of repentance. The rest of the chapter has Jesus preaching and at the end only the 12 remained with Jesus.
The better way is Jesus’ way in the Gospel account: Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” To sit down means to stay a while, to spend some time—and it means to be served. The one who stands serves; the one who sits is served. Us sitting down and Jesus serving—that’s a picture of our Christian life. Our lives/ Lent in particular is us, sitting down, examining our hearts and lives in light of God’s holy Law, recognizing our sin, being full of sorrow over our sin, asking the Lord to forgive us our sin. It is sitting down—taking/ making time for this most necessary of spiritual exercise; but it is also sitting down, that is, we are being served—by Jesus, as He gives us the forgiveness of sins, His righteousness, His Holy Spirit to fight all the more against sin; by Jesus coming to us with His very body and blood strengthening us and giving us every spiritual blessing.
Long story short—we don’t like the sitting and waiting, even if it is for our spiritual good and benefit. That sitting and waiting/ time of spiritual reflection is vital. Especially Lent is a time to sit—to spend time to recognize our sin and our need for a Savior and for Him to come serve us in word and sacrament; to wait on Him.
1. Our text today from St. Isaiah also talks about waiting—both the Lord and us. The situation of that time was that the Jews were in danger of being captured by the Assyrian Empire. Through St. Isaiah, the Lord told them to sit and wait, to rely on the Lord, He would rescue them [30.15]: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength. But they didn’t want to sit still and let the Lord serve them; instead, they took action on their own and sought an alliance with Egypt to protect them. And that would get them nowhere. A rebellious people turned away from the Lord, His word, His will. But what would the Lord do about it? He would wait for them to repent; to those who wait for Him, He will be gracious and merciful. What a glorious promise to us this Lenten season. The Lord waits on us and our repentance. And why? –To punish us? Hardly! But instead He waits in order to be gracious to us: Our text: Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.
Like back then with the Israelites, so also with us today: God sees us sinning and has put up with it. It’s not that He likes it, but in grace and mercy He is giving us time to repent. It is not license to sin; instead, it is a time of grace so that we do repent before our time of grace comes to an end because He, a God of justice, must punish the sinner. St. Peter writes by the Holy Spirit [2 Peter 3.9]: The Lord…is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. Through St. Ezekiel, the Lord says [Ezk. 33.11]: I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Through the holy prophet, St. Joel, the Lord says [Joel 2.13-14]: Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in mercy, and he relents from sending disaster. Who knows? He may turn and have pity and leave behind a blessing. And there are many more passages from Scripture, but the point is clear: the Lord is gracious and merciful and so He waits for us to repent of our sin.
Now is the time of grace. As much as Lent has a theme of repentance, so it also has a theme of grace. There would be no point of repenting, if, in the end, we would still only suffer hell and damnation. There would be no point of repenting if God didn’t want to forgive us, if God weren’t waiting there to forgive us our sins. Like with the Israelites to whom St. Isaiah first spoke our text: Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him—He was calling them to repent of their sin/ their plan of rejecting the Lord’s help and relying on the Egyptians to protect them. The same call goes out to each of us today—especially in Lent when we examine our hearts, minds, motives, etc.—repent of your sin—and why? Because God is still waiting; He wants to be gracious to you. Even though He has forbidden us something and we did it anyway, or commanded us to do something and we didn’t do it, God does not stop waiting to pardon us after we have sinned.
How much more gloriously can we see this than in Confession and Absolution? At Baptism we were brought into God’s holy family, to enjoy all His gifts and graces and made heirs of heaven. When we sin, when we turn away from our baptism, does that mean that we have lost it all? Absolutely not! Otherwise we shouldn’t baptize until the moment of death, lest a sin be committed in the meantime. But because our baptism stands firm, because God does not stop waiting to forgive us after we have sinned, He has given us Confession and Absolution. Confession is our daily remembrance of our baptism/ our daily return to our baptism to reclaim the gifts of forgiveness of sin, eternal life and heaven. And guess what? God is there—waiting for us—to give us those blessings in the Absolution spoken by His servant, the pastor. He stands waiting to give them to us fully and freely.
Not only is God waiting to show us mercy when we have sinned to forgive us our sin, but here He is most glorified. Our text: he exalts himself to show mercy to you. God is most glorified when He shows His mercy. As the almighty Creator of heaven and earth, yes, we expect God to do powerful/ mighty things. As the Holy One, yes, we expect Him to act mightily and punish evil and reward the good. But when He shows mercy and compassion, how that goes against our thinking! But this is His greatest work and the one that we praise Him for the most—Jesus’ coming and work, the forgiveness of sins, heaven, word and sacrament. Here we praise and glorify Him the most. And what is so glorious is that He waits for us to recognize and sorrow over our sins, going to Him in confession, so He can show us mercy and be gracious to us forgiving us our sins in Jesus.
2. Not only does our gracious Lord wait for us, but we also wait on Him. Our text: blessed are all those who wait for him. We don’t wait for forgiveness, because that is immediate—as soon as there’s confession, the absolution/ forgiveness follows. We don’t have to watch for white or black smoke to emerge. Our forgiveness is certain and immediate. But in other things we wait on the Lord to act. And while we wait, let us remember how our text describes us: blessed. We are blessed in the Lord. We stand under His mercy; we live under his grace; we enjoy the forgiveness of our sins and stand in a new and right relationship with Him; we are heirs of heaven and, in Christ, the recipients of every heavenly and spiritual blessing. Because of who the Lord is—gracious and merciful—and who we are—His dear children by faith in Jesus—we abide in faith, trusting and knowing the Lord to act in the right way for us in all our needs, to reveal His mercy to us also in all our physical and earthly needs. We wait for him, that is, we wait for God to work in the right and best way for us—even when He seemingly takes His time. We dare not fix time and place for God; we do not rely on what we feel, see and hear, but rely on Him whom we know in faith. We rely on His promise, that it, is fact/ truth: For a people shall dwell in Zion, in Jerusalem; you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as he hears it, he answers you. The prophets would often describe the Church with the names Zion or Jerusalem. Here is the glorious promise of the gracious God to His Church, to us! He will preserve us in the midst of all our dangers. We cry out to Him for help and He is gracious to [us] at the sound of [our] cry. And, in fact, as soon as he hears it, he answers [us]. And this why we are blessed if we wait on the Lord. In faith, we know that He always answers our prayers in the best way for us since He is gracious to [us] at the sound of [our] cry. But this means, that we will sometimes have to wait on Him because we don’t recognize His gracious answer, or reject His gracious answer as an answer.
But let us wait on the Lord, for He has promised: And the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction. It’s not that the Lord gives us what is detrimental to us or has delight in our afflictions. Instead, the bread of adversity and the water of affliction are the nourishment and sustenance our Lord gives us in the midst of our adversity and affliction so we don’t go under, until the right time comes for us to be rescued by Him. And in the midst of them, the Lord doesn’t let us flounder but gives us His holy word—the holy prophets and apostles—to strengthen and sustain us to show us the right and true way to eternal life: Your teachers will not hide themselves anymore, and your eyes shall see your teachers. And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.
As we wait on the Lord, we do well to ponder holy and unceasingly His holy word. Through it He leads us back to Him who is waiting for us that He might show us grace and mercy; and through His holy word and sacrament He is strengthening us as we wait for His glorious help and rescue. A glorious waiting game indeed. INJ Amen.