Lent 4—Laetare
Beloved. Today is a marked change in the Lenten season. In the Gospel readings we have gone from Jesus’ battles with the devil the first three weeks of Lent to today Jesus feeding the 5000. Our Introit has the theme of rejoicing: Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad with her. In fact, from the Introit, this Sunday is called “Laetare” which means in Latin, “Rejoice.” We do have cause for rejoicing. Lent, with all its rigors is now half over; Easter is closer. With this “Rejoicing Sunday” we are being strengthened and refreshed before we enter the somber and more intense final two weeks of Lent, Passiontide, which focus our attention especially on Jesus’ rejection, suffering and death—all for us, to save us from our sin.
So why do we have in this Sunday’s Gospel Jesus feeding the 5000? There are a couple of things at work here. First, we see a beautiful image of what the Church is. Jesus looked up and saw a huge crowd coming toward him. That’s the picture of the Church down through the ages—people being drawn to Jesus and attracted by Him. And then there is the fact that they are in the wilderness. What can the wilderness give them to eat—to sustain and preserve them? Absolutely nothing! Although there was much grass there, that could not sustain them. Jesus had to feed them in a wonderful and miraculous fashion. Again, this is a picture of the Church. We are in the midst of the wilderness of this world which cannot give us what we need spiritually to sustain us; the world and the things of the world cannot fill our spiritual longings. The only thing that will give us spiritual sustenance as we make our way to heaven is that which Jesus will give us—His holy word and sacrament. The Church, our Lord’s dear Christians, gather around Him in the spiritual wasteland and wilderness of the world—our Lord being the “oasis”—and are fed by Him. It is something He must and only He can do!
And then there’s this, the gathering of the fragments: Gather the pieces that are left over so that nothing is wasted.” So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with pieces from the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten. The gathering of the leftovers may not seem like much except for the fact that these leftovers were from after feeding 5000 with five loaves and two fish that Jesus had miraculously multiplied. But this gathering is a sign itself of something greater—and it was not lost on the crowds. Twelve large baskets were filled with pieces of bread—that was a picture and reminder of what the Messiah was to do—He was to gather the 12 tribes together. So when Jesus fed the crowds and gathered up 12 baskets of leftovers, that was a clear sign to the people that Jesus was the long awaited Savior. He provided abundantly for them and He gathered in 12 baskets, like the 12 tribes. And this sign was not missed by the crowds: When the people saw the miraculous sign Jesus did, they said, “This really is the Prophet who is coming into the world.”
But here we again meet, in the background, the devil trying to stop Jesus from carrying out His saving work by tempting Him away from the path of the cross: 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. How easy it would have been for Jesus to accept this, be made a king! But Jesus saw right through it. He knew the way to His kingship was through suffering and death, that He would be enthroned on the cross. There on the cross He would draw all peoples to Himself.
Here is a wonderful tie in to today’s Epistle, our text: The crowd that day wanted to make Jesus king; they wanted to be His subjects. At the very least, He fed them. But no one can make him/herself Jesus’ subject/ a Christian. We do not make ourselves Christians. Instead we are born anew/ born from above as Christians, as Jesus told Nicodemus [Jn 3.3,5]: Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God….Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Just as little as we had to do with our physical birth, even less do we have to do with our rebirth, our entering the Kingdom of God, of us becoming Christians. It is all God’s work!
So all this talk of rebirth and being born from above brings us to the question: if I am to be reborn, don’t I need a mother? And of course the simple answer is “yes!” And the next obvious question: And who is my mother? And that’s what St. Paul talks about in our text: But the Jerusalem that is above is free. She is our mother. The Jerusalem that is above is the Church! Luther writes it quite clearly in the Large Catechism [II, 42]: the [Holy] Spirit has His own congregation in the world, which is the mother that conceives and bears every Christian through God’s Word. Through the Word He reveals and preaches, He illumines and enkindles hearts, so that they understand, accept, cling to, and persevere in the Word. The Church is our holy mother who conceives and bears every Christian; and as her children we are blessed.
In our text, St. Paul brings us back to the OT account of Abraham. God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation and ultimately and most importantly, the ancestor of the world’s Savior, Jesus. The great problem with this, though, was that Abraham and, more importantly his wife Sarah, were elderly, way past child-bearing years. But they believed the Lord’s promise and when it seemingly wasn’t happening, they took matters into their own hands and according to the custom of the day, Sarah gave Abraham her servant to be the “surrogate” mother. Sure enough, the much younger slave did bear a son. But he was not the son that God had promised. Years later, Abraham and Sarah have a son, Isaac, the son that God promised. Through him and his descendants—the Israelites—the Savior would and did come. Our text: Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman, and one by the free woman. However, the son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but the son by the free woman was born through a promise. These things can be used as an illustration. This account beautifully illustrates that we don’t make ourselves Christians but that the Church is our mother who conceives and bears every Christian. When Isaac, the son God promised Abraham and Sarah, was born, she was 90 years old. She had been childless. Her womb was dead through age—she was way past childbearing years—and barrenness—what are the odds someone unable to have children in the prime could have children way past prime. But what does this show? The son by the free woman was born through a promise. Isaac’s conception and birth did not come about by the normal way according to the flesh, but by an extraordinary working of God through His word of promise. Just as Isaac “came about” because of the word and promise of God, so too does every Christian “come about” because of the word of God brings us to spiritual life—that word of God that has been entrusted to the Church and which she proclaims and administers. That means that left to ourselves we are like Sarah’s womb—dead through age and barrenness. We cannot bring ourselves to/ give ourselves spiritual life. We must be acted upon. We must have a spiritual mother in order to be born from above/ anew. That mother is the Church, which as Luther reminds us: the [Holy] Spirit has His own congregation in the world, which is the mother that conceives and bears every Christian through God’s Word. Through that word Jesus has given and entrusted to the Church—be it the word we hear or the word we see of the sacraments, the Holy Spirit is there forming us, creating us anew, giving us new spiritual life so we are born of mother Church.
But the Jerusalem that is above is free. She is our mother. This is all the working of God’s supernatural, mighty power—just like it was physically with Abraham and Sarah and the birth of Isaac, the son of the word and promise. Holy mother Church conceives and bears every Christian through the word of God. She gives birth by exercising the preaching office—be it proclaiming the word or administering the sacraments. St. Peter writes [1 1.23,25]: You have been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever….Now this is the word which by the gospel was preached to you. By the word and promise of God, which the Church proclaims, the Holy Spirit works to create faith in us—in us who are spiritually dead. Like Isaac, dear Christian, we have been fashioned and brought to life by the Spirit filled word; we have been born from above. Like with Isaac, all this is the grace and work of God working in the word. There is no other way we can be saved from our sin. All trust/ reliance on self and works, on other gods, on anything is excluded. It is purely God’s grace and work alone in the word that we are Christians; or, to put it differently: if we don’t have the Church as our mother, we cannot have God as our Father. He works in and through the word and sacrament He entrusted His Church to proclaim. And that is a powerful working!
And just like a mother does not give birth and then forgets the child, so also Mother Church continues to nourish and sustain us daily through that same Spirit filled word and Sacrament. The very fact that we remain Christians and grow in the faith is because of our Lord’s work in the word and sacrament. That same word is both milk for the babes in Christ and solid food for the mature in faith. Let us resolve these closing weeks of Lent to be more faithful and diligent in our hearing and studying the word. Let us resolve to come to the holy sacrament more regularly to receive Jesus and His body and blood and so unite more closely with Him. For through our Lord’s holy word and sacrament, at which our Lord is at work, our holy mother, the Church, is feeding and nourishing us unto life eternal.
With the Church as our mother, how blessed we are, dear Christian! With the same mother, all Christians throughout the world have the same Gospel, faith in Christ, Holy Spirit and sacraments. So what does this mean? It means that we are heirs of heaven and now living in a state of grace. This means that through faith in Jesus we are forgiven our sin and reconciled to God; our sin no longer separates us from Him. With the Church as our mother and God as our Father, we have the glorious certainty that as His dear children, our good and gracious Lord is working all things for our spiritual and eternal good. It means that in that Spirit worked faith, we are all the time receiving God’s grace and forgiveness—even when we are unaware of it, like when we are sleeping. It means that with the Lord in us, with His Holy Spirit in us leading and guiding us, we are always striving against sin and always seeking to do the will of God. All this—not because we hope to earn our way into heaven, but because we can’t help it: we are children of God; we want to show Him our love and thankfulness with our lives and works.
Remember what St. Paul writes in our epistle: Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of the promise. We are God’s dear children and heirs of heaven because of God’s promise to us—that promise of forgiveness of sin and eternal life in heaven because of Jesus. That’s what makes us Christians—we have all been born by the word of holy mother Church and as her children, we are the communion of those who believe the promise of the forgiveness of sins for Jesus’ sake. Only through faith alone in Jesus and His saving work alone are we the children of the Church.
But the Jerusalem that is above [the Church] is free. She is our mother. She conceives and bears every Christian by the word and we are blessed to be her children. INJ Amen