A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, April 7, 2019
St. Dunstan’s Anglican Church, Largo, FL
The Very Rev. J. Michael Strachan
Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-18
In our Gospel reading this morning,
Mary, the sister of Martha and the sister of the once-dead-now-alive-again
Lazarus anoints Jesus feet with perfume to prepare him for his coming death. This
is an appropriate reading for this Sunday, the fifth Sunday of Lent, because
today we turn our eyes more clearly to the cross of Jesus Christ. Even though
we are still in Lent, with the fifth Sunday in Lent the liturgy changes in
certain ways in order to draw our attention and our focus to the cross. From
here until Easter morning the liturgy will continue to do this. Next Sunday,
Palm Sunday, we will have two Gospels readings: first, the Palm Gospel in which
we here of Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and second, the Passion narrative. On
Maundy Thursday we will share a meal with him as he prepares himself and his
disciples for his impending death. And on Good Friday, we will again hear the
Passion narrative and walk with him through his death on the cross.
In this way, the last week of
Jesus’ earthly life before his resurrection, liturgical time slows down, and we
walk with him one day at a time through this holy week, not only because the
events of Holy Week are the most significant events in all of human history,
but also because his story is our story. His death is our death and his
resurrection is our resurrection if we are in him, if we are his.
Have you ever thought about what it
is that makes you special? We live in a culture today where everyone is told
that they’re special, and some will say that if everyone is special, then no
one is. Of course, that’s obviously untrue. Just because some want to say that
everyone is special doesn’t mean that everyone is special in the same way. If
we aren’t here by cosmic or genetic accident, if we are here because God has
created us uniquely as individuals, then we should recognize that each of us is
unique, each of us is special, and each of us is created by God not randomly
but with a plan and a purpose.
Paul, in our reading this morning,
is laying out his credentials for what makes him so special. Even more than
this, Paul is laying out his unique claim to be to salvation, his claim to be
special in God’s eyes. And isn’t that the best kind of being special?
Most of us were raised on a version
of Christianity that was based on a mistake. Most of us who have heard and read
the Apostle Paul for most of our lives were raised with the belief that Paul is
contrasting his doctrine of salvation or justification by faith with a Jewish
works-based understanding of justification. It’s said that in the
first-century, Paul’s Jewish brethren believed they could earn their salvation
by keeping the law, and in contrast to that, Paul came preaching the doctrine
of justification by faith alone through grace alone. The Jews said you must
keep the law; Paul said you only have to believe in Jesus.
Except, it’s not clear that any Jew
in the first-century believed you had to or even could earn your salvation. So,
let me explain how this works. In first-century Judaism, salvation was always
something future. We speak of being saved now, but in Paul’s day they were
waiting for God to save them. They were waiting for God to act. If then you
were to ask, when God finally acts, who is he going to save, the answer would
be obvious: the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But then the question
becomes, who are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and how do you
know? The Jewish people spent almost five centuries in exile. Only the southern
kingdom came back. Many Jews intermarried, adopted Gentile practices, language,
and customs, and what it meant to be a child of Abraham became less clear. And
if God’s going to act for this particular group of people, this particular
subset of humanity called the children of Abraham, then how does one know that
you’re in the club, that you’re in the right group?
The Pharisees had their answer. So
did the Sadducees, the Zealots, and the Essenes, the people of the Dead Sea
Scrolls community. Different sects asked different questions to get their
answer, but there were some commonalities among the questions. Were you
circumcised and on what day? Are you an Israelite? What tribe are you from? Are
you of mixed or pure blood? How knowledgeable are you about the law? How
zealous are you in defending the Jewish way of life? Do you faithfully keep the
With those questions in mind,
listen again to what Paul says makes him so special: “If anyone else thinks he
has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth
day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as
to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to
covenantal faithfulness under the law, blameless” (Phil 3:4–6).
The irony is that, as much as the
church today upholds the doctrine of justification by faith, many of us could
make a similar list. So, what is it that you think makes you special in God’s
eyes? What’s your list? To put it another way, when you stand before the
judgment seat of Christ, what will you tell him? Will you tell him about how
much you gave to the church? Will you tell him about how long you’ve been a
member here? Will you tell him about all the Sunday school lessons you’ve
taught or all the sermons you’ve given? Or maybe you’ll tell him about all the
times you’ve celebrated mass.
These are all good things. If we
were doing salvific accounting, they’d all be on the plus side. But Paul says
this: “But whatever was to me ‘gain’ (on the plus side), these things I
consider to be a loss because of the Messiah. Indeed, I count everything to be
a loss because of surpassing greatness of knowing Jesus the Messiah, my Lord,
for whose sake I have forfeited everything, even more I regard them as trash that I might gain the Messiah and
be found in him not having a covenantal status that comes through the law but a
covenantal status that comes through the faithfulness of Jesus, which is the
covenantal status according to faith, which is to know him and the power of his
resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, taking on the same form as
his death, if somehow I might attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
So, let’s unpack this. First, we
speak about being saved now, but no one is truly “saved” from death until they
rise again with a new body that will never die. This is important to stress.
Without Easter, God doesn’t save Jesus from Good Friday. You aren’t saved from
death when your soul escapes your body. You’re saved from death when you rise
Second, if that’s the case, then
the only thing that truly matters in this life is rising again into the next
life. If we’re making a ledger, considering that truth, everything that we
think makes us special, everything that we think gives us good standing before
God, is meaningless. There’s only one thing that matters in this world, and
that’s when God acts at the end of the history of this world, that we are, as
Paul says, “found in him.” Though his faithfulness, we who are in him by faith
and baptism must forsake anything else that we think gives us good standing
before God, and instead believe that we will be found in him, that our
covenantal status won’t have anything to with our flesh, with all those things
that Paul listed and their modern equivalent, and instead have everything to do
Third, it’s his faithfulness that
is our guarantee, and not our own. And so, what does it look like to be in him,
to have out covenantal status defined by his? It means letting go of everything
that we think gives us right standing before God and putting our faith in what
God has done through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. It means
getting to know Jesus personally. It means experiencing the power of his
resurrection both in this life and in the life to come. And perhaps most
significantly, it means conforming our lives to his death.
Paul says in Romans 8, arguably the
greatest chapter in the Bible, that those whom God foreknew, he has predestined
to be conformed to the image of his son. And I know what you think when you
hear those words. When you think of the image of God’s Son, you think of glory.
Except that word is the same word Paul uses here in Philippians when he speaks
being conformed to Jesus’ death. You see, in Paul’s mind, it’s very simple. You
can’t be conformed to the glory, unless you are first conformed to the cross. To
say that his story is our story means to take all of history, not just the parts
that we like. So, we take the cross now, because it has become the tree of
life. We conform our lives to his death now, so that we will share in his
resurrection on the last day. We take Good Friday now because Easter is coming.
Amen.
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