Jesu Juva
“An Incomprehensible
Truth”
Text: Isaiah 6:1-8; Acts
2:14a, 22-36; John 3:1-17
Grace, mercy, and peace
to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Today we celebrate a mystery. The
mystery of the Holy Trinity. That the only God, the one true God, is
three persons but only one God, one essence, and that this one essence is three
distinct persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each 100% God, and yet there
are not three gods, but one God. A mystery. A mystery
we try to verbalize in the words of the Athanasian
Creed, which we’ll soon speak. But though we verbalize it, speak it, we cannot
explain it. It is a mystery. Beyond our ability to comprehend
or understand. Too large for our small minds to wrap
around, too holy for our sinful minds to grasp. We can simply speak the
truth as the One who is truth has revealed it - and Himself - to us. This is
who God is.
And so one of the essential and foundational
truths of Christianity we cannot explain - we can only confess. This is the
truth. That has led some to mock us. How can you believe in a God you cannot
even really explain? But perhaps the question really should be: How can
anyone believe in a god they can? For if we could fully understand and
explain God, figure Him out and contain Him in our minds,
that would make us greater than God and, in fact, make us god. That’s
what satan wants and so
mocks the idea of the Trinity and the mystery. That’s what our sinful natures
want as well, not content to humbly rest in the mystery, but to master it; to
master God and put Him in our debt and so turn everything upside-down. For
that’s what sin does - it makes good evil and evil good; it makes the truth a
lie and lies the truth; it makes man his own god, master of his own destiny and
shaper of his own fate. And then most to be pitied.
For you are a dying god and one whose kingdom is falling apart and does not
last. You are a god who cannot even save yourself.
So today we confess the truth - that God is (to
use some of the words of the creed) uncreated, infinite, eternal, almighty,
incomprehensible, holy. Everything we are not, He is. All that we have is from
Him, and all that we have He does not need. And so we are here in the presence
of this great and awesome God not to give but to receive; not to do but to
rest; not to get answers and information but to worship. For the true worship
of God is not primarily an intellectual or moral exercise, a thinking or
doing - it is to receive life from Him in the forgiveness of our sins. For when
you have forgiveness you have life, whether you live or die.
And our model of that today is Isaiah. Isaiah got
it exactly right. In the presence of this almighty, infinite, incomprehensible
God, he was toast. And he knew it. He was unclean. And not
just his lips, but all of him. His heart, his
mind, his eyes - all unholy and corrupted by sin. And therefore his
coming into the presence of a holy God was like gasoline coming into the
presence of fire. And so he is undone and filled with fear. Woe is me,
he cries out. I am dead.
Yet something most wonderful happens. He does not
die. There is something Isaiah has not taken into account. There is an altar. An altar for sacrifice. And when something from that altar
touches his uncleanness, he is not toasted! Rather, his guilt is taken
away and his sin atoned for. Or in other words, he is
made clean; he is made holy; he is forgiven. He is born again,
raised from the death of his sin to a new life. Nothing he did. He just died,
so to speak. It’s what God did. And with that his dread and fear are gone,
replaced by faith and hope and confidence. So that when the voice of the
Lord then says, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
- us: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - Isaiah hesitates
not one moment! Here am I, your child. Here am I,
the one you have made alive and rescued from death. Here am I! Send me.
It is what happens here and wherever God gives
His gifts. You, lost and condemned sinners, are made
alive and rescued from death. You cry out “Woe is me!” in
confession and death, and the Lord answers with forgiveness and life. You are born
again and raised when the sacrifice of God from the altar of the cross
- the Father’s own Son! - touches you and your
guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. The
uncleanness of your lips and hands and minds and hearts made clean when
the water from the sacrifice touches your head, when the word of the sacrifice
touches your ears and heart, when the body and blood of the sacrifice touches
your lips. And you are made new. A gift just as incomprehensible, powerful,
infinite, and eternal as the God who gives it - and keeps giving it - to you.
And with this gift the Lord is now sending you. But where? This too may be incomprehensible. It may not be
where you think and not where you want, but where He needs. Maybe He will send
you into suffering, or to suffer with a loved one. Maybe you will be sent into
grief or hardship, into pain or sadness. Maybe into joy,
maybe into the unknown. But wherever or however it is, you are not alone
and never will be. For the God who sends you is with
you. The Father, who gave His Son for you and gives His Spirit to
you, won’t stop giving what you need . . . including
Himself. And maybe that will be through others who He sends to be with you.
That, too, is often incomprehensible, isn’t it? How God brings Himself and others into our lives and gives His good to us.
But most incomprehensible of all is how this
awesome, holy, infinite, almighty, eternal God became small - became a man.
That too is in the Athanasian Creed. That the Son of
God in person, but all of God in essence, became man in the one single
fertilized egg of His mother Mary, and was born and grew for us. How can the
God who created all things become a creature? How can the God who feeds all
creation Himself need to be fed? How can the all-powerful God become weak and
lowly? Yet this too we confess. And His death on the cross in our place - not
because He couldn’t save Himself (like us), but because He wouldn’t
- to provide the atonement, the forgiveness, we need and cannot live without.
That dying and rising, we who are dead might rise too, with Him, to this new
life. That’s the truth Peter was preaching on Pentecost, when the Lord sent him
after raising him from the death of his denials.
And that’s what Jesus was trying to teach
Nicodemus, who seems to me like a very modern man. He wants to learn and get
things figured out. He wants to wrap his mind around God and the things of God,
like so many today. But he can’t. Jesus is telling him incomprehensible
mysteries. About God and what God is doing; about being born again and born
from above. Nicodemus wants to be in the classroom, but before Jesus he is in
church. Jesus has come to give him what he needs - not understanding, but
Himself.
Nicodemus doesn’t get it . . . not at first. That
he needed to be like Isaiah. But it seems like he did later, being one of the
two men who cared for Jesus after He died, taking His body down and laying it
in the tomb. Maybe it was that very day that connected the dots for Nicodemus,
when the sacrifice from the altar touched him and raised him, when he saw Jesus
on the cross and remembered those words spoken to him a few years before in the
darkness of night: And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have
eternal life. And his guilt was taken away and his sin
atoned for.
So whether it is Isaiah, Nicodemus, Peter, or
you, the story is the same. Our incomprehensible God does incomprehensible
things. His love, His forgiveness, His life, His incarnation, His death and
resurrection, His Spirit, Word, and Sacraments now in all the
world - we might ask today with Nicodemus: How can these things be?
And even if we cannot explain it, we confess it. This is the truth. That God
[the Father] so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever
believes in him [through the working of the Spirit] should not
perish but [be born again, born anew, and] have eternal life.
And so we worship - we come and receive forgiveness and life from - this
God and no other. For there is no other.
Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the undivided
Unity.
Let us give glory to him because he has shown his
mercy to us
(Introit
Antiphon).
In the Name of the
Father, and of the (+) Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.