Video of the Divine Service is here. The sermon begins around the 22:30 mark.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The author Brennan Manning tells the story of an old man who used to sit beside the Ganges River. One day, while he was sitting there, he saw a scorpion in the water and it could not get back out. So he climbed out on a branch over the river, and reached out his hand to pick up the scorpion, to put it back on dry land. The scorpion stung the man’s hand. He reached out again to rescue the scorpion, only to be stung so badly that his hand and face swelled up. Another man, passing by, said, “Hey, you stupid old man, why are you trying to rescue the scorpion? It’s just going to sting you again. Let it go!” The old man said, “It is in my nature to save the scorpion, and it is in the scorpion’s nature to sting me.”

It is very unlikely that someone would die for a righteous person; die for someone even if everyone around thinks that person is very, very good. Now someone might die for a good person—that is, a benefactor, someone who has done you good personally. If someone had been good to you, it’s possible you might give up your life for that person. But that’s not what God does. He doesn’t send the Son into the world, and Jesus doesn’t come to die for us, because we are righteous in ourselves, because we are so good. Neither does He die for us because we have done good for and to Him. God shows His love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. While we were still weak, while we were ungodly; while we were His enemies, Christ died for us. It is in God’s nature to seek and to save the lost, the sinner, the ungodly, the weak, His enemy; and it is, after the Fall, in the nature of sinners to sin, to oppose God, to fight against His good and gracious will, to kill the Son, to crucify Him.

The man by the river, though, remained a man, and whether he was able to rescue the scorpion or not, that would not change the scorpion into something else, which would not sting a person trying to grab it. The man did not become a scorpion to convince the scorpion he was trying to do something good for it. But the Son did enter human flesh not only to convince us that He was here for our benefit, but to take all the sting, all the venom, all the death out of us and into Himself. We who are by the nature we inherited from our father Adam and down to our human fathers “sinful and unclean,” will do nothing on our own except sting and kill. It is out of our hearts that every kind of evil flows. We bite and sting; gossip and rage; all our bitterness and the venom of our thoughts, words, and deeds continually overflows against God and against other people. And where we sting the most fiercely is often where our own hearts are most affected. There is something true about our blind spots, about what pierces our consciences most sharply, that those are the things we project onto other people, and accuse others of doing to us. Probably this is because we recognize most what we know best.

Jesus enters this world where death reigns because of sin. It reigns in this creation since the time of Adam. Death is king. We see it all around us. And Paul makes the point that even when there was not a command, between the times of Adam and Moses, that identified sin as sin, sin was still the overriding word. And the proof is that people die. That we each die is the proof that each of us is a sinner. No wonder there are people who believe and work for the erasure of physical death. It is the negation of all human optimism about ourselves. And that is because death flows directly from sin, from Adam’s sin and from ours.

This is the world, and no other, that Jesus entered. And He received all the stings of our scorpion natures, all the venom we could inject, all our hatred, bitterness, rebellion, anger, and lust, and He took it for His own, into His own flesh. He was pierced by the nails and thorns of human rejection of God and of His Word. And those sins, which were not rightfully His, He received and died as a result of them. The sting of sin is the victory of death. But death could not reign forever over Him. He is the author and king of Life. So He rose from the dead and took all the venom of all our sin and the sin of the whole world and removed the sting of death. Now, O death, where is your sting? Now, O death, where is your victory? Now death is no longer king. Death is not the final word. Death does not reign, but Christ does. He reigns in life for you. So the one who took all our sin in His own flesh is also God. By His death He brought us back to God and put us right before Him. But that’s not all. By His life, which He still lives in His glorified flesh, He has saved us, does save us, and will save us. It is all Jesus from beginning to end; from reconciliation with God, to our ongoing life by faith, to the life that will be no more subject to death.

How much more Paul says more than once. Sin and death are universal, overwhelming, complete. But how much more is the holiness and life of Christ. How much more is God’s grace and the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, which now abound through His gifts. How much more! Abounding, overflowing, unending, more complete and more universal and more overwhelming even than death.

Of course, even after we have been reconciled, even after we have received His life, we are yet weak. Our sinful flesh clings to us. We have not yet been brought to the completion of life and the erasing of death. So we are still in need of the life of Jesus. As soon as we remove ourselves from the hearing of His Word of forgiveness and the receiving of His living body and blood, we remove ourselves from Jesus’ life, which sustains and saves us. There is no time, as long as we live in this age, when we cease to need the abundant grace and mercy of Jesus. So He continues to save us and shield us from the wrath of God which is going to undo and remake this creation. He continues to give us His life. And we continue to rejoice in God through our Lord, Jesus Christ, until the day when death, which can no longer harm us, is done away with forever.

In Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, about a priest who is weak and ungodly and sinful in almost every way, but who is the only priest left in Mexico during persecution, Greene has the priest think, “It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt” (114). So it is, for us half-hearted and corrupt, for those who are not good or beautiful, God in flesh died. And now, and then, and always, we rejoice: O death, where is your sting? Where is your victory? Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:55-57)!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, ESV). Amen.

— Pr. Timothy Winterstein, 6/16/23