3rd Midweek Lenten Service

_{3rd
Midweek Lenten Service – March 11, 2009}

_F_orgive_O_ur_D_esire
to_D_efy_Y_our_D_ivine_A_uthority!

Mark 14:60-65 – “Then the High Priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, ‘Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?’ But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer. Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?’ ‘I am,’ said Jesus. ‘And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.’ The high priest tore his clothes. ‘Why do we need any more witnesses?’ he asked. ‘You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?’ They all condemned him as worthy of death. Then some began to spit at him; they blindfolded him, struck him with their fists, and said, ‘Prophesy!’ And the guards took him and beat him.

There is a poem written by William Ernest Henley in the latter part of the 1800s titled “Invictus.” In the poem the writer praises himself for having made it through the dreadful and difficult times of his life without wincing or crying. Then finally, at the end of his poem he writes, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” Sadly, there are many people who think this poem is quite courageous and inspiring. They like to imagine the speaker sailing through the storms and problems of this life, following his own will, and bravely marking out his own way. No one will set his course. No one will command his soul.

Caiaphas (the high priest of the Jewish nation) and the members of the Sanhedrin (the ruling council of Israel) liked to think of themselves in a similar way. It was their task to keep their people safe amidst the rise and fall of empires. And this was no small challenge! It would take all the wisdom they had to keep little Judea from being swallowed up and disappearing as had happened to so many other nations. But they were accomplishing it, and boy, were they proud of themselves for it.

But in all of their arrogance, in all of their being masters of their own fate and captains of their own souls, they forgot who the true master of Israel was and condemned him to death when he came before them. What about us? Although we might never have gone along with this great crime, we still are tempted by the same pride and arrogance that led Caiaphas and the others. Deep down we still have that desire to declare, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” Because of this, we must humbly get to our knees and pray:

Forgive Our Desire to Defy Your Divine Authority!

Let me tell you how the high priest of the Jewish nation got to be the high priest of the Jewish nation in the days of Jesus. The Romans, when they had conquered the country, had decided that so high an office as the high priesthood was not something they wanted out of their control. So the governor of the province was the man who would decide how to fill the office, and he had two important stipulations: make sure it is someone who can keep the peace and keep the taxes coming in.

Caiaphas’ fit that bill. He knew how to keep the streets of Jerusalem relatively peaceful. He knew how to keep the governor happy. He knew just what to say and when to say it. As a result he enjoyed all the perks of the position and gladly wielded the power of the high priesthood, allowing no rivals.

But Jesus of Nazareth was a thorn in his side. The man traveled throughout Israel preaching and teaching, which would have been all right except for one problem: He kept on talking about the Jewish leaders’ hypocrisy and false teachings. Jesus was saying that the priesthood had abandoned the pure laws of God and had substituted them with the traditions and foolishness of man-made laws and opinions. On top of that, Jesus kept performing all these miracles that got everybody worked up about him. Every wonder he performed made him look better to the people and the priests look worse. “See, this is getting us nowhere,” some of the higher-ups had complained. “Look how the whole world has gone after him” (Jn 12:19).

So the high priest and his council, the Sanhedrin, had to go to work. They had to do something to lessen the influence of this fellow from Galilee. They tried to trap him in his own words and ruin his popularity with the people. But they failed again and again. They confronted him on the day he rode into town with palm branches all over the road. But Jesus wouldn’t back down.

So they plotted his death. They bribed one of his disciples to betray him. They held an illegal nighttime trial and condemned him. They brought him to the Roman governor and demanded that the governor execute him. And when Pontius Pilate put up a sign on his cross to show what crime he was dying for, the priests protested loudly. What an insult for Pilate to write “The King of the Jews” above the head of the man they had utterly rejected. Not him! They would not have him rule over them! They would have nothing to do with his “authority”! And that was the trouble right there. They didn’t want to yield the control they had over Israel. They didn’t want to yield their power to any Messiah.

And of course, we say, there is not one of us who would willingly and consciously join them in this blasphemous defiance. But you see, that is the thing about sin and temptation: It never shows itself as it really is, not in ourselves. We can see it clearly in others. But we have such a hard time seeing it when it rears up in our own hearts.

Are there not times when we feel that Christ’s authority is too much of a burden for us? His laws are not always what we want to do, after all. Our sinful flesh sometimes protests at the idea that we don’t get to call all the shots for our own lives. There are times when those commandments of his are more than we feel like bearing. And then we look for ways around them, ways to cut a few corners, ways to find some special circumstances that will allow us to ignore the clear laws of our God.

Yes, we must all admit that there are times when we defy the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ and turn to sins we know he has forbidden or ignore doing the things we know he has commanded us to do. These are not just those wrongdoings we fall into through weakness or thoughtlessness. These are acts of rebellion against our King at those moments when our human nature just plain doesn’t want him to follow him—those times when we want to be the masters of our own fates and captains of our own souls.

And suddenly there we are, sitting in the council chamber of the Sanhedrin with Caiaphas presiding. But instead of condemning Christ to a Roman cross, we condemn him to the backseat of our lives, out of sight and out of mind for the moment, while we do what we want to do and refuse to listen to him whom we call our Lord and King. And if we continue in this fashion, then we will soon cast him out of our lives as surely as the high priest and his followers cast him out of their nation.

Of all the people for us to be allied with! The members of the Sanhedrin who preferred to see Jesus die on a Roman cross than to spend another minute listening to him and his words and commands. So before we find ourselves so firmly set in their midst that we can’t find the door out of that hideous chamber, we must stop and think about what we are doing and what we are saying and who it is we are defying. And then we need to fall to our knees and pray, “Father, forgive our desire to defy your authority, and teach us, for Jesus’ sake, instead to submit!”

How fervently our prayers need to ascend to the throne of God, asking him to help us remember that we really are not fit to be the captains of our own fates or the pilots of our own souls. Have we forgotten how surely we will bring our ships to wreck and ruin if we start navigating? We are sinners, born in sin and living in it all our days. What sort of moral or ethical sense within ourselves can be our chart and compass when, as Scripture says, no good thing is present in our sinful flesh?

We can see the shipwrecks that people make of their lives when they try to sail according to their own charts. They set their own rules. They make their own designs for the way life ought to be lived. And, in the end, they bring only sorrow and pain, if not to themselves then to the others they hurt in their mad desire to live free of every rule but their own.

It was to save us from such ruin and disaster that God’s Son came to this earth and submitted himself to the authorities of the Jewish nation and of the Roman Empire. But more than that: He submitted himself to the authority of God’s law, which we so often throw aside. He submitted himself to the condemnation and death that we earn for ourselves. Instead of allowing us to simply sail into eternal ruin and regret and punishment, he surrendered himself to the power of wicked men and allowed them to try him and condemn him to death. Yet, through this death he paid the price and penalty for our many and constant refusals to live under the authority of his commandments.

He saved us from our headlong rush away from God and by calling us to faith has set us once again on the course that God, in his love and wisdom, has revealed clearly in the pages of his Holy Word. Now that we know the price he paid and the damnation from which he saved us and the heaven to which he is guiding us, why would we ever entertain the thought of further defiance?

Jesus Christ is the pilot of our lives. He and he alone is the captain of your soul and mine. Yes, we know that his commandments are sometimes hard to live by. We live in a sinful world and are pursued by the roaring lion who seeks to devour us. How could we imagine that living a Christian life would be a walk in the park? Temptations will not cease, and again and again the world and the devil and our own sinful nature will tell us we are being fools. But Jesus gives us strength.

It may indeed be that we will be giving up much that the world finds quite pleasurable. Is that too great a price to pay to show our gratitude to him who died to make us the children of God and citizens of heaven? He gave his life that we should belong to him and live in his kingdom and serve him. Will we throw that aside? Will we try to fool ourselves into believing that we know better than God when it comes to what is right and what is wrong or what direction we should go and what paths we should avoid?

Remember what St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthians: “He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Co 5:15). Why would we try to throw off his authority? His authority is the most precious and important thing in a Christian’s life.

“Master of my fate”? “Captain of my soul”? There is One and One alone who can truly make that claim for any of us, and it is not ourselves. It is the One who paid the great price to make us his own so that we might live under him in his kingdom and, as Luther so eloquently put it, “serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.”

Father, forgive us when we forget this and seek to deny your Son’s divine authority! Make us right in your sight by the blood of your Son. Give us innocent hearts that run to your cross daily to confess our sins and receive the unconditional forgiveness won for us there. And then, move us to truly seek to live by your commands under the authority of Jesus, our King. Amen.