Trinity XVIII Sermon 2025

Lord we beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations
of the world, the flesh, and the devil; and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee. (Collect Trinity XVIII)


In the Gospel from last Sunday, you and I were bidden by our Master to take the lowest seats at any grand dinner, the place of least importance in the eyes of the world, and to embrace a character of humility and meekness to better situate ourselves in relation to God’s Grace. Our Lord, using the Parable of the Wedding Feast, intended to teach us that Divine mercy alone can invite us to go up higher into the Kingdom. He elevates only those who are humble and meek, rather than the proud and hubristic who reckon that they have earned a high place in his presence. This is practical advice of the greatest spiritual value: God alone is above all and alone provides; God alone can lift man out of the lowliness of alienation from Himself and into the presence of His Eternal Love. Man should humble himself before God and know that he is not worthy to eat of the crumbs that fall from God’s table. Man must acknowledge with meekness that he cannot save himself and needs God’s coming down in Jesus Christ to redeem and save him.

This week, we continue to pray that our hearts and minds might be open to the Divine Mercy in Jesus Christ. God’s coming down in His own Son, Jesus Christ, is a hard truth for most of us to swallow. We believe that an all-perfect God would never dirty or demean Himself with our suffering and sinful human nature. We have trouble seeing how Jesus Christ can both be the Second Person of the Trinity, God’s eternally begotten Word, and the suffering servant who takes the lowest seat in creation by suffering and dying innocently for all of us, pouring out His blood to pay the price for our sin, to ransom and redeem us, and to reconcile us to our Heavenly Father.

And Jesus Christ seems to make matters worse by testing our faith in Him. Today, He asks the Pharisees, What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He? (St. Matthew xxii. 41, 42) With the Pharisees, most of us respond, the son of David (idem) -which is to say a great man. Christ then pushes us harder. How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool?  If David then call him Lord, how is he his son? (Ibid, 43-45) David calls Christ his Lord and yet it is prophesied that Christ shall also be one of his descendents. How can Christ be both the Son of God and the Son of Man (David)? Of course, this union of contraries is hard for us mere mortals to imagine ever being possible!

But our problem, no doubt, originates in our fallen natures. We live in a time when most men put material comfort  before redemptive love. The world tempts us with the need to want more because we fear less by way of riches. The world tempts us with promised treasure, only to fill us with immediate fear of its loss. Prior to Jesus’ prophecy of His double-nature, Jesus answers the Pharisees’ lawyer with man’s call to a double-love. If we would only love God more, we would not find it difficult to see how God is made Man in Jesus Christ. The lawyer had asked Him Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus answered,

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Ibid, 36-40)
 
Perhaps, What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is he? is more easily believed if we begin to ponder the double-love that Christ himself embraces. Christ teaches us that the activity of God’s Love should be alive in the heart of Man. Christ is the eternally begotten Word of Love, spoken from the bosom of God the Father perfectly and forever. He is Simple, High, Perfect, and Supreme. But Christ is the same Word of Love made flesh that dwelt among us, that came down from Heaven to reveal God’s love in dying for us, redeeming us, making atonement for our sins, and longing to save us forever. In loving God, when He turns to other men, He loves them also. In Jesus Christ the eternally begotten love of God is made Man for our salvation.

Why should this surprise us? Hasn’t the Word of God’s Love always come down from Heaven to make and create a world full of wonder? Did not God’s Word of Love speak to the ancient Jews in His promise to redeem them? Hasn’t the Divine Love always come down to communicate with priests, prophets, and kings? Even the Greeks, in Plato and Aristotle, had sense of God’s Word of Divine Love communicated to them as what moves the universe. Why, then, do we have so much difficulty with the Word of Love, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, being made flesh to suffer and die for us? Is this not the fullest expression of the Spirit of Love? Are not our souls struck with awesome wonder when we see that the Love that made us can become one of us, with us and for us, as He lives and dies to sweep us up into the Love that returns us to God the Father?  Shouldn’t we be overwhelmed by the Word of God’s Love that even welcomes us into a new kind of Love that enables us to die to sin and embrace goodness? Isn’t this the perfect Expression of Divine Love that God’s Word comes down to the lowest level of man’s suffering sin and conquers it on the Cross? Don’t we sense that this Love is a further expression of God’s divinity since it reveals that God will not be thwarted, even by sin, in His determination to offer salvation to His creatures?

Dear Friends, today we study the Love of God in the life of Jesus Christ, His Son. He is the Love of the Father in the flesh that came to us long ago and comes to us today. In His double-nature, Jesus Christ alone is the double-love for God and Man that is accessible once again to all mankind. In Jesus Christ, we find that Love for God the Father is simultaneously the Love that does what He must to win back the love of His neighbor. Christ loves the Father with all His heart, soul, mind, and strength. This same Love is returned to Christ as the Father’s desire for all men’s salvation. The Word of God’s Love dies to Himself in earnest of all men’s salvation. Loving God with all His being enables the Saviour to die to the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil for us. Such uninterrupted love for God will then soar into glorious Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecostal Return, and Intercession. In Christ alone, we can find the double-nature of Love, through whom we too can begin to love God more fully so that we cannot be restrained from loving all men in God and God in all men. Loving our neighbors in God, and God in our neighbors will be evidence that Christ, the Word of God’s Love, is being made flesh in us.

Today, we long to embrace the reality of double-love made one in Jesus Christ, God and Man, shared with us through the Holy Spirit. It inspires St. Paul in this morning’s Epistle. There, Paul reminds us we must receive the Grace and Love of God in Jesus Christ as a gift. If we do, it will enrich us with eloquence and knowledge of every sort, as we find our minds and hearts in union and communion with God through Christ. But its power shouldn’t stop with us. The electrical current gives us enough energy for ourselves and for others. Its energy and meaning power our journey to the kingdom with an increasing understanding of a current. The love of Christ for God and His fellow men is transmitted spiritually to us not merely as knowledge of what Christ has done for us already but how Christ’s Love continues to flow to us for others.

With St. Paul, Christ’s Love, a double love, must be confirmed in us, so that we come behind in no gift, waiting for Christ’s coming [daily], which will confirm us until the end [times] as blameless. (1 Cor. i. 4) For this reason, we pray in the Collect that God might give us His Grace and Love to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow Him. (Collect, Trinity XVIII) St. Paul urges us to embrace the double-love so that we might be blameless. To become blameless, as difficult as it may be, we must love all men in Christ, pray for their salvation, and so as much as we can to show God’s love to them in our words and works.
 
Amen.
©wjsmartin

©wjsmartin