A Wounded Savior for a Wounded People

Joel 2:12-19

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Joel 2:12-13   “Now, therefore,” says Yahweh, “Turn to Me with all your heart, With fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.” So rend your heart, and not your garments; Return to Yahweh your God, For He is gracious and merciful, Slow to anger, and of great kindness.”

Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord…  Scripture tells us: dust you are, and to dust you shall return.  That means we will all return to the dust of the ground; we will all die one day, sooner or later, unless the Lord returns before that time.  And so it is most certainly true: dust we are, and to dust we shall return.  That is the meaning of the imposition of ashes that we experienced at the outset of this service tonight.  Such is the wages of sin.

But then we stare in amazement tonight at One for whom those words sound so wrong.  We see Him and cry out, as we will throughout this Lenten season: “O sacred Head, now wounded, With grief and shame weighed down, Now scornfully surrounded With thorns, Thine only crown!”  If ever there were a head that did not call for repentance and death, it is His sacred head.  Why should that Sacred Head receive a crown of thorns when it should be a crown bedazzled with gold and jewels?

Here we see in human flesh Christ, the God/Man, the One who formed us from the dust at the beginning.  Here is the One who in unfathomable love for our fallen race became dust for us.  And now He will even lay down His head into the dust.  And yet there is no sin in Him!  In Him, there could be no death.  How and why will He die?  We will spend this Lenten season pondering such questions.

When Joel declares a sacred fast – as we heard in this evening’s Old Testament reading – when he urges the trumpet to sound and the people to gather, we discover that the occasion is one of return.  The holy season of Lent is always about a return.  We so often think of it in terms of turning away from—what we are giving up, or what we will fast from.  Make no mistake about it: it is a good thing to fast.  Jesus assumed that His disciples would do so when He said in tonight’s Gospel: “when you fast”?  When, not if!  But by itself fasting and deliberately going hungry can be nothing more than an empty religious exercise.  The Lenten fast goes deeper than your decision to deny yourself some tasty treat or to take a break from Facebook.  Rather, it invites, it summons, it urges you back to someone; it invites, summons, urges you back to the Lord.

We hear the prophet Joel say, “Return to Yahweh your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and He relents over disaster” (Joel 2:13).  A Lent that is anything less than a return in faith to the Lord is only a religious game.  A Lent that is anything less than a return in faith to the Lord is worth less than nothing.

Rather than play games with God, hear in this sacred season His call, his intense invitation to you to come back to Him, to return to Him now.  He does not want some piece of you, some outward display, torn garments and such, a few minutes tossed His way one day a week.  No.  He wants you, your heart.

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Lent is not for pretend sinners.  Lent is for real, honest-to-God sinners who realize and confess in no uncertain terms that they have failed in their love of God, who have failed in their love of their neighbor, who see this reality, and who by God’s grace despise their sin and ache for His forgiveness and for strength to do better.  To those people the invitation rings out as sheer refreshment: “Even you, even now: Return!”

Return, dear baptized, and see the sacred head of Your Savior now wounded.  This is the One to whom we are summoned to return.  He is the One who knew that we, on our own, could not come to Him, that we could not return to Him, that we could not find Him; and so He came to us, He returned to us, He found us.

And we marvel at how far Jesus went to find us.  For it is a marvel indeed that the God of Israel, the God of all gods, the King of all kings, the very Creator of the universe should take on human flesh and blood—as He did in His incarnation.  That is enough to leave us astounded forever.

But He went further.  Not only did He take on our flesh and blood, not only did He become dust for us, but He also went so far as to lift the burden of our sin from us, to bear it and take it into His own perfect and sinless body all the way to His death.  He did this in order to own all our failures, so that we may live in love as His very own children.  It is exactly as St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “He, who knew no sin,” became sin for us “so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Christ not only died, but He also died as the greatest sinner of all time, with the sins of the whole world upon Him—all of it.  Yours.  Mine.  Everyone’s.  Thus the Lord revealed that He is indeed merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.   Look, dear people of God, look to the cross and see!  He bore your sin to death that neither death nor sin might be the end of you.  Such is the measure of His love.

During Lent, when the Church calls us to return, she is calling us to return to Christ, to draw near to this Savior who was wounded for our transgressions, who was bruised for our iniquity, upon whom was the punishment that brought us peace, and by whose stripes we are healed.  The Church reminds us that the only real life in this whole world is fellowship with Jesus, communion with Him, and that every time we have settled for anything less, we have allowed ourselves to be deceived and cheated of the great gift of which Baptism made us heirs.

As often as she sets the Table, the Church calls for all her children to return, to come to this wounded Savior who bore our wounds in His own flesh, spilling His blood for us, so that His flesh might be our living bread from heaven and His blood the blotting out of our every sin.

It is most certainly true that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.  But we have a Savior who became dust for us, whose sacred head was laid in the dust of death, in order that the dust of our corrupted being might be rendered incorruptible with Him in the life of the world to come.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.