Right Worship
Genesis 4:1-15; Luke 18:9-14
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Genesis 4: 4-5 “And the Lord respected Abel and his offering, but He did not respect Cain and his offering.”
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… What in the world is God’s problem? If you ask Cain, he would tell you that the problem with God is that He’s just too darned picky about worship; He’s not very flexible when it comes to things like that. Cain, together with each of us, thinks that God should be happy with whatever we throw his way, provided we offer it sincerely and with good and proper motives. And yet God had the audacity to have “regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” God accepts one offering and rejects the other. We find it rather intolerable. Why shouldn’t He just be happy that we offered Him anything at all?
Well, as always, God is merciful and patient. He seeks always to teach, always to correct, always to mold us and shape us into what He wants us to be, and to bring us to a right understanding of His will and word. And He was most certainly that way with Cain: “Why are you angry? Why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it!”
It’s not that God needed the answers to those intensely probing questions; He is God, and therefore knows all things. The interrogation was intended by God to bring Cain to a proper understanding of his erroneous thinking and actions, and to give him a chance to “come clean,” as it were, just like God did with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Clearly, Cain did not rule over sin; sin ruled over Cain. His anger at God – which was also anger toward himself – was transferred into bitter hatred toward his brother. And the result of this misplaced, selfish anger was to betray and kill the one who had offered to God an acceptable sacrifice. Hold that thought…
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells the story about the Pharisee and the tax-collector. The Phariseee wants his worship to be accepted – especially the things he thinks he has done for God that puts him way ahead of those who are not serious about the law – folks like this lousy, money-grubbing tax-collector. The Pharisee stands and he prays…. Well, no, he doesn’t pray; not really. He doesn’t ask God for anything. Instead, he reminds God – and anyone else within earshot – of how lucky God is to have such a devoted follower as he. “God, I am doing you such a favor simply by existing and being me!” It’s really hard to watch and listen to…
But the tax-collector – this man is different. He stands far off, probably in the shadows, almost not wanting to be seen or heard. He knows his unworthiness to approach the All-Holy God. Beating his breast, he cries out: “God be merciful to me, a sinner!” Now, THAT is an excellent prayer!
What is striking in this prayer is the word in the Greek for “merciful.” It is the not word we are familiar with when we sing Kyrie eleison, Lord, have mercy. This word is different; it is, instead, a bloody word: ἱλάσθητί (hil-AS-thay-tee), which means, “God be gracious to me on account of the sacrifice. Lord, be my sacrifice for sin!” This broken and contrite man was not appealing for mercy on the basis of God’s attributes – that He is merciful and loving and so on. He was appealing to God for mercy on the basis of a death, a bloody substitute for his own forfeited life. He knew he didn’t deserve that mercy, but he asked for it anyway. And that is why it is an excellent prayer.
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And once again, like in our reading from Genesis 4, God is being picky about the worship He accepts. Here He rejects the proud man who stands before Him and presumes to offer his own doings, but He accepts the humble man who stands before Him and pleads for mercy because of a bloody sacrifice.
And what was that sacrifice? Remember Who it is that is telling the tale. Remember Jesus, who alone of all the human race stood before the Father and offered to Him deeds that were acceptable – and they were accepted because they were all love. There was no self-interested motivation behind one single act of Christ’s life. He was the man who lived perfectly for all mankind. He was the one who came into the flesh, born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to be their ransom. His life of love and perfect self-sacrifice was a fragrant and acceptable sacrifice to the Father. And it was in love that He consented also to be the bloody sacrifice.
Cain killed Abel because God accepted his sacrifice and rejected Cain’s. So, as the brothers of Jesus, His own fellow human beings, we consign Him to the wood of the cross. And why?
The Apocryphal book The Wisdom of Solomon describes in shocking detail the why: “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.” (2:12-20)
Shocking, isn’t it? It all comes down to this: in and of our sinful nature we hated Jesus because the light of love that shone from His life as He offered to God the Father endless worship exposed the nakedness of our lives; it made us realize that we are all counterfeits and that none of us can dare to stand before His Father and plead for justice. Like the tax-collector, we can only ask for bloody mercy.
And then we see that HE is the bloody mercy for which we plead. Our hands are stained with the blood of the Son of God. I Samuel 16 we read what happened when word was carried to David by an Amalekite who claimed to have killed Saul and brought David Saul’s crown. David’s own words sound familiar: “Your blood be on your head, for your own mouth has testified against you, saying ‘I have killed the Lord’s anointed.” (1 Sam. 1:16) In this we hear echoes of the people of Jerusalem crying out: “His blood be on us and on our children.” That blood, of course, was that of the Son of God staining all of humanity.
But behold! Death is not offered by the deed; LIFE is! We do not receive the punishment we have deserved, but instead, by Christ’s dying, he brings about the payment for all sin and the death of death itself. By His bloodshed, there is the blotting out of sin. For our hatred, He gives love. For our murder, He gives life. This is the shocking news of His resurrection: PEACE! Not “now you are really in for it.” But “believe and trust that my blood has secured your peace with my Father. You see, I AM the answer to every plea for bloody mercy. I AM the propitiation, I AM the taking away of your sin!”
And so, we rejoice with St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians that it is by grace we are saved through faith. And not even faith gets to be any of our doing; it is the gift of God, not of works so that no one can boast. Instead of what we offer to God in our works, we get what God offers to us through His works, so that we get to be His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for the good works He has prepared for us to walk in.
Yes, God is picky regarding worship, and we are glad that He is. He wants the direction to be clear: not your doings toward Him, but His doings toward you, to give you the life that is in His blood. Come, then, and humbly join in the worship where the Lamb of God is upon the altar. Come to where God gives and you receive. Come to where God acts first and accepts not your sacrifice but the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus for you. Come to where mercy is given from the hand of God, so that you are made and kept alive under the blood, taken up into mercy, into love, joined to His sacrifice, and made acceptable in the Beloved.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
