Radical,
personal, and permanent. This is circumcision.
Every
male child of Israel from Abraham forward was to know for a
certainty the promise of God, dramatically, personally, and
permanently.
It is no
slight matter, our sinfulness. The dire matter of rebellion
and flight from God is not resolved by a wave of the hand or
token apology. One may brush off one's own iniquities like
crumbs from a table, but God does not. He accounts for every
one. God is holy, of a purity we cannot comprehend.
If we are
to be His children, we must be altogether righteous too, and
this we can neither be nor achieve by ourselves. Every man,
woman, and child on earth was born in sin and neither
possesses, understands, nor even desires such innocence. It
is utterly foreign to us.
By nature
we have no idea what good is. We pretend to know. We feign
goodness and invent shabby pretenses which are about as near
to holiness as a child's scrawl is to a Rembrandt canvass or
gutter graffiti is to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Too
common is the point of view that babies are born as pure
little angels unsullied and having no faults. Nothing could
be further from the truth.
"Behold,
I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother
conceive me." (Ps. 51:3)
"God
looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there
are any who understand, who
seek after God. They have all fallen away; together they have
become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one."
(Ps. 53:2-3)
The case
is hopeless and recovery impossible...
...
Unless God Himself should send a Savior who would
fundamentally, personally, and permanently resolve the crisis
of human sin.
God has
done so through the Person and Work of His righteous Son,
Jesus Christ. God Himself came in the flesh, and in one
sweeping, activist undertaking by the substitution of His Son
for us, God severed humanity from sin and delivered His divine
righteousness to the world.
God did
not do this by a wave of the hand or a few vague steps.
Christ's coming was neither temporary nor standoffish. God
plunged His own eternal Son into the catastrophe we created by
our sin. God took the most radical steps. His own son would
bleed, bleed for our sin in His circumcision and bleed for our
salvation on a cross.
Radical,
personal, and permanent! His service to us, His commitment to
us, His action for us is the primary matter for Christians.
It was not for any sin of His own that Christ came under knife
and nail. His wounds were the atonement for our sins. His
shed blood served as expiation for our impurities. Christ
Jesus took it personally; he assumed the contamination of our
sin as His own, and He made the key to our salvation permanent
by His personal suffering and death.
The infant Jesus, just eight days from birth hemorrhaged
blood, the same blood that would pour from his wounds at
Calvary, and the same blood that would grace the challis of
the Lord's Supper. His body and blood bring us the thorough,
distinctive, and eternal remedy for sin and death.
That is
why circumcision was radial, dramatic, and so personal.
The counterpoint to circumcision is our own Christian baptism
in which we are given the merits of Christ's bleeding and
death, the victory of his bodily resurrection, and the
permanence of sins forgiven. Baptism is not some gushy
twitter over an adorable tot; it is your salvation through
Christ feit accompli, accomplished and irreversible.
The
righteous Lord wants you to know completely, personally, and
permanently the fulfillment of His promises. He comes to you
in Word and Sacrament, not just to inform you about
righteousness, but actually to bring you into it.
The Gospel of Christ is proclaimed to you not as some sort of
byword but as the account of your own history bound to Jesus,
buried with Him, raised with Him, and benefiting forever from
His radical love for you.
Radical, personal, and permanent. This is your
circumcision, more profound even than given to the children of
Israel. Holy Scripture speaks of your baptismal life
in Christ,
"In him also you were circumcised with a
circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of
the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried
with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him
through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him
from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and
the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with
him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the
record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.
This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the
rulers and authorities and
put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him."
(Colossians 2:11-14)
Your circumcision without hands, your baptism into Jesus
Christ, is nothing short of life and salvation, radically,
personally, and permanently yours. Great comfort isn't it, as
we begin another year and always look forward in hope!
Pastor Reed
© 2009
