Redeemer Lutheran Church

I. About Jesus

In 2009, two days before the American Thanksgiving that year, another holiday took place in Nepal—a festival in honor of the Hindu goddess of power, Gadhimai. The focus of the festival was plain to all: in two days’ time, 320,000 animals were sacrificed in honor of the goddess—20,000 buffalo, along with 300,000 assorted sheep, goats, birds, pigs and rats. That’s a lot of animals. That’s a lot of blood. I’d like to share two quotes from participants of that festival about the purpose of the sacrifices. One said, “If we want anything, and we come here with an offering to the goddess, within five years all our dreams will be fulfilled.” With a statement like that, there’s little doubt that this is a religion of works: if you please the goddess, she will fulfill your dreams. The second quote is along the same lines as the first, with an important addition: a participating Hindu priest explained, “The goddess needs blood. Then that person can make his wishes come true.”

The goddess needs blood. The need for sacrifice is found in a lot of religions—sometimes the sacrifice of blood. For the goddess Gadhimai, 320,000 animals were slaughtered in two days’ time.

My question is this: was that enough? Was 320,000 enough blood to please the goddess? How could they be sure? Who set the number—and why?

My other thought is this: 320,000 sacrifices is a lot. But it isn’t. Consider the temple in Jerusalem, where animals were sacrificed throughout the day, every day. At Passover, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims converged, so many animals were killed that the brook below the temple turned red for a few days. God demanded blood: not to make wishes come true or dreams fulfilled. God demanded blood to atone for sin. But was all that blood enough?

No. Our text says, “Sacrifices and offerings You have not desired…in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure;” and our text goes on to say that these were offered according to the law. God never meant to say, “If you do the work of sacrifice, then I will make your dreams come true.” He didn’t say, “If you keep this law, I will bless you.” The sacrifices throughout the Old Testament were all to point to Jesus Christ, the Savior who would come.

Don’t run past verse 5 of our text, in which Christ says, “Sacrifices and offerings You have not desired, but a body You have prepared for Me.” That’s amazing! It is the Gospel. To atone for sin, God did not desire the sacrifice of all those animals. Instead, He prepared a body—He desired that His Son become flesh. The Son became flesh to do His Father’s will; and His Father’s will was that He shed His blood on the cross as the Sacrifice for the sins of the world. His Father’s will was that we be “sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

Christmas is just three days away. But before the Feast of the Nativity, we are still in the penitential season of Advent, and this is a good focus for our meditation this morning. The Baby born in Bethlehem is given that body to sacrifice Himself on your behalf. That is the sword that will pierce Mary’s heart.

So on this last Sunday of Advent, a couple of important points: one about Jesus and one about you.

The one about Jesus is this: the miracle of Christmas is God-with-a-body to be your Savior. Along with the cross, that is the scandal of Christianity. Many are happy to acknowledge that they believe in a “God out there somewhere,” and many are happy to acknowledge an ordinary baby in a manger in Bethlehem. But it is only by faith that one can point to the Infant in Mary’s arms and say, “That is the Word made flesh, dwelling among us. Mary is holding her Creator—our Creator—in her arms.” Nearly all the major heresies about Christ begin with a rejection of this point, this God-become-flesh. You can find them in the history books. You can also find them in religious thought today, for there is nothing new under the sun.

By the grace of God, we confess the truth that Jesus is “true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary.” It is vital to do so, and it is what the Scriptures teach: He had to be true man to die in our place. He had to be true God to die for us all. So, whether it be when you join shepherds to peer into the manger three days from now, or months later, you hold fast to this truth: the Son of God became flesh, without sin, to save us from our sin. To lose that confession is to lose so quickly your certainty of salvation.

2. About You

The second point is about you, and it is about your body. The Christian faith is not just about the condition of your soul or the thoughts of your mind. Christianity is about the condition and salvation of your body, too. Back before the Fall into sin, Adam and Eve were created to live forever—body and soul both. This text, then, has an important message to you, about you: behold how Jesus honors your body…He takes on flesh and blood like yours in order to save you, flesh and blood included.

See, it may well be that you don’t give your body quite the credit it deserves as God’s creation. You are always tempted to see yourself as a soul wrapped up in a body, as if it’s only the soul that really counts before God. After all, you can see the effects of sin on your body in the form of pain, injury and disease. You can’t see the effects of sin on the soul—you take that on faith. And because we are usually trusting our eyes more than our ears, you’re going to tend to think “soul: good, body: bad.”

Once you do that, you’re up for a whole lot of trouble.

Take, for instance, your view of other people. They have both bodies and souls, created by God and died for by Jesus. The world will argue that it’s only the body that matters, and so it says that the Church is useless when it devotes itself to the care of souls. The world is wrong, of course: the Lord appoints rulers and doctors and farmers and paramedics and safety inspectors to tend to bodies, so body-care is pretty well covered. The Church is the one institution appointed by God to care for the soul, and to do so by the giving of the Gospel in Word and Sacrament; if the Church doesn’t do that, nobody else will. So we are careful to keep our focus on the proclamation of Christ and Him crucified—and we do so with the knowledge that redemption is for both body and soul. However, the temptation for you will be to say, “Since I as a Christian am about caring for the soul, I need not worry about the needs of my neighbor’s body.” There’s a reason why St. James warns us in his Epistle, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also, faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:15-17). James is, first and foremost, warning against a failure to do the good works which flow from faith. When we fail to view others as God’s creation, this contributes to the lack of love. Beware, and remember that the cold hands without gloves this time of year have fingers fearfully and wonderfully made by God.

This is not just about others, but about you. Your body is fearfully and wonderfully made by God, and your body has been redeemed by Christ on the cross. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the devil will tempt you in all sort of ways to believe that your body is a throwaway, that God only cares about the soul.

A prominent example would be sins of the flesh. One of the first heresies that early Christians had to contend with was Gnosticism, which taught that physical bodies were evil and God only cared about souls. The Gnostics were divided into two camps. Some said that because the body was evil, you needed to deprive your body of any sort of pleasure and comfort whatsoever. This meant staying in a perpetual state of not-enough-food, not-enough-sleep, not-enough-clothing against cold, etc. The other camp said that since the body was evil and didn’t matter before God, you were set free to use and abuse your body for any sort of activity that gave you pleasure.

Gnosticism is false teaching to the core, but this view of the body slips into Christianity. Consider the attitude of the medieval monk, who said, “Because my body has sinful desires, I must punish my body by fasting, by whipping, by sleep-deprivation and wearing hair shirts. By so demonstrating my hatred for my body, I will prove to God my desire to follow Him.” You may have the same desire to punish your body, too. But that’s when you commit sins against your own flesh. We need to make two important points: one is that hurting your body doesn’t get rid of your sin. Forgiveness does. The other point is that your body certainly needs discipline, but that is different from punishment. For example: if you regret using your eyes to fill your mind with wicked images, the answer is not to gouge them out and thus punish your flesh. The answer is to confess your sin, be forgiven; and as one set free from sin, discipline your body to avoid those images and fill your mind with godly things instead.

Punishment of the body is perhaps more common than we might think, especially when one includes eating disorders, cutting one’s arms, endless piercings and other troubles we find especially among youth. These certainly have a psychological side that needs to be treated, too. But do not neglect the spiritual part, for punishment of the body indicates trouble between that person and God.

We must move on to the temptations of the other camp of Gnostics, the ones who said that you can do anything you want with your body because God only cares about your soul. This is a much more popular temptation, because indulging is always preferred to punishment. In a pleasure-driven society like ours, it is far too common for Christians to excuse sin by compartmentalizing their lives. In cooperation with your sinful flesh, it is far too easy to say, “I can indulge in immorality or addiction or whatever, but this doesn’t affect my faith.” It is a striking demonstration of sin that one can convince himself that he can terribly misuse the gift without offending the Giver. But your body is God’s gift, created and redeemed by Christ’s blood. Thus, St. Paul declares in Romans, “Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness” (Romans 6:13). Do not give up your body to sin and pretend your soul is fine. This will kill your faith.

When confronted with this truth, your sinful flesh will say, “But I’m so weak! God’s grace is enough to strengthen my soul, but not my body against temptation.” This is only self-serving, and it accuses Jesus’ cross and forgiveness of being insufficient for your sin. His grace is sufficient for you. Repent. Be free. Addictions may haunt you for life, but that does not make them acceptable to God. Repent. Repent again, and rejoice that the blood of Jesus Christ covers the sins of His repentant people.

We have time for one more application, one that has to do with sickness and especially the end of life. When it comes to discussing end-of-life decisions, the world seeks to justify euthanasia and medical assistance in dying (MAIS) by arguing that there is a point where life becomes too much of a burden. But life is never a burden: life is a gift of God. The curse of sin is a burden that afflicts life. The solution is not to get rid of the burdensome body, but continue to live a repentant life, joyfully looking forward to the time when the Lord delivers you from this vale of tears to life everlasting with Him. Likewise, when it comes to health issues, it is tempting to start to view the body as the problem. The body is not the problem: it is a creation of God. It is corrupted by sin, but it is still God’s gift. Disease, injury and the like are the problems which afflict the body: they are the trouble, not the body itself.

Therefore, we do our best to take care of the body, always looking forward to the time when Christ will raise us from the dead. St. Paul writes in Philippians 3, “For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.” This would include those who believe themselves to be Christians, but give up their bodies to sin. He goes on: “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to Himself” (Philippians 3:18-21).

There’s that miraculous statement again: Jesus Christ has a body. A glorious body. He was born of Mary to have one, and with it He has borne our sins to the cross. He rose again three days later—body and all, and He kept that body as He ascended into heaven. He even continues to give you His body and blood, His very real body and blood, for the forgiveness of your sins. His embodiment, His Incarnation, is what Christmas is about. And it says to you that there is no part of you that is not redeemed. He has saved you, body and soul. He will raise you up to heaven, body and soul, for He has reversed the entire curse of sin, and He will not leave any part of you in the grave.

In the meantime, you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. You are the Lord’s, body and soul, because His grace is for all of you. You are His, body and soul, because you are forgiven for all of your sins. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.