How hard it is to preach the gospel! Judith Simonson, in Homily Service in 2006 wrote about the proclamation of good news requiring that the preacher know how to distinguish between law and gospel. The preacher, then, does not leave
people thinking that the gospel is something we achieve. It is well to think of
this every Sunday.
Paul Scott Wilson (The
Practice of Preaching) distinguishes in this way: law is what human life
is, what we do, and what we are to do. Law is about human action. In contrast,
gospel is what God is doing. This can be a handy check for preachers.
Almost nothing makes me a stronger
believer in the doctrine of original sin than the difficulty we have in keeping
the message of the Gospel clear. There is something, apparently, in the human
makeup that prompts the clergy and laity alike to confuse law and Gospel and use
them interchangeably. Perhaps the good news does not seem so good to those who
really do want to earn the love of God.
. . . I heard it again the other
day in one of our churches. I was listening to a well-delivered sermon, but
beginning to wonder if it were not more of a lecture than a sermon. The
preacher apparently also felt some need to inject a bit of the “Gospel,”
proclaimed that intention, and proceeded to quote the lines from Matthew
22:37–39, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your mind. . . You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.” Ignoring the next verse, which speaks of “these two commandments,”
we were urged to conduct ourselves as befits Christian people because that was
the “Gospel” Jesus proclaimed.
I behaved myself and did not rise
up to challenge the preacher (although I shall find a way to do it privately).
. . because this is where our message gets so muddled and loses its power.
. . . Jesus understood the law in a radical way. He
was forever pointing out that the letter of the law was one thing, but that the
children of God were called to express the intent of the law— the good of the
other. When he challenged the rich young man with that radical expectation, his
disciples questioned him and were told that, of course, it was impossible to
satisfy the law from a human point of view; that it took God’s intervention.
It is that intervention, in the
person of Jesus himself, the embodiment of God’s grace, that constitutes the Gospel.
. . . Here we have come full circle
from Ash Wednesday when we were urged not to display our piety in public. . . to fast and pray privately. Now we hear words
about light and darkness and are urged to come into the light. – Judith E.
Simonson
The images of death and of healing in the Gospel of John and
in Numbers turn us toward honesty about our struggles and the fact that looking
at the causes can begin the healing.
John 3:14-21
Just
as Moses turned the serpent, something that was originally the cause of
suffering, into a means of saving lives, the gospel writers made the cross,
originally a symbol of shame and suffering, into a symbol of eternal life. –
Jonathan Lawrence
Numbers 21:4-9
[T]he
concept [here] is of God providing a way to rescue the people from the
situation they found themselves in due to their sin, offering a logical
parallel for the gospel of John. – Jonathan Lawrence
Ephesians 2:1-10
Writing to the
church in Ephesus, Paul clearly reiterates the difference between law and
gospel: “For by grace you have been saved through
faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of
works, so that no one may boast.” (vs. 9)
Jonathan D. Lawrence, an American Baptist Church ordained
minister, teaches Religious Studies and Theology at Canisius College, Buffalo,
New York.
Judith Simonson is
an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Homily Service 39, no. 4 (2006): 44-52.
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