All Loves Excelling

Into the Flames, by Big J

Lections: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments … Those who keep my commandments are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father … and I will love them.”

Feels kind of ominous, doesn’t it? There’s a way to read these verses that makes them sound conditional, if not a veiled threat. “If you love me, prove it. If you love me, do what I say. If you love me, then I’ll love you.” And that can be a bit of a kick to the gut. Because it feels like judgment; it feels like Law; it feels like the threat of damnation.

For whatever else it became, the Protestant Reformation began as a pastoral response to the anguished question, “How can I get right with God? How can I be saved?” And the answers in the air at the time were not terribly comforting. “You get right with God by doing good works. You get right with God by obeying your bishop. You get right with God by paying for the forgiveness of your sins.” It was all so very transactional.

Yes, salvation was for sale, in the form of indulgences. “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs!” Remember that catchy little ditty? That’s what pushed Luther over the edge: not ego, though he had plenty of that, but seeing his flock fleeced; watching poor Germans pay for the palatial cathedrals of Italian bishops. “The love of God is not for sale,” Luther raged. “The love of God cannot be bought, cannot be earned. The love of God is pure mercy, pure promise, pure grace. Here I stand.”

Jesus loves you, and Jesus is God, and there is nothing that you or I or anyone can do about it. Luther found this promise in the Scriptures, especially in the Epistles of St Paul, which is why he translated the Bible into the vernacular—so that we could read the promise for ourselves, so that we could know the love of God poured out for us in Jesus Christ. This contestation of grace and works split the Western Church right down the center, because it wasn’t some obscure theological debate, but an assertion at the core of Christianity.

I don’t want to make this a Protestant/Catholic thing. The division of Christ’s Body is a travesty; as Lutherans we pray for reunion. And Lord knows that both sides have sin enough and to spare. But this question of the love of God—how we know it, how we find it, or how it might find us—remains as crucial today as it did 500 years ago, 2000 years ago. All of us ache for salvation; Creation herself groans in travail. How do we get good with God?

The trope is that Protestants believe in salvation by grace through faith alone, while Catholic and Orthodox Christians preach salvation by faith and good works. Thus Protestants point to Catholics and say, “You cannot earn the love of God. You cannot make yourself worthy.” And obviously they’re right. But Catholics then point to Protestants and say, “Faith without works is dead.” And clearly they’re right too. It does us no good to say that we believe in Jesus, if we do not do anything that He tells us to do.

The problem with salvation based upon good works is that you’re effectively attempting to climb a ladder up into Heaven, with good deeds getting you a rung up, and bad deeds slipping you down a few notches. There are two glaring problems with this picture. One is that a ladder cannot get you to Heaven any more than it could get you to Mars. No amount of good works can make us worthy of the infinite Good who is God. The other issue is that on such a ladder there are always people above us and people below; so we inevitably end up comparing one another, judging one another, condemning one another.

At the other extreme, we have those who insist upon salvation by faith apart from any good works at all. The traditional term for this is Antinomianism, “Lawlessness.” These are the folks who boast that all things are pure for the pure, that Jesus loves me so I might as well lie and cheat and steal and harm as many people as I can, because why not? Haven’t I got a free ticket to Heaven? The errors here are myriad, starting with the idea that faith could ever be mere intellectual assent—checking the right box, voting for the proper party—without any sort of change in life, any real resurrection.

On the one hand, arguing over faith and works is a bit like arguing which blade of the scissors does the cutting. On the other hand, we need to be clear upon what our faith is based. Are we saved by what we do and who we are—or are we saved by what God does and whose we are? And in fairness, Catholics and Lutherans officially settled this debate 30 years ago. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, back in 1999, affirms that we are saved by grace through faith, and that this grace transforms us to go and do good works, together as the Body of Christ. The major question of the Reformation is resolved.

Jesus loves us. And because He loves us, we are freed to go love one another: faith in action. Good works, in other words, do not earn salvation. Good works are salvation.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” Jesus says. That’s not conditional love. It certainly isn’t a threat. Rather, it’s a promise: to love Jesus is already to keep His commandments. For what are the commandments of Jesus Christ? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Upon these two, Jesus proclaims, hang the whole of the Law and the Prophets, the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures.

And you might say, “Well, Pastor, what of the 10 Commandments? Are those not in our Scriptures? Do we not study them in our Catechism?” And of course you would be right. But the purpose of the 10 Commandments, throughout the Middle Ages and Reformation, has been as a devotional tool for personal piety; to realize the depths of our sins and our need for Jesus’ grace, driving us to the Gospel; not to be wielded as a weapon against others.

Moreover, at the Last Supper, Jesus gives to us His final commandment: that we love one another just as He has loved us. That is Christ’s command, to love as He loves us!

It was never about doing what He says so that then He might love us. No, He loves us while we are yet sinners, loves us even as we murder Him, loves us all the way to Hell and back. And that love changes us, transforms us, kills us and makes us alive again. He fills us up to bursting with the life and love of God, such that we cannot help but overflow upon all the world around us. Jesus loves us so completely that we become Him—one in His Baptism, one in His Spirit, one in His Body and His Blood.

The whole of Christian life is to be so beloved by God that we become that love, suffused with the Holy Spirit, made one in the Body of Christ, so that love bursts forth from us like a flame, blazing up unto God and out to all people, consuming the whole of Creation. And yes, of course we still sin. Yes, of course we fall short. But that doesn’t stop Him. Why, it barely slows Him down. The mercy, grace, and love of God are absolutely inexorable. We will drown in those waters; we will rise in that fire.

God in Christ will love you through all of time and all eternity. You can resist, all of us do, but Jesus will outlast you. If you fly up to Heaven, He’s there. If you fall down into Hell, He is there. And sooner or later His love will resurrect you, and you will be like Him. We shall be one in Jesus, as Jesus is one with the Father. It’s not about believing the right things, doing the right deeds. It’s about rising again from our graves, from the ruined wastes of sin, beyond time, beyond death, beyond fear, so that all that burns within you is His love.

It’s already happening here: every time that you hear your forgiveness, every time that you taste of His grace, every time that you reach out to your neighbor, every time that you speak up for truth, that is the living Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Jesus, alive within your souls. Works are the fruit, not the root, of our faith. And properly speaking, those works are not even our own. They are Christ at work within us, Christ working through us, Christ saving this and every world.

We keep His commandments by loving Him. And we love Him because He loves us.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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