What you long for above all else is Peace, such as the world does not know and cannot give, and you cannot get for yourself. All of your past regrets over this past year and over the course of your life — all of your present resolutions — and all of your future hopes — all center in a longing for true and lasting peace. For there is this deep hunger and thirst within your soul which cannot be satisfied, a restlessness of heart and mind that cannot be stilled, until you are at peace with God.
Death is not the answer or the solution, in case you have contemplated that possibility. Suicide is not a means of grace but a grave sin of despair. Dying of natural causes won’t bring you peace, either, not the peace you’re looking for — not if it is already lacking in your heart and life now.
You want your burdens to be lifted, but peace is not found in retirement, nor in a day off, a long weekend, or even an extended vacation. A sabbatical from work brings no real rest without peace, whereas true peace enables you to rest and rejoice even while you’re working long hard days.
You want your enemies to give up and go away. You want your foes to stop fighting with you. You want your persecutors to stop picking on you. You want the world to leave you alone. But there is no true peace in such a cease fire, nor in a stalemate or a tense truce. “World peace” may be measured by periods of time without any wars, but the true peace that you need is more than avoiding confrontation, it is more than managing to make it through the day without conflict.
You want comfort and confidence. You want safety and security. There is no peace without these things. But none of this is found in the temporary institutions and investments of this world. Life on earth itself is fleeting, it is perishing, it is temporary. There is no safety and security in that.
Money will not buy you true or lasting peace. Your house and home cannot keep you safe and secure against your real enemies lurking within and without. All the creature comforts in the world will not prevent your death. Family and friends are no more helpful than earthborn mortal princes in protecting you from the grave and preserving your life. Then again, simply to go on living, in itself, offers no peace or rest, whether you are active, bedridden, comatose, or driven to extremes.
The Law has an appearance of an answer, because the Law of God is good and wise. It seems to offer a solution to your restlessness: Simply do what it commands, and avoid what it forbids, and you’ll have it made. Keep you nose clean and stay out of trouble, and you’ll have nothing to fear.
To be sure, you can and should discipline yourself to live according to the Law of God. You can and should train yourself in such outward righteousness. You can stay your hand from hurting, you can extend your hand to help, and your neighbor’s life on earth is better for it. That is a good thing. But it still isn’t peace. It does not satisfy the Law, nor can the Law satisfy your heart.
The Law demands perfection, and there is no such perfection in your fallen flesh. Despite your best of intentions and firm resolutions, you are weak, and you fail. No matter how hard you try, you can’t make up for all your past mistakes, you can’t undo the wrongs you have done, and you cannot pay back all the debts you owe. Nor do all your efforts to keep the Law bring any peace or rest to your anxious heart and troubled mind; they rather add to your burdens and your stress.
The Law requires that you exercise divine perfection in all your thoughts, words, and deeds, in all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. But to be honest, what you find within yourself is laziness and selfishness, a battle between pride on the one hand and despair on the other, and a sickness unto death far worse than any plague or pandemic. The fall into sin resides not only in your mortal flesh with all its flaws and blemishes, but in the way that you think, in the way that you feel, and in the way that you really want to speak and act, even if you restrain yourself from doing so.
Religious rites and ceremonies are not the answer, either, whether they be sparse and simple or grand and formal. They are neither the problem nor the solution in themselves, though they may indeed be beautiful and meet, right, and salutary as vehicles for the Word of God and prayer. In so far as they are human works, they cannot obtain the peace that you are looking for. Which is to say that your own piety and religiosity will not (and cannot) save you — not from the war in your members, not from the conflict in your heart, and not from the restlessness of your thoughts.
Not even the God-given Covenant of Circumcision could save anyone apart from the fulfillment of that divine promise in Christ Jesus. He is what the Law demands. And the same Lord Jesus is what the Gospel now gives you. For He has come to save you, as His Holy Name confesses. He is Yahweh in the Flesh, who saves you from sin and death and gives you divine, eternal Life in and with Himself. This is the grace of God, His good and gracious Will for your salvation, which is done when He keeps the Law, defeats your enemies, and preserves you in His Word and faith.
In Christ Jesus is finally found and realized the perfect Life of God in the perfect Man, in flesh and blood exactly like your own, save only without any sins of His own. Even from the womb, from childbirth and infancy, He is the one true God who is also the one true Man. He even has private parts, which He exposes to the knife and to the Law — and on the Cross in humility and shame.
All of this because, not only has He become a true Man of flesh and blood, but He has voluntarily assumed the circumstances of fallen man, all the curse and consequences of sin and death. Though He has no sins of His own, He assumes the sins of the world and takes them upon Himself, into His flesh, into all of His members; He owns them as though they were His own faults and failings. So it is that He will be condemned by God and man as a lawbreaker and crucified as a criminal.
Because He does it all as true God and Man, perfectly united in His one Person, in His relationship of perfect faith and love with His God and Father — voluntarily, in righteousness and holiness, innocence and blessedness — His sacrificial death upon the Cross is the perfect satisfaction and fulfillment of the entire Law. Here is true faith and real love. Here is the right worship of God.
In Christ Jesus, in His Person and His good work, all of the Law’s demands are met and kept. And at the same time, in His death and in the shedding of His precious Blood — beginning already on the Eighth Day in His Circumcision — with His death and bloodshed, all the Law’s punishments are completed, and all of its debts are paid in full. There is nothing lacking, nothing left undone.
That is how and why He now preaches, not punishment, but Peace to His people. So does He speak tenderly to the heart of Jerusalem, that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned.
And so does He speak Peace to you and to your heart, with such tenderness, with such grace and mercy. And with such speaking — as God has ever chosen to work — by the preaching of His Gospel, by His Word of Absolution — He names you with His own Holy Name, and He blesses you with that very Peace which He speaks, such as this world neither knows nor can it ever give.
For not only has the Lord your God taken your place — under the Cross, under the curse of sin and death, in flesh and blood just like your own — not only has He taken your place and resolved whatever was amiss in your heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit, but He has done so in order to give you His place in your own flesh and blood, cleansed and purified of sin and death forevermore.
He has given you His Name, His Spirit, and His Sonship; and with His Sonship, He has also given to you His inheritance as the beloved and well-pleasing Son of God. Everything that is God the Father’s is His, and everything that is His is now also yours. For you have received the adoption of sons. In fact, you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus — whatever sort of body parts you have — for your Sonship is that of Jesus, the Christ. And everything that belongs to Him is now yours.
Indeed, Christ Jesus Himself is yours, and there is nothing lacking in Him. He is your Savior and dear Friend, and He is your own Brother, not only in the flesh, but in the Household and Family of God. His God and Father is your God and Father, as He has also taught you and invited you to pray with all boldness and confidence. And He has poured out His Spirit generously upon you by the Ministry of His Gospel, unto righteousness and holiness and the Life everlasting of your body and soul in the neverending “Eighth Day” of the Lord’s own bodily Resurrection from the dead.
It’s not by accident that Jesus was circumcised on the Eighth Day, but in accordance with the Law of the Lord and the Covenant that God established with Father Abraham. And from the earliest days of the Church, that Eighth Day was understood to be significant of what the Lord would do and accomplish in Christ Jesus, the promised Seed of Abraham. It points beyond the days and weeks of this life on earth, beyond the sun, moon, and stars with their seasons. It points to the Day of the Resurrection, in which there is no longer any night; and there is no longer any death; and there is no longer any sadness, any weeping or sickness or fear, but Peace and Rest in Christ Jesus.
Instead of all your guilt and shame, instead of all your sins and iniquity, instead of all your griefs and sorrows, now there is the Lord’s free and full forgiveness, and with it His Life and Salvation — not just existing, slogging forward day after day, but living at peace with God in faith and love. For God has reconciled you and all the world to Himself in Christ Jesus. And He has called you to be at peace with Him, to be reconciled to Him, by faith in His Gospel. That is the heart of real Peace, that you have a friendship with God; that you are close to Him, and He is close to you; that you are His own dear child, a beloved member of His Family; and that you are at home with Him.
Instead of enmity and alienation, instead of running away and trying to hide because you’re afraid of being punished, the Lord has prepared a place of real Peace and Sabbath Rest for you within His House. Here you are safe. Here you are loved and forgiven by God. Here you live, come hell or high water against you, because here you abide in the Body of Christ, in the Bosom of His Father.
“Take they our life, goods, fame, child, and wife.” Perhaps that’s what the New Year has in store for you. Especially after this past year, we all know how precarious and scary this world can be. But, come what may, you remain safe and sound in Christ Jesus, in whom you have real security, even in the face of death. For safety and salvation have been granted to you — with the Lord’s own Name — in the waters of your Holy Baptism, which St. Paul describes as “the circumcision made without hands.” That Sacrament is and remains your “Eighth Day,” no matter your age, because it is your participation in the Resurrection of Christ Jesus by His Word and Holy Spirit.
By the washing of the water with His Word you were given the Name of Jesus, which is the Name of God, the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So has He bound Himself to you, and you to Him, for all the days and weeks and months and years of your life on earth, unto the Resurrection and the Life everlasting. Never will He leave you or forsake you.
Indeed, as you are baptized into Christ Jesus, a member of His Body and Bride, the Church, so does He nurture and sustain you in the Holy Communion of His Body and His Blood, given and poured out for you and for the many. It is a holy Communion indeed, for you are what you eat, of one flesh and blood with the incarnate Son of God. Intimately united with Him in body and soul, you are united with His Father and the Holy Spirit. And here in that fellowship of the Holy Trinity you are united with all your brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, not only those here, but those who are far away, and those who have lived and died before you, and those who shall come after you. For you belong to this holy Communion in the Body of Christ, in the New Covenant of His Blood.
These rites and ceremonies of the Divine Service — the rites and ceremonies of the Holy Liturgy in the Word and Sacraments of the Gospel — these do give you Peace. Not because they are your work, but because they are the good Word and Work and the gracious Gift of God in Christ Jesus.
Consider how often the Liturgy declares to you the Peace of the Lord in and with His Name, and take it to heart that His Word does and gives exactly what it says. Here is the Peace that you long for, the Peace that surpasses all human understanding. It is your Peace with God and with each other in the Gospel of Christ Jesus. It is the perfect Peace of His “Eighth Day,” which is yours in Him today, tomorrow, and all year long, unto the end of your life, even unto Life everlasting.
In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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