The Angel of the Lord Announced Unto Mary . . .

A sermon on Romans 2:25-3:18, Jeremiah 5:1-9 and John 5:30-47 March 25, 2011,
Feast of the Annunciation. Preached at the Trinity Chapel.

Today we are exactly 9 months away from Christmas. it’s the feast of the annunciation, when “the Angel announced unto Mary and she conceived by the Holy Ghost.” It seems ironic that the Angel’s announcement of the one “who will save his people from their sins” should come in the middle of Lent, and that this feast should be marked by readings that speak of God’s judgment. Especially incongruous is the reading from Romans where Paul specifically speaks of God’s judgment against Israel, the same people Jesus came to save.
This reading is a key part of Paul’s argument in Romans. In the first chapter he established that God’s wrath and judgment rest on all the gentiles. This wouldn’t have surprised any Jewish readers: Gentiles were, by definition, idolaters, outside God’s covenant and the sphere of his grace. A pious Jewish reader might have come to the end of C. 1 and been excused a sigh of relief, and a prayer of thanks for the good fortune to have been born into the covenant people.
The Apostle doesn’t let his audience enjoy that relief for long though. The Jewish people, the covenant people, also stand condemned before God. “Circumcision,” Paul says “is indeed of value if you obey the Law, but if you break the Law, your circumcision becomes uncircumscision” (ESV, 3:25). Now Paul’s claim that the Jews had failed to keep the Law must have sounded strange. Paul himself says in Philippians that he was blameless at to righteousness under the Law (Phil. 3:6). And I don’t doubt that there were many Jewish men and women who could have said the same. They had kept the Law; They had sinned, fair enough, but the Law made provision for forgiveness through sacrifice. So for what fault could God possibly condemn them?
What Paul saw when his attempt to stamp out Jesus’ followers was interrupted by conversion, was that even though he was blameless with respect to the Law, he had completely missed the point of the Law. The Law is, as Paul said, “the embodiment of knowledge and truth” (2:20), and the Truth which the Law spoke of was the Truth of Jesus Christ. Jesus himself says “if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me” (John 5:46 ESV).
It’s not so ironic after all that we read this on the feast of the Annunciation, because the judgment against God’s people was precisely what the Angel announced to Mary. God had come to dwell with us, to save his people from their sins - this was the truth to which the Law bore witness. The world rejected this truth. St. John says “this is the judgment: the Light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the Light” (John 3:19). It is the Gospel, as much as the Law, which judges us.
The Prophet Jeremiah searched among the wealthy and the wise, looking for a righteous man, and was disappointed. Israel had the spiritual wealth and wisdom of the Law, they were “entrusted with the oracles of God,” but they became no better than the Gentiles when they rejected the only one who perfectly embodied the Law God had given them. That’s why Paul can say that the Jews had every advantage (3:1-2), and yet were no better off for it (3:9). All of humanity, Gentile or Jew, is under God’s righteous judgment.
Now at this point I picture Paul’s hypothetical Jewish reader throwing up his hands in frustration and saying “Well what are we supposed to do then? We did all the right things! But we’re guilty anyway, judged anyway. What more can we possibly do?” But that’s exactly it: we can’t do anything!
Our whole problem is that we try so hard to do something; we want to establish our own righteousness apart from God. We’ve been doing it since the Garden of Eden, when we wanted to be like God, when we tried to deny our dependence on him. And anything we do, whether circumcision, or Baptism, or even the Holy Eucharist, just becomes a more subtle form of idolatry when we attempt to use it as a way to prove our righteousness, rather than a sign of our total dependence on God.
So again, what can we do? In Christ we have heard God’s judgment that “None is righteous.” And the only thing we can do is respond to God’s judgment with our “Amen.” We can admit that God is righteous, that we deserve the sentence of Death which was carried out on the Cross, that we’re helpless before God. This isn’t despair: it is faith and it is repentance.
It’s not despair, because we have not just been judged, we have been judged in Jesus Christ. The Cross is our judgment, and to believe that we have been judged in Christ and his cross is at the same time to believe that we have been raised with Christ. As soon as we accept that we are unjust and have been judged in Christ, we will also hear that we are justified in him.
So as we go through Lent, and we fast and pray and practice Christian disciplines, may those things not become distractions from God, but reminders of our need for God, so that when Good Friday comes we can really say Amen to the Cross and passion, and rejoice in the Glory of Easter.