The Reformation is only as significant as its faithful and accurate witness to Christ.
Reformation Sunday is early this year. All Saints Day happens to fall right on November 1, so we get to break out the church’s Oktoberfest celebrations a couple of days early. But Reformation Day is far more than a history lesson or a cultural celebration. The pulpit is hardly the place for a survey course in Reformation history, however interesting the material might be. The point of this festival is not that some Christians finally got their theology straight (but thank God for orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and Lord have mercy in our own time and place as well! Semper reformanda est ecclesia!). Rather, that God preserves His Church by delivering His Son to sinners, and the Gospel of this Son is the Church’s life. The Reformation is only as significant as its faithful and accurate witness to Christ. In the same way, this Reformation, preacher: Preach Christ.
Romans 3 gives us a splendid opportunity to do just that. The apostle’s argument turns on the righteousness of God, and the preacher might helpfully frame the text around two ways of hearing God’s Torah: A Torah of works and a Torah of faith. Torah is the Hebrew word for law, instruction, or teaching, and it can also refer more broadly to God’s Word. Here, the distinction is not between God’s Word and some other word, nor between the Old Testament and the New. It is about two ways of conceiving God’s righteousness and His dealings with us. The text invites this distinction, as Paul’s been arguing about this since the word “go” in the epistle to the Romans. His three-chapter argument about righteousness culminates in our Reformation pericope this week. Does God’s Word confront us with a righteousness we must produce, or does it announce the righteousness He gives us in Christ?
1. The Torah of Works: When God’s Righteousness Condemns
Paul begins by shutting every mouth. The whole world is accountable to God. All have sinned and fall short of His glory (3:19, 23). There is no privileged class of sinner who gets to escape the verdict by appealing to their ancestry, their religious affiliation, or their superior moral record. The Torah of works makes God’s righteousness the standard against which our own works are measured, but no one can measure up (no, not one, as Paul quotes). Here, the preacher can bring Paul’s wider argument in Romans 1-3 into view. We invent gods in our own image, trust the creature rather than the Creator, and congratulate ourselves by comparing our respectable sins with somebody else’s spectacular ones (chief of sinners though I be, at least that bozo’s worse than me!). We build a little Torah of our own, adjusting the standard until we can pass, slicing the Law to our own liking. Of course, sometimes we cut it so thin we can even see through our own baloney. Do you take pride in your denominational heritage, your confessional history, or your church identity? How about your biblical knowledge, your attendance record, your service, or your general decency? Remember, you are preaching to church folks on Reformation Sunday, and on Reformation, above all, those hearers need to hear the law that says none of these makes us righteous before God.
What a Reformation warning! We can even turn right doctrine into another reason to boast, as if belonging to the right church was a work that saves us. Lord have mercy! Religious pedigree never made a sinner righteous. Moral achievement is a fizzled droplet on a bonfire of vanity. Under a Torah of works, even our best efforts cannot hold up.
I say, “Proclaim the Law, preacher,” but not to browbeat or berate the hearer. The goal is to proclaim the text, that every mouth be shut. The sermon is not the place to rehearse how terrible everybody else is. The point is, in fact, to close even the preacher’s mouth along with everyone else’s. The Law leaves no room for boasting because it leaves no sinner standing on his own righteousness. The work of the Law is to expose sin. Measuring against neighbor and measuring against self always leads to self-righteousness or envy. Measuring against God is the way to holy sorrow, to contrition.
A Torah of works, pushed to the extreme ends of cultural mythology, lays out a God who operates a celestial system of rewards and punishments, sending prosperity to the well-behaved and misfortune to those who have disappointed Him. This is the stuff of, “I know I am a good person. That is why I will go to Heaven someday.” The Torah of works imagines a God whose favor you must manage and whose blessings you have to earn, whose mood you can gauge by the good and bad things that happen to you. Just ask Job’s friends, they have a corner on this kind of theology. But Paul is doing something more radical than teaching us to improve our performance. Paul erases our confidence in performance altogether.
The Law leaves no room for boasting because it leaves no sinner standing on his own righteousness.
2. The Torah of Faith: God’s Righteousness for You
Then comes the great turn: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the Law” (3:21). The Torah and the prophets bear witness to it, but this righteousness is not attained by works. It is given through faith in Jesus Christ. The preacher should linger over that “but now.” That is a great “big but” of the Bible (for some other “big buts,” see Psalm 73:26 and Ephesians 2:4; Paul loves them in Romans, so also check out Romans 5:8 and 6:23 as well)! God does not lower His standards, and he does not just turn blind eye to sin as if it does not have consequences. God could deal with it any way He chose. He chooses to manage it in Christ rather than start over or wave away the wickedness of the world. God fulfills His Law in Christ. God acts in Christ. He redeems sinners, presents Christ as the propitiation by His blood, and justifies freely by grace (3:24-26). God remains righteous and God makes sinners righteous. God’s righteousness is revealed as a gift He gives to us in Christ, not the unattainable mark or futile goal of a weak sinner.
This is the Torah of faith: God’s Word as the delivery of promise, His righteousness, His Son. Faith becomes the only way to attain it, to receive it, an honesty about weakness, sinfulness, and death that simply opens the hand, the passive hand, the dead hand of faith. This is far opposite to conceiving of faith as some kind of heroic achievement or psychological “leap.” It is also different from thinking faith must be big, quantifying it like a spiritual giant. Do not encourage anyone to muster up anything from the inside of them, preacher. No works here. Faith is simply the God-given organ of reception, the thing which receives what God gives. Do not do faith talk, in fact. Do Jesus talk, because the preacher does not need to spend time telling people to have faith. Better to deliver the Christ whom faith receives.
This week, make the gift personal. Paul says all have sinned. He also proclaims justification as God’s gracious gift. The preacher gets to say to each hearer, not merely that Christ died for sinners in general, but Christ is given for you. The righteousness of God comes to beggars, not to those who demonstrate they have earned their place at the table. Sinners are declared righteous. The guilty receives forgiveness. Those who have nothing to boast receive everything in Christ. This is why the Reformation’s insistence on justification by faith alone is not a history lesson or a doctrine class. It is just the Church refusing to let sinners look anywhere but Christ for their salvation. Faith alone means Christ alone as the giver of the gift, and Christ’s finished work as the ground of our confidence.
Faith alone means Christ alone as the giver of the gift, and Christ’s finished work as the ground of our confidence.
3. The Gift Received: Open Your Hands (Those Dead Hands of Faith)
Paul concludes that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law (3:28). More gift language! But where does the gift arrive? In the Word of Christ, which creates faith by hearing, and in the Sacraments, where Christ attaches His promise to tangible things. Eyes, ears, all our members, and God still takes care of them. We have ears to hear, mouths to eat and drink, and hands to receive. Faith is not an abstract notion. Faith is embodied, as surely as babies who trust their mom and as the hand that receives the gift. Christ in His incarnation took on flesh, shed real blood, died, and rose bodily for your listener. And He continues to give Himself to His Church. At the altar, there is no work left to be done. He is host. He is giver. Christ gives us His body and blood for the forgiveness of sins. The dead, empty hands of faith receive what the busy hands of works could never earn.
Here, then, is the comfort of Reformation, and the privilege of the preacher! Law/Gospel distinction is not something you want to explain from the pulpit. It intends to be preached! Faith does not need a definition from the pulpit. It aims to be delivered! Awaken it by delivering Christ, and His Spirit will create the faith in your hearer. No turning your listener’s back to their own prayers and wrestling’s. No leaving them wondering whether they have done enough, believed strongly enough, or belonged to the right people. Announce the gift and put it into their ears and mouths: Christ crucified and risen, His righteousness for you.
Consider the following outline if you are looking for a way to organize your proclamation this week!
1. The Torah of Works: God’s righteousness exposes our unrighteousness.
- All have sinned; no pedigree, piety, or moral record can justify us.
- Our self-made standards and religious identities cannot save us.
- The Law closes every mouth and excludes every boast.
2. The Torah of Faith: God’s righteousness is given in Christ.
- “But now”: God acts for us apart from our works.
- Christ redeems us by His blood; God justifies sinners freely by grace.
- Faith receives the gift; not something earned.
3. The Torah of Faith Delivered: Christ for you.
- God’s promise comes through the Word and Sacraments.
- The empty, dead hands of faith receive Christ’s body and blood.
- Preach not “faith as achievement,” but “Christ as gift.”
God bless your preaching this Reformation Sunday, and thanks be to God for the righteousness He gives freely in His Son, Jesus Christ, for you.
