So What About the Preaching?

Written by Pastor Nuckols Thursday, 28 January 2010 10:09

          The preacher dares to preach, not because he is certain of himself, but because he is certain that Christ is Lord, and that He is his own Lord.  The parish listens to the preaching because it is the place where the certainty of Christ’s Lordship dwells, and it is the place where His gifts of mercy, cleansing, and forgiveness are distributed.  Therefore, preaching is the deed by which both the preacher and the parish confess the truth of that which calls the Church into being.  In other words, the One who is present and personal in and through the proclamation, that is Christ, is truly serving both preacher and parish with Himself and His gifts.

            The Word exists to be made known, and to gather a people around it when it is preached, thus, its objective content is fully disclosed.  In the beginning, man was created by the creative Word, and destined to live by that which proceeds from the mouth of God.  “Men understand themselves aright and receive true human life in the hearing of God’s Word.”[1]  The Word reaches the objective for which it was sent out only when it affects an entrance into men.  Man reaches the spring out of which he can draw human life only when the Word of the Creator comes to him.  The Word is supremely God’s creative Word, and this creative Word is enfleshed in Christ.  Hence, where Christ is preached, there the Word is preached and vice versa.  God speaks in the Bible, and when the Bible is proclaimed God speaks to the parish from the pulpit.  God’s Word is Christ, so when the Gospel sounds forth, it is the living Christ who has come down among men.  “The entire Lutheran conception of the Word and preaching is only to be understood in the light of belief in God’s becoming man in Christ.”[2]   

            In preaching, the Word is addressed to all who have been assembled.  The individual who sits in the congregation has no experience of something happening to him as an individual; he can, in a sense, escape contact with the Word in a way that is never possible in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  The preached Word is both Gospel and Law.  Both must strike home to man so that Christ’s death and Christ’s resurrection, which is the kernel of the kerygma, can take place in him.  But the possibility of hearing only the Law and allowing the Gospel to pass to others—and that is where doubt begins—arises more readily where the Word is preached to a large number of people than when it is distributed in Baptism and the summons of the Gospel actively embraces the individual, or when in the Lord’s Supper, it is offered, bringing nourishment to the individual who receives it by faith.  The problem of the Word that is not received in faith, has given rise to lively debate in the history of dogma about the relation between the Word and the Spirit.  However, the Spirit and the Word are one!  Thus, the difficulty of holding fast in concrete cases to the conviction that God Himself, that is Christ, is in the Word. 

          In reality, it is the Word that is in conflict with the power of Satan.  Just as Christ came into the life of man to destroy the works of the Devil, under whom man was oppressed, thus, unbelief is not just an intellectual attitude on a purely human level, but it is something diabolical.  Thus, faith simply means that the Word’s true content destroys this caricature.  The Spirit is the Spirit that is in the Word, that is to say, in Christ, God’s Holy Spirit, who judges and makes alive.  In unbelief, sin rules, in belief, Christ rules, since the Word is never inactive: as Luther declares, if it does not bring life and forgiveness, then it brings death and judgment, Gospel and Law, since all that God does in His Word is in conflict with Satan, both in what He does with His ‘left hand’, and in what He does with His ‘right hand’.  Hence, man cannot escape the Word; he is always subject to it and never superior to it.  “In unbelief he (the creature) is not human but depraved, torn away from his humanity and condemned by the law.  In faith he (the creature) draws life from the Gospel.  Then for the first time he (the creature) becomes man.”[3]

            The strength of Luther’s exposition of the Bible consists in this: that the whole life of man is unveiled and is seen to be such as the Scriptures describe it, so that Christ’s death and resurrection have to do with the affairs of everyday life.  The struggle between God and Satan is camouflaged under social and political differences, marital troubles, labor difficulties, nervous illnesses and sicknesses.  Luther’s teaching about vocation is a central point in this respect.  Such consecration adds nothing new to the Word: on the contrary, the kernel of the Word is hidden until I see that the Word is talking about something where I already am, and not about something to which, in a religious act, I may rise.  In the Gospels, Christ releases man from Satan’s power, but that takes place by His healing of their sicknesses.  ‘Faith’ in the Gospels is quite often belief in the power of Jesus to help in a definite need in which the sufferer finds himself.[4] 

One day Christ shall be a visible King.  But, now Christ is in the Word; now the messengers whom He has sent preach Him; now, He lives in the cloud, which is faith in the heart.  The time for the Word is that time that precedes the last day.  The time for faith is during this same time, the time before sight shall come.  The living Word, which is God at work, has its home in the present.  Preaching is not just talk about a Christ of the past, but it is a mouth through which the Christ of the present offers us life today.  In the Word we become partakers of that which has taken place, and of that which shall take place—that is, Christ’s death and resurrection, and our own death and resurrection.  The fulfillment of God’s promise began when Christ came, and what is now happening in the Church through the Word and through the Sacraments takes its place within the fulfillment which has thus began, and which is now marching towards completion.  When the Word speaks to us today, Christ is there.  All He has done is there, and all He shall do is there, gathered together, pressed small in the Word, and now offered to us.  It is the Word that provides the feet upon which Christ walks when He makes His approach to us, coming to us to bestow Himself.  The Law subdues what is evil in us, and lays us low under its chastening blows when these fall from left and right.  The Gospel abolishes sin from our conscience, and thereby places us under the kingship of the risen Christ, which at last shall emerge in visible form, and towards which the body, too, is on its way by taking upon itself the burdens of the law, and bearing the cross.  The Word is Law and Gospel.  He who proclaims the Word has to give it voice and utterance; then, of itself, it will accomplish its double work in the hearts of the listeners.  The Spirit is in the Word and the Spirit knows the art of separating Law and Gospel, of apportioning judgment and restoration.

            Preaching has but one aim, which is that Christ may come to those who have assembled to listen.  That, too, is the great object of the passage upon which is preached, since it is a passage from the Scriptures.  The Word carries within itself Christ’s coming as its general aim, to which all tends.  At any particular time, however, it is one particular passage that is its voice; it is a certain ‘bit’ provided for the journey.  When the preacher inquires about the general aim he finds it to be Christ’s coming, and when he bows obediently before its words, he accommodates himself to the simplicity of the passage, and he finds it to be humanity.  God’s greatness eludes us if we seek to attain it by cutting away what is human, what is poor and mean in the Gospel narratives.   It is in the simple words, in what is human in the Bible, that God’s power is hidden; divine and human must not be separated.  Indeed part of the hidden ness in the revelation consists in the ‘worldly nature’ of the Word—its humanity, its historicity.  However, the real hidden ness consists in this, that the Word, which gives us life, tastes death, bitterness and judgment, and actually conveys death and judgment to us, does so that the body of sin may be destroyed, and so that we may live.  It is the cleavage of the Word into Law and Gospel that holds us back from speculations, and reminds us that we are still in the battle, still in time, and still on the journey where death and resurrection happen to us, and where the true Christ thus lives in us.