The Passion of Christ

Newsletter article for April 2004

© 2004 by Rev. Paul A. Wolff

Christ’s “Passion” refers to His suffering. The work of Christ has long been identified with His suffering because that is what the Holy Scriptures tell is the work of Christ. Isaiah 53:5 tells us that “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” If you have seen the new movie “The Passion of the Christ” you will note that this Scripture verse opens the movie and gives the necessary context in which to view it.

There are many ways to wrongly consider the Christ’s passion. Even before the new movie was released some Jewish groups were complaining that it would incite people to punish the Jews for their role in the death of Christ. This has happened in history, and it is absolutely a wrong interpretation of the sufferings of Christ to single out the Jews (or anyone else) as the ones who brought about some great injustice. It is equally wrong for those same Jews (and all others) to view the passion of Christ without believing that they were responsible for the death of Christ, and being responsible for Christ’s suffering and death also receive the benefits of that death.

Isaiah made it clear long ago that the Christ was to suffer and die for our sinfulness and through that punishment we would receive forgiveness and eternal life. Pressure from Jewish groups moved Mel Gibson to remove from the subtitles the quote from Matthew 27:25 where the crowd tells Pilate, “Let his blood be on us and on our children.” That is an ironic statement because although the crowd meant it as a self-curse, it is a blessing which all of God’s people can apply to themselves as John writes in 1 John 1:7 “The blood of Jesus, [God’s] son, purifies us from all sin.”

Although Martin Luther never saw Mel Gibson’s movie (or any other movie, for that matter), he did write a short essay in 1519 entitled, “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion”. In this essay Luther notes, “They contemplate Christ’s passion aright who view it with a terror-stricken heart and a despairing conscience. This terror must be felt as you witness the stern wrath and the unchanging earnestness with which God looks upon sin and sinners, so much so that he was unwilling to release sinners even for his only and dearest Son without his payment of the severest penalty for them.”

If we take Isaiah’s prophesy seriously (and we should) then we understand that Jesus suffered so much because of our sins. Because we love Jesus we ought to be horrified that our sinfulness and the disobedience of our sin caused our beloved Savior to suffer. If you can watch the scene in the movie where the soldiers are taking such pleasure and enjoyment in beating Jesus into a bloody pulp and not understand that it is you who is doing that every time you take some guilty pleasure in some sin, then you are also not correctly considering Christ’s passion. The movie shows this pretty well how the devil was taking pleasure in the murderous hatred of the soldiers. Satan tempts us all to sin by making sin seem fun even though the least of our sins caused Jesus immense pain.

Christians know, however, that the “terror” and “despair” in our hearts that we must feel for our guilt and sin is not an end in themselves. That would also be a wrong way to view the sufferings of Christ. Judas is the example which shows us that it is not enough to simply be sorry that we have done wrong. Faith trusts that although we are terribly guilty in the death of Jesus, He loves us and will forgive all the sins of those who trust in Him for salvation. Our sorrow over our guilt should cause us to fervently repent of all our sins, and look to Jesus to forgive us for all the pain we caused Him. Luther explained this wonderfully when he wrote:

You cast your sins from yourself and onto Christ when you firmly believe that his wounds and sufferings are your sins, to be borne and paid for by him, as we read in Isaiah 53 [:6], “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” St. Peter says, “in his body has he borne our sins on the wood of the cross” [I Pet. 2:24]. St. Paul says, “God has made him a sinner for us, so that through him we would be made just” [2 Cor. 5:21]. You must stake everything on these and similar verses. The more your conscience torments you, the more tenaciously must you cling to them. If you do not do that, but presume to still your conscience with your contrition and penance, you will never obtain peace of mind, but will have to despair in the end. If we allow sin to remain in our conscience and try to deal with it there, or if we look at sin in our heart, it will be much too strong for us and will live on forever. But if we behold it resting on Christ and [see it] overcome by his resurrection, and then boldly believe this, even it is dead and nullified. Sin cannot remain on Christ, since it is swallowed up by his resurrection. Now you see no wounds, no pain in him, and no sign of sin. Thus St. Paul declares that “Christ died for our sin and rose for our justification” [Rom. 4:25]. That is to say, in his suffering Christ makes our sin known and thus destroys it, but through his resurrection he justifies us and delivers us from all sin, if we believe this.

Any Christian who views a reenactment of the passion of Christ will have to feel ambivalent (i.e. have mixed feelings) about it. On the one hand we are sad that we caused Jesus to suffer and die because of the guilt of our sins, but on the other hand, we are glad that Jesus endured the pain and death so that he could rescue us from an eternity of such suffering.

Another thing to remember if you go to view the movie is that what you are seeing is not the crucifixion of Jesus. It is a movie with actors and fake blood. This ought to be obvious to everyone who goes, but these days you can never be too careful. You are not necessarily closer to Jesus if you view this reenactment of His death. Many people have seen the movie, and still do not believe in Jesus, and are still on their way to damnation. Many other people, who have never seen the movie still repent of their sins and trust in Christ and receive forgiveness and eternal life. Remember the words Jesus told Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

(All Luther quotes from Vol. 42 of Luther’s works, p. 7-13. Philadelphia: Fortress Press; translation by Martin Bertram.)

Martin Luther

Newsletter article for October 2003

© 2003 by Rev. Paul A. Wolff

By the time this newsletter reaches your home you should be able to go to your local movie theater and see the latest movie which depicts the life of the great reformer, Martin Luther. The movie is simply titled, “Luther”. With every new look at the life of Martin Luther we Lutherans have the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with what it means to be Lutheran. However, this does not come without dangers. Not every depiction of the life and teachings of Martin Luther is good and beneficial. Some depictions of Luther’s teachings or the significance of his work are distorted and others simply contain flat-out lies. An example of this was a recent PBS television documentary on Luther. This documentary, while doing a pretty good job of accurately presenting the factual information of Luther’s life, didn’t have a clue about the true significance of Martin Luther. But then of all the scholars who were interviewed in that documentary, none of them were Lutheran, and all of them had some other agenda which led them to misunderstand or purposely distort the meaning of the Reformation.

I would encourage all who read this article to go and see the movie “Luther,” but I would also hope that you would go with open eyes. I have heard good reviews from Lutherans who have previewed the movie, so I am hopeful that it will be an honest look at both the man and his teachings, and I am looking forward to seeing it myself. However, recent events in the church (worldwide) have reminded me of the validity of the doctrine of original sin and have left me wary of trusting in the unquestioned goodness of all that calls itself Lutheran or even Christian. Further examination is always required, but I am always hopeful, and I am eager to be impressed.

It should come as no surprise that there is now a renewed interest in Martin Luther. At the end of the millennium several historians came up with lists of the most influential people in the second millennium since Christ, and Martin Luther was at or near the top in all of these lists. It is also probably true that each list put Luther at the top for different reasons, which begs the question, “What is Luther all about?”

In the past year I have come across a little book which gives the best explanation of what it means to be a Lutheran in modern society. The book is Here We Stand by Hermann Sasse (pronounced SAH-say). There has been a growing rediscovery of Hermann Sasse lately because the issues with which the LCMS is currently struggling are the very same sorts of things that Sasse had to deal with in Germany in the early 20^th century. I myself have been astonished by the current relevance of essays that Sasse wrote some 70 years ago. I suppose I should not have been astonished because it was nearly 3,000 years ago that King Solomon wrote that “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Strangely enough, as we try to understand what it means to be Lutheran we should first of all keep one thing in mind: to be Lutheran has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Martin Luther. The best possible Lutheran cares not one little bit about Martin Luther. Luther himself was not interested in Martin Luther, but rather he was interested in Jesus Christ. Of course as a Christian we cannot ignore Luther because there have been only a precious few people since Biblical times who have taught the truth of the Bible so purely and clearly as he did. To be a Lutheran is all about what the Bible teaches about Jesus Christ, and not at all about who Martin Luther was. However, there are those who seek to undermine the teachings of Luther, and because they cannot find fault with his theology (because he taught the truth of God’s Word) they instead attack or undermine the man.

In Here We Stand, Sasse notes that there are at least three ways in which the Lutheran Reformation is misunderstood, or misrepresented. The first is that Luther is depicted as a great “Hero of the Reformation” who led his followers to a new age of Renaissance. This is a false depiction for several reasons. At the time of the Reformation Luther was, and remained, a pastor, Biblical scholar, and teacher. Sasse notes that early in the history of the reformation Luther “slipped into the background,” and his role after 1530 was “not nearly as important as that which Calvin played to the close of his life.” Luther also never wanted his followers to be known by his name. He preferred the name, “Evangelical” but eventually that term came to apply to others, and the term “Lutheran” stuck. What is more, of the eight confessional documents which make up the Book of Concord, which is what really defines what it means to be Lutheran, only three of them were even written by Martin Luther (the Small and Large catechisms, and the Smalcald Articles), and the Formula of Concord was written some fifteen years after Luther’s death.

The second way the Lutheran Reformation is misrepresented is what Sasse calls the “culture-historical interpretation of the Reformation.” This describes the impact that the reformation had on Western society, and claims that the main importance of Luther is that he began to release the human potential of Europeans from the oppression of the Medieval way of thinking. This is still a popular view in some circles, but anyone with even a limited knowledge of Luther knows that this is way off base. If this were true then Luther would have encouraged the peasants in their revolt rather than vehemently denouncing them. (The peasant revolt is reportedly depicted in the movie, and is one of the main reasons that the movie received a PG-13 rating.) This is the point of view of the PBS documentary which was released this summer. This suggested that Luther began something, but it was incomplete, and left to others to finish. Or to use a sports metaphor, Luther, it is implied, picked up the ball, but others ran with it, and so Luther is seen as incomplete and obsolete. In reality, Luther was not concerned about the advancement of human civilization, instead he was concerned about the salvation of man and taught what the Bible teaches about the complete moral depravity of sinful man which everyone must recognize before they can receive the salvation which only Jesus can give.

The third way the Reformation is misrepresented is that it is seen as essentially a German nationalistic event. There is a grain of truth to this because there was the beginning of a unification of Germany behind Luther. His translation of the Scriptures into German not only was the focus of shared German pride, but it literally created a unified, common German language out of several differing dialects. But again, Luther was not interested in what it meant to be German. He was only interested in what it meant to be a Christian. Lutheran teachings are not culture bound, but universal because God’s Word is universal.

The true meaning of the Reformation is that it is an event in the history of the Christian church. It is all about doctrine, and not about the man. To be Lutheran is to trust that the Holy Scriptures are God’s Word which is the only thing which shows us how we may be saved from our sins.

I hope you will keep this in mind as you go to see the new movie. This is how a movie about Luther should be judged: Is it more about Luther, or more about Christ? Do you come away with more of an admiration of Luther, or is your Christian faith strengthened? It is again strange to say it, but it is true, if the movie is too much about Luther then it doesn’t fairly represent the man. He relentlessly pointed people to Christ for their hope and salvation, and any accurate representation of Luther will do the same. I pray that this is true, and if so then I also pray that this movie also becomes wildly popular in our society.

Confession and Absolution

Newsletter article for March 1999

© 1999 by Rev. Paul A. Wolff

The Church season of Lent which we are now observing is a special season which prepares our hearts and minds for the celebration of Easter. We do this by looking into our own hearts and recognizing our sinfulness. We cannot properly celebrate Easter until we recognize that Good Friday and Easter are for us. The death of Jesus makes no sense until you realize that Jesus didn’t belong up there on the cross. It should be you and me up on our own crosses suffering for our own sins. The resurrection of Jesus also makes no sense unless we believe that just as Jesus died so that His death takes the place of our death, in the same way His resurrection to life proves that He will also give us the victory over death so that we may live forever.

Six weeks of thinking about sin probably doesn’t fit anyone’s definition of a good time. Some may say that the season of Lent is too long. They are missing the point. We should look into our hearts every day and confess our sins to God every day, or even more frequently if we are struggling with a particular temptation. Although it is hard to admit our sins, even when we talk to God in private, it is a great blessing to be able to confess our sins to God.

God is a gracious God. He wants us to admit our sinfulness and confess our sins to Him. He knows our sins better than even we know ourselves. He knows all the sins that we have forgotten about, or that we were not aware that we were doing wrong. There is no hiding from God the fact that we are guilty, and deserving of punishment. But God doesn’t tell us to confess so that he can punish us. He tells us to confess our sins so that He can forgive us.

Absolution (or forgiveness) is an even greater blessing from God than confession. It seems easy enough in our worship to confess our sins and hear the words from the pastor that God forgives our sins. Perhaps it is too easy, because if we overlook all that it took for God to be able to tell the pastor that he can pronounce the words of forgiveness, we might possibly think that God simply overlooks our guilt and doesn’t care if we sin against Him. However, Holy Scripture tells us that God is a righteous and just God and He hates sin. He cannot let even one little sin go unpunished.

This would be extremely bad news for all of us except that God also loves us and wants to save us from our sins. That is why He sent His only begotten Son, Jesus, to be born as one of us and take our place on the cross. The suffering and torture that Jesus endured for our sins is indescribable, but His love for each one of us is even more awesome. It is only because Jesus loved us enough to suffer and die to take the punishment for our sins that He has given us the authority to forgive one another’s sins.

May God bless you during this Lenten season as you prepare your heart for the celebration of Christ’s victory over sin. May the Holy Spirit give you the courage to admit your sinfulness before God. May the Holy Spirit give you the faith to trust in Jesus to rescue you completely from your sins. And may Christ

Jesus, our Lord, strengthen you with the assurance of salvation every time you hear His words, “Your sins are forgiven.”

Why Is It So Hard to Do What is Right?

Newsletter Article for December 1998

© 1998 by Rev. Paul A. Wolff

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Romans 7:15)

It is always a struggle to do what is right. It is rarely easy. Perhaps that is why an act of kindness from a stranger is so special and noteworthy, not only because of the kindness itself, but also for what has been overcome or sacrificed to get to that point. If you have studied Luther’s Small Catechism you ought to remember that we have three major powers working against us which make it hard for us to obey God and do what is right. These three powers are the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh.

Our first obstacle is our own sinful nature. Even without any outside help, we are drawn to disobey God. This is our sinful Pride. Our sinful nature leads us to believe that we can do no wrong, and we believe that as long as we do what is right in our own eyes we don’t have to do right in the eyes of others. However, Jesus gave us the golden rule which says that we should love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We are not the ones to determine the rightness of our own actions, but instead God and others ought to determine if we do right by them.

The second obstacle to doing right which we face is the world. Because the world is full of sinful people they want to justify their own sinful actions and bring us down to their level. After all, if we are just as bad as everyone else, then we have no right to condemn anyone else. This is the “everybody is doing it” argument which we all know all too well. The trouble with this is that it leads us into an ever deepening spiral of sin and depravity until we destroy ourselves.

This is clearly shown in the struggle for peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Soon after a recent peace agreement was reached between the two sides there was a terrorist bombing which was meant to re-ignite the hatred and destroy the peace process. I can’t even remember which side bombed the other, but it doesn’t matter because there are groups on both sides which would rather see both nations obliterated rather than swallow their own pride and live in peace and prosperity with their closest neighbors. Those who don’t want peace must have a death wish, and they will likely get what they want. Those who want peace are afraid for their lives because their own people think little of their lives and will try to murder them. This is an example of how the world makes it hard to do what is right, even when it is clearly in our own best interests to do so.

Behind both of these obstacles is a third obstacle, the devil. The devil is the original enemy of God, and he wants to do everything he can to destroy God’s will, and hurt God’s people. The devil is a powerful enemy, but there are limits to his influence over us. God keeps the devil on a short leash so that he cannot destroy us against our will. Remember that even in the book of Job, the devil couldn’t torment Job without God’s approval, and even then God limited his power. But the devil is a tough opponent, and he knows that we are all sinful by nature. Even though Christians have been reborn as holy children of God, the devil works on our sinful flesh to try to get us to do evil, and kill the new life within us from God.

Any of these three obstacles would be enough to keep us from doing what is right, but with all three working together it is impossible. Fortunately for us we are not alone in our struggle. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.” (1 John 3:8) Christ has overcome the devil so we should trust in Jesus to give us the strength to resist the devil’s temptations to sin. Jesus also told us, “I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33) We don’t have to fear the evil intentions of the world, because Christ has rescued us from all that the could do to us. Jesus also rescues us from our greatest obstacle, our own sinful flesh, “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22) Even though our sinful flesh must die because it is corrupted by sin, we have Christ’s guarantee that He will raise us to life and glorify our bodies so that they are perfect, without sin.

Why is it so hard to do right? Because we are trying to do it on our own, apart from Christ. Let us submit our will to Christ and let Him guide our actions, so that by His grace, we will continue to do good and give Him all the praise and glory.

Reformation Day 1996

Newsletter article for October 1996

© 1996 by Rev. Paul A. Wolff

At the end of this month we will celebrate a very special holiday. October 31 isn’t just Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve), it is also the 479th anniversary of the start of the Reformation. This is a great day in the history of the Christian Church, although it is understandable that it is not celebrated with such vigor in the Roman Catholic Church (to say the least). However, we celebrate Reformation Day because it is the day that Dr. Martin Luther brought the Gospel back to its rightful place in the Church.

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian Monk and Bible Scholar, posted a sheet of paper on the door of the Church in Wittenberg, Germany. On the paper was printed 95 “Theses” about what Luther felt were unscriptural and anti-Christian practices in the Catholic Church. He wanted the local Church leaders and Biblical Scholars to study each thesis on the basis of Holy Scripture so that they could stop doing things which were spiritually harmful for the members of the Church, and they could have a better understanding what Scripture taught.

Luther’s 95 Theses were not received kindly by the leaders of the Catholic Church, even though the members of the Church were generally excited that someone in the Church was addressing the problems in the Church of that time. Even though printed Bibles were rare, the people knew enough about Christianity and about the Bible to know that some of the practices of the Church of that time were wrong. However, because of greed, and pride, and sin in general, the leaders of the Church were unwilling to admit any errors, and they tried to get Martin Luther to recant his position that the Church was in error. In a dramatic and famous scene from history, Luther stood in front of the emperor, who had put Luther on trial, and he told the emperor that unless it could be proven from Holy Scripture that he was wrong he could not recant what he had written because it was the truth of God’s word.

Martin Luther had come a long way in his life to get to this point. He was raised a good Catholic, and felt so strongly about the Church that he devoted his life to service in the Church by becoming a monk in the Augustinian order. However, as he tried to live out his faith, he grew increasingly unsure about the forgiveness of his sins, and even his own salvation. The problem was that the Church had a system of penance where a person would have to do a good work before receiving forgiveness from the priest (and presumably, God). Instead of reassuring Luther (and no doubt others, too) that his sins were forgiven, this only raised doubts in his mind whether he had done enough penance, or whether he was sorry enough for his sins. Luther even began to doubt whether God could forgive him at all for his sins.

The answer to this dilemma came when Luther was reading the Book of Romans where it says, “A man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.” And also in Ephesians where it says, “For it is by faith that you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” It was these passages, and others like them which reassured Luther of God’s love and forgiveness in Christ. This was such a relief to Luther’s conscience that he began to reread the Bible to learn if there were more passages like this. To his great surprise he found that there were passages like this throughout the whole Bible. In fact, he learned that the whole Bible was about what God has done to save us from our sins (the Gospel). The answer was always there, right under his nose, but he had overlooked it until this point. From then on he looked at everything the Church did in terms of the Gospel. This is what led him to post the 95 Theses.

This also explains why we hold Luther in such high regard in the Lutheran Church. Luther was not a perfect man. He did not do miracles (although several times God protected him in nearly miraculous ways). He did not even devise a clever system of theology like some later reformers. Martin Luther simply read God’s Word and discovered the Gospel of Salvation through faith in Jesus, and he tried to return the Gospel to its proper place in Worship, and in the Church. This is why we in the Lutheran Church place great importance on Holy Scripture and the Church’s doctrine. Since Scripture is God’s Word, it is the basis for all the teachings in our Church. God gave us His Word so that we can put our faith in Jesus to save us from our sins. Luther didn’t teach us anything new, but we thank God for sending Luther to remind us that Jesus is our only savior from sin, and that the only way we can be saved is through faith in Jesus Christ. We should keep this in mind this month during our times of Bible study. Whether you are at Church, or at home in your personal Bible study, remember that the Bible is about Jesus and what he has done to save you from your sins and give you eternal salvation.

May God bless your worship and Bible Study this month (and always),

Pastor Wolff