Sermon: Wittenberg Academy – St. Philip Melanchthon

16 February 2020

Text: John 5:30-47

 In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Today the Church honors St. Philip Melanchthon, a lay theologian and confessor of the faith, the author of the Augsburg Confession, and a professor who helped restore the study of Hebrew and Greek so as to more fully understand the Word of God. 

Professor Melanchthon pointed his students to the Scriptures, to the Word of God, for the Bible points us to the incarnate Word of God, our Lord Jesus Himself!  Reading the Bible is not just an academic exercise, for as our Lord Himself says: “You search the Scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about Me.”  Scripture points us to Christ, dear friends, and in Him we have life!  And in today’s reading from John’s Gospel, our Lord gives a theological discourse about Himself.  He is the Son, and the Son does nothing on His own, but acts in, with, and under the Father’s will and authority.

Nor does Jesus simply assert His divinity alone.  The prophets of the Old Testament – including, and concluding with, St. John the Baptist – proclaim Him as the Messiah.  And yet, building on the prophets and on John’s testimony, Jesus says: “But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John.  For the works that the Father has given Me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about Me that the Father has sent Me.”

What are these works, dear friends?  Jesus not only performs miracles showing His mastery over nature, like turning water into wine, multiplying bread and fish, and calming storms, He also changes the trajectory of human history: liberating sinful men from physical infirmities, like blindness and deafness and crippling diseases.  And what’s more, He delivers people from the bondage of demons, and ultimately, raises the dead!  For all of these infringements on our burdened human nature are a result of sin.  And Jesus has come to atone for sin, and thus defeat death at its source, by dying on the cross. 

Our Lord warns us not to read the Scriptures in such a way as to derive false hope from “Moses,” that is, the Law.  The Law accuses us; it doesn’t save us.  But the Law does diagnose our ailment: sin.  And so, as our Lord points out, if we believe Moses, we should believe Jesus, and if we believe Jesus, we should also believe Moses.  For Moses too points us to Jesus!

Thanks be to God for the life and work of the humanist scholar and confessor of the faith, St. Philip Melanchthon, whose study of Scripture was more than an academic treatment of the classics.  For he knew and confessed that the Scriptures point us to Jesus: who forgives our sins, and wins eternal life for us.  So let us remember Master Philip and let us praise the one whom he confessed, even Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.