One of the big Jewish holy days is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement: the day above all others for seeking God’s forgiveness for the failure to live as God requires.  God appointed the day.  Yom Kippur is not a recent development in Judaism: it’s been around since God’s instructions to Moses in the wilderness.  God knew His people would need such a day until the great day of full, final atonement came.  You and I know that day.  We’re here because of it.

The thing about the Pharisees, scrupulous observers of all the annotated, expanded, explained, interpreted Law, was that they had become expert at telling themselves there was nothing for which they needed to seek atonement—nothing serious, anyway.  Being so faithful and righteous and all.  They did not stand in need of God’s forgiveness in any serious sense because they were righteous, scrupulous performers of the requirements of the law, as explained by the law experts: Do these things and you’ll be fine, the scribes said, and the Pharisees did these things, believing they were safe because they did them.  And we say we see the problem with that assumed righteousness through keeping the law, and then we don’t act upon what we say we see.  We still go about our lives as if, really, ultimately, being a good person, in our own eyes and in the eyes of those who matter to us, will be enough, that doing an occasional good deed, as these get defined by contemporary mores, will be enough: God will sort out the rest—if He even really needs to.  And since He loves everyone and all . . .

Brothers and sisters, what Jesus is saying has nothing now to do with the Pharisees.  They’re long dead.  God’s Word speaks still.  God sees all the heart: “The Lord looks on the heart,” we hear through Samuel; God tells Jeremiah to remind the people that, “I the Lord search the heart”; we hear in the psalms that God “knows the secrets of the heart.”  We remember being told that Jesus knew what was in every heart.  Nothing is hidden, beloved.  What can we hide from the Lord?  “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.  What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs” (12:2-3).  Jesus has already said much the same, earlier (8:17).  He is emphasizing a point.  It does matter, what gets said even if it’s just you and one other.  It does matter, what goes on inside.  But what can any of us really do about that?

Several times, Jesus reminds his followers to keep a close watch on themselves: self-knowledge, self-control.  Not always fun, or easy, but oh, so valuable.  My father, trying to explain the sense of Jesus’ “all is already known” to a young boy unused to such an idea, told me that, at the judgment, it would be as if a movie of each one’s life were shown on a huge screen, for all to see.  The movie would detail not only our actions and words but our thoughts as well: all would be revealed, for all to see.  The idea disturbed me: I didn’t want just anybody to see and know everything like that!  I would just die!  Later, it occurred to me that my life wouldn’t be the only life up on that big screen.  Everyone would see and know everything about everyone.  For anything that obliterated me with shame, there would be just as many writhing on the floor in grief that their sorrowful secrets were out, too: all they had so labored to hide away even from themselves.  The point of the exercise, beyond demanding a full and fully truthful account from us all, beyond reminding us that we are each woeful messes in God’s loving, merciful, forgiving, gracious eyes—the point of the imagined exercise, I think, is to remind ourselves, again, to make the most of the time we have been given.  Keep priorities in clear view.  Now is the time to go the way.  Now is the time to pray, fervently, for grace to make decisions for righteousness, knowing it is only through God that we can, and that God helps us to follow through.

Let us strive here, now, for consistency.  Let our Yes be Yes, and our No be No.  Say what you mean, mean what you say.  Follow through.  Prize integrity, in others and in yourself.  And also this: don’t allow your past to cripple your present.  It doesn’t have to.  One stronger than any and every past is now with you, with us all, to bear us along into God’s future.

“I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more” (12:4).  If Jesus is speaking to friends, and he is, then he is speaking for our welfare and blessing.  Sometimes, we follow the teaching of the world because we think it is better, kinder, gentler, than the teaching of God.  Sometimes, we tell ourselves God’s teaching has never really been rightly understood, until our own day, when we know so much more and are so much more advanced.  It’s easy to listen to the things Jesus says that we like.  We wrestle with, ignore, or reject those things Jesus says that do not sound like the Jesus we want.  We’d take a truncated Jesus over a true Jesus because we do not want a Jesus who changes us so much as Jesus who doesn’t ask hard questions, like where have we been, and what have we been doing.  But all is seen and known.

And there is the tremendous if unacknowledged weight of social pressure.  Peer pressure—they used to talk to us about it in school as if it were a hopeless trap.  What those first apostles and then the early Christians found was that, as they turned to God, received Jesus and began patterning their lives after all God’s Word, people they had known all their lives began to criticize them, ridicule them, warn them, argue with them, threaten them, and reject them.  Under pressure.  Could you really give up your family, for Jesus?  Your parents?  Your spouse?  Your children?  We won’t answer.  No such thing would ever happen to us, of course, so we don’t have to answer.  But those early believers did have to answer: their loved ones left them no choice.  Those around us who are not committed to God will leave us with no choice.  Oh, we’ll try to straddle both worlds: this and the kingdom, but as the chasm between grows ever wider, that straddling ultimately becomes impossible.  Even the most flexible among us will need, finally, to hold to one or the other.  Beloved, if we’re all good people and already all God’s children, why do any of us need salvation?  Salvation from what?

To choose God’s side, the kingdom side, is to reject what is not of God.  We do not get to decide for ourselves what is and is not of God: God’s Word instructs us, clearly, carefully, lovingly, constantly, consistently.  We grow closer to God as we hold to God’s Word over love of the world, love of what the world permits us to do as if without judgment.  The world will not allow such closeness to God to go unpunished.  The faithful Christian in this world, beloved, will bear a heavy, splintering cross.  Jesus knows.  Jesus also knows the cross and the bearing it is temporary, and eternity of glory, after.  Just when you think you can’t hold out any longer, that capitulation is your only option, just when you want to go running back to the world, to do as those of this world tell you, believe what they tell you to believe, reject what they tell you to reject, remember: this is temporary; God is forever.

“But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell.  Yes, I tell you, fear him” (12:5).  Him who?  The Devil?  I mean, Jesus just mentioned hell, there.  He seems to believe it’s a thing.  But Satan has no authority over us except what we allow the Tempter, what we voluntarily give our mortal enemy.  And why would anyone ever even give him the time of day?  Just read a work like Faust or Picture of Dorian Grey.  A deal with the devil—David Lee Roth sang about it; Bon Scott didn’t seem to mind: all our appetite fulfilled, here . . . for a price.  It ought to cause us to shudder.

Only one has authority to cast into hell—authority over our eternal disposition.  But wait.  Is Jesus saying that God will be the one to throw people into hell?  What sort of God is that?  How dare He!?  Who does He think He is, anyway?  If I love you, beloved, will I willingly let you do just whatever you want to yourself, or others?  And if, despite all the love I lavish upon you, you reject that love and seek your fulfillment in places and ways I have told you again and again will only end in your destruction, shall I disregard truth and reality, and drag you into Life, all the while you kicking and screaming hate for me?  Oh, but we aren’t in our right mind.  Then why do we decline to institutionalize those who clearly aren’t in their right mind?  But that’s against the law!  Who makes the laws under which we agree to live?  But who are we to know?  God knows.

Kicking and screaming hate for God?  But who hates Him?  It’s insane to hate Him.  Insane it may be, yet it’s more common than we may want to realize.  Just look around.  “Jesus Christ is a myth,” I heard someone say just last week.  Hate doesn’t always look or sound like ranting wrath, or gunfire and burning churches.  Most often it is rather casual: careless, constant disregard.  Indifference, no curiosity, no time.  Better things to do.  Most people aren’t hostile until the button that sets them off gets pressed.  Jesus, for example, sin, salvation.

Jesus speaks of God throwing people into Hell.  He is putting matters strongly: who in their right mind would ever want that to happen?  It happens all the time, as people walk their own way into hell, despite every sign pointing to a better way.  Ever wonder why they put those Wrong Way signs up on the highways?  Who’d be dumb enough to go the wrong way?  Any God who throws people into hell is unjust.  No, people are hellbent on their own way.  God will not stop those who do not want to stop.  So, how do any of us ever get to the point of wanting to stop?  Think that through and you will begin to know your own faith journey, your own testimony.  Share it, like a gift from God, like bread for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, grace for the dejected, balm for the hurting.

God expects us, rightly, justly, to revere, obey, honor, emulate Him, and always to seek to please Him above all no matter what.  Fear the Lord.  God help us!  God save us!  Jesus does not need to remind us that we have fallen short of God’s requirement.  The Spirit makes that knowledge keen in us who want to stop, who want to go God’s way according to God’s Word, every day.  No, Jesus wants to remind us, here especially, of something else, something more: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?  Yet not one of them is forgotten by God” (12:6).  Two pennies.  Would you bother to stop and pick them up off the asphalt?  We pass by what is worthless, to us, without notice, without thought, care, or concern.  And God is well aware of the least of the least.  He sees.  He knows, completely.  All are seen.  All is known.  “Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (12:7).  Each hair has a number in God’s reckoning?  Not one, unseen.  Not one unknown, uncounted.  And what else, then, also seen, also known?  “Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (12:7).

Worth more.  Despite the failures, weakness, cowardice, entrenches habits, the sorrows we seek to fill with the wrong things in the wrong ways.  What is our worth, in God’s eyes?  We behold it here, today, beloved.  When Christ took the bread and broke it, when he took the cup and poured into it, he told us what we are worth, to Him: his body, his blood: his life.  We are worth the life of God.

Do you wonder, then, that God is so persistent, so insistent, upon saving us, changing us, re-shaping us into conformity with Christ?  Even now, across the world, brothers and sisters are gathered, celebrating God’s love, rejoicing in God who calls people to turn, to remember, to lift hands and hearts, to receive Him: His grace, His mercy, His power, His salvation, His love, His way.  Let us be joined at the heart to our brothers and sisters; let us be joined in Christ, joined with the Father, through the mystery of the Spirit’s love, the very power of rebirth, renewal, restoration.