Sunday, September 18th, 2011: “The First Last, the Last First”

Talk about crushing Law! It is this terrifying saying of our Gracious Savior to those in the visible manifestation of the kingdom of heaven on earth, the Church. Jesus is speaking to Christians in Matthew 20 when He says, “So the last will be first, and the first last.” For our Savior to speak this way means that we Christians are sinners. That sounds like a simple thing to say, to think, to write, to confess, but it is totally true. Sometimes Christians just doubt this. After-all doesn’t Scripture call Christians “born again,” “a new creation,” “children of God,” “a royal priesthood,” etc.? Of course God calls us these things, and that is what we are! But this does not cancel the fact that Scripture constantly employs a figure of speech called synecdoche when the whole is put for a part, or a part for the whole. We are forgiven this is true, and we are sinners who constantly confess our sin. The sinner is a saint, the saint is a sinner! We are both; we are “simultaneously justified and sinner,” which is why all of us should be able to relate to St. Paul’s commentaries on the battle between the two natures (Romans 7 and Galatians 5). So Christ our Lord in Matthew 20 speaks to His forgiven people, His saints, His Church and gives us an invaluable warning: our sinful nature is such that we are constantly led to gravitate towards St. Peter’s insecurity expressed in Matthew 19:27: “See, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” Even after we have received the grace of God through faith in Christ alone apart from the work’s of the law, our sinful flesh starts working overtime. It leads us to play the game of comparison with others and enter into the presumption of righteousness. We know that the synergistic idea that “God has done His part, we must now do ours” is not what we confess, but it is the way we act. Our assurance of salvation begins to creep over into human security, especially as we strive to point out that we are indubitably better than others, at least a few anyway! But this is the game of the heart “deceitful above all things and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9). We are to realize that our natural tendency is to claim we are first and to hold God to our way of Law. If we do, that same demand will lead us to forfeit and reject the grace of God. There is no hope for those who insist that they are first or that they should be in any way put above anyone else. The only right confession is that we are last, dead last. That we are helpless to save ourselves; that God had to go out searching for us when we were not included in the kingdom and by grace welcome us to work in His vineyard. We must confess that receiving our “denarius” is not because of our merit, but because of His grace; in fact His kind and generous gift is His grace in Christ. This situation leads us to have a new mind (even as we battle with the old); we now accept the truth: “For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.” (Galatians 6:3) AND “So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'” What else is there to say about what we do? After all, it is only through the life, death, and resurrection of  our Savior Jesus Christ that we last ones are said to be first; not for boasting over others, but for marveling that while we are chief of sinners, God would claim us as His own! In Your Service and To Christ’s Glory, Dr. Espinosa

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