Homily for Lent 3 Evening Prayer (2019)

"A God Exposed"
Genesis 3:7-21; John 19:1-5, 23-24

With complete credit and much appreciation to Rev. Jeff Hemmer and Concordia Publishing House's "Behold the Man!" Lenten series, and with slight revisions for my proclamation.

How things have changed. Naked once meant “innocent, selfless, and perfect.” The man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed, Genesis 2 tells us. Shame is different from guilt. Shame includes an unhealthy preoccupation with oneself. It makes sense that Adam and his wife were unashamed even though they were naked. After all, they did not have that level of self-awareness that comes from sinful, selfish navel-gazing. But then, as soon as they sinned, their eyes were opened to a new reality. Sure, they knew good and evil, that knowledge their Creator had withheld purely for their good. But now they see that they are naked. Exposed. Vulnerable. And when their eyes turn toward themselves for the first time, they are ashamed. “Look at me,” Adam thinks. “Look at me,” his wife muses. But each of them is too preoccupied with himself or herself to notice the nakedness of the other. Sin does exactly that; it curves our gaze in on ourselves.

What could they do? Hide themselves, they hoped. Fig leaves hastily stitched together, before they fled from their Creator into the garden, were their garments of choice. But fig leaves cannot hide sin and guilt. So, after God exposes the couple in their ashamed hiding, gets them to acknowledge (though not confess) their sins, and doles out the curses to the two and the serpent, He then upgrades their wardrobes from bloodless fig leaves to garments made from skin. And they quickly learn that God was not wrong when He had threatened death the very moment they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But He mercifully stayed their executions by shedding the blood of some innocent animal, an animal whose skin would cover the sin and shame of the man and woman. Their nakedness would be covered at the cost of an even deeper nakedness. After all, what could be more exposed than an animal stripped of its skin? And so the first death, the first bloodshed, happened at the hands of the Creator Himself. God granted these rebels the luxury of hiding their shame behind the innocence of another creature.

You never want to admit it, but this is the true nature of sin—your sin. Instead, you want to hide it behind pious-seeming fig leaves, but fig leaves cannot do the job. No matter what you do to delete your browsing history, you cannot hide your shame or obscure your guilt from the eyes of an all-knowing God. No matter how you try to couch your gossip in thinly veiled requests to “pray for her,” those words remain reputation-damaging slander against your neighbor, and they render you guilty before a Holy God. Even if you call it “just getting what’s rightfully yours,” it’s still greed. Excuses for why you can’t make it to the week-after-week Sunday morning Divine Service don’t allow you to receive the gifts that God delivers there. And those excuses cannot hide your sin. Claiming “Everyone else is doing it” is a very flimsy fig leaf. Repent of these and all other fig-leaf attempts to hide your sin and trick yourself into thinking that you are blameless.

Sin can only be covered with skin.

No one knows what that animal was in the garden, the one whose innocent skin the Creator peeled away in order to hide the exposed, vulnerable parts of Adam and his wife. But, given how immature offspring of sheep are often selected to be sacrifices on Passover, in the tabernacle, in the temple, it might be a good guess that the first animal to die, flayed to fend off death for mankind, was a lamb.

“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” John the Baptist proclaimed about Jesus (John 1:29). Behold, the fulfillment of every lamb with its throat slit and its blood spilt to render it a sacrifice in the temple. Behold, the fulfillment of every Passover lamb roasted and completely consumed the night before God brought His people out of slavery. Behold, the Lamb who is not actually a lamb but a man. Behold God with skin.

Behold the man scourged by the Roman soldiers with their evil flagrum, designed to shred the skin from the back and sides of the person whipped, tearing away flesh so deep that the internal organs are nearly exposed. Behold the man on whose head the soldiers pressed the crown woven of thorns to ridicule Him as a madman for His belief in being King. Behold the man on whom they drape a soldier’s dirty purple robe to intensify the joke. Behold the man whom Pilate brought forth to say, “This is no king!” Here is God, with skin, clothed in the mockery of sinful men.

Behold the man who, when He was nailed to the cross, was stripped naked. Behold the man whose clothes the soldiers divided amongst themselves. Behold the man whose seamless tunic was the prize for which the godless gambled. Behold the man, God with skin, whose skin is shamefully exposed for all passersby to mock. Behold the bare naked God.

Behold the man who will bear your sin and shame. Behold the man who will suffer in your place. Behold the man whose nakedness answers for Adam’s. Behold the man naked and unashamed, with nothing to hide, with no sin of His own to clothe in garments and rationalization. Behold the man stripped bare to bear your own sins. All of them. The ones you try to hide and obscure, the ones you pretend are not there, the ones that cause you the greatest shame. All of them hang there on the cross with this man, this God, Jesus, naked and dying for you.

Behold the man, stripped naked so He might clothe you in new skin. Behold the man who will hide your sin with His own righteousness. Behold the man who gives you Himself to wear. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Behold the man in whose washing of Holy Baptism you are clothed in the boundless perfection of His own righteousness. Behold the man who covers your sin with His own skin. Wear His garment. Wear Him. Your sin is gone. Your shame is removed. Your guilt is dissipated. Behold the man! Amen.