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At the font, God names you His child; at the cross, Christ bears your sin and hides your sonship in His. The baptized saints are children of God now, even as the world and their own eyes cannot yet see what they will be. As we remember those who died in the faith, we wait for the Lamb to reveal them—and us—as His own.
Jeremiah 26 opens Part Two of the book by returning to about 609 BC and the Temple Sermon, now showing what that hard word cost the prophet who preached it. As Jeremiah is put on trial for speaking the Lord’s words, the chapter contrasts his rescue with Urijah’s death and points ahead to Jesus, who was handed over for our offenses. On All Saints’ Day, we consider the call to hear and turn, and the promise that there is no condemnation for those in Christ.
The priests and prophets said it of Jeremiah: “This man deserves to die!” The verdict was wrong about him, and it is right about us. Jesus took that verdict in our place, so no charge is left against you, and nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ.
Who are the violent who take the kingdom of heaven by force? Sinners with empty hands take hold of Christ and His mercy. The King suffered every blow our sins deserved, and He gives His kingdom freely.
We review Jeremiah 1–25 by returning to the prophet’s call: God put His words in Jeremiah’s mouth and sent him to speak them. From Jeremiah we follow the promise of the Prophet like Moses to Jesus, who drank the cup of wrath His prophet could only carry. We also consider what it means to hear Christ today through the men He sends to preach His Word.
The man the King walks up to is not a scoffer who stayed home. He is the pious man in the pew, dressed in his own clothes, and the Law shuts his mouth. But there is another speechless man in Matthew's Gospel: the Son, who was bound, stripped, and cast into the dark in his place, so that the baptized wear Christ and have their mouths opened to sing.
God built Eve from Adam's side while he slept. Christ slept in death on the cross, His side was pierced, and from the water and the blood God built His Bride, the Church. A marriage God builds does not rest on how well the couple builds. It rests on Christ, who gave Himself for them.
Jeremiah 25 reads like a list of verdicts on nations nobody can find on a map. The easy reading is that God is settling accounts with Judah's enemies. That is half right. The cup begins in Jerusalem, and God puts it in Jeremiah's own hand: "Take this wine cup of fury from My hand" (v. 15). Every nation drinks, God's own city first, and the chapter points ahead to the One who drank it in their place.
The Lord's words to the seventy end in a house, not on the road. The peace they speak is not theirs; it is His, sent before His face. It can be sent back by the house that smiles and never lets it in, and by the one who hears "son of peace" and counts himself out. But a son of peace is simply the one it was sent to, and the Lord who set His face toward the cross now comes to this house as host and speaks it first.
The disciples ask Jesus when; He tells them how to stand. St. John says His commands are not heavy, yet Mark 13 lays on councils, betrayal, and the hatred of all. The weight is real, but every command comes with Jesus Himself attached. He was delivered up in your place, He endured to the end for you, and the victory is already yours.
Two baskets of figs sit in front of the temple, one good and one so rotten it can't be eaten. The easy reading is that God keeps the good people and throws out the bad, so be a good fig. That is half right. It misses who lands in which basket, and who does the work. The good figs are the exiles Jerusalem wrote off, and every verb in verses 5 to 7 has God as its subject: "I will give them a heart to know Me."
Jesus does not tell the paralytic that God forgives sinners. He says, “Your sins are forgiven you.” A general pardon lets you stay in the crowd; Christ puts the pardon in a man’s mouth, on earth, with your name written on it.
The Lord picks a speck of a seed and a woman's hidden leaven, and we grade the kingdom by what we can count. But the seed is Christ Himself, small enough to step on, sown in a garden and hung on a tree. The one who grades, and comes up short, is the bird He has given a place to land.
This week the chapter Advent made famous. God turns on the shepherds who scattered His sheep and promises to raise up for David a Righteous Branch, a King who will execute judgment and righteousness in the earth (Jer. 23:5), the very thing chapter 22 demanded and no king did. Then God names Him. Judah's last king was Zedekiah, whose name means "My righteousness is the LORD." He wore the name and lived nothing like it. God gives the true King that name turned around: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS (Jer. 23:6). The rest of the chapter goes after the prophets who preached peace out of their own dreams, and God answers them with His word: Is not My word like a fire? says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces? (Jer. 23:29). The hammer comes first. Then the name.
There is a little monk in all of us who says real service to God is somewhere else, so we look down on the ordinary work God gave us and step over the neighbor at our elbow. Jesus answers the temple lawyer with a kitchen answer: love God, love your neighbor. David's Lord came down, kept both commandments in the carpenter's shop and on the cross for you, and now He sits. Under His wings the diaper, the combine, and the drive to your mother's appointment are done to God.
Bad news always gets to church first, and the people who bring it to Jesus have already sorted the dead. Jesus takes away both explanations, Pilate's sword and Siloam's tower, and says twice, "unless you repent." Then the same Pilate asks whether Jesus is a Galilean, and at the cross the blood is the sacrifice itself, poured now into the cup for you.
Luke gives you one table on one afternoon: a man with dropsy, drowning in water and still thirsty, and a room full of people swollen with the same thirst for the good seat. You cannot humble your way out of pride any more than he could drink his way out of dropsy. But the Lord who heals took hold of the sick man, took the sickness into Himself, and carried it to the cross, where He cried, “I thirst.” The Host gives the seats by mercy, and the water He gives fills you without swelling you.
Why did Jesus heal the blind man at Bethsaida with two touches? Not because faith comes in stages, and not because He failed the first time. He showed His majesty when and as He willed, and the spit He put on blind eyes is the spit He took on His own face at the cross. The same hands keep touching you at font and rail, until your body rises and sees everyone clearly.
This week Jeremiah is sent to the palace. Zedekiah asks him for a miracle while Babylon is at the wall and gets the answer nobody wanted — I Myself will fight against you (Jer. 21:5). Then chapter 22 walks back through the four kings Jeremiah outlived and measures every one of them against a sentence spoken twice to the house of David: execute judgment and righteousness. In the middle of the worst of them God stops and points at the good one: Josiah judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well — and then the line this session hangs on, Was not this knowing Me? (Jer. 22:16). It ends where nobody wants it to. God swears that if Coniah were the signet ring on His own right hand He would tear it off, and tells the scribes to write this man down as childless (Jer. 22:30) — and Matthew's family tree of Jesus runs straight through that man.
Nobody in Nain sent for Him. The widow did not pray, the boy certainly did not, and there is no faith in this story anywhere — only a Man coming the other way through the gate who tells a mother at her son's casket to stop crying. It is a command with nothing under it yet: the boy is still cold and gray when Jesus says it. That is where the church lives, between "Do not weep" and "arise," holding a word with nothing in our hand but the promise.
The Sanhedrin's question — by what authority? — is not illegitimate; checking a teacher's call is exactly their office, and our Confessions call that mercy, not bureaucracy. The tragedy is structural: servants in the house have stopped the Son at the door of His own house and demanded His papers. He never produces papers — He produces the house, answering not with a credential but a crucifixion, and naming us the very masonry He set at the font.
A widow at the gate of Zarephath has a handful of flour, a little oil, two sticks, one son, and a plan to eat it and die. But before she ever picked up a stick, the LORD had already said, "I have commanded a widow there to provide for you." The cake goes to the prophet first because the promise is in the prophet's mouth, and the promise is the one thing in the story that never runs out. Christ came hungry to your gate and went out with wood on His back to make the meal where He died and you get to eat.
A man interrupts the sermon to ask about money, and Christ refuses the case: “Who made Me a judge or an arbitrator over you?” He gives a farmer instead — the barns, the succession plan, and then the religious upgrades, the pledge card and the estate gift. Luther’s verdict on all of it is not greed but idolatry, the most common idol on earth. But the appointed reading does not stop at “Fool.” It runs on to the ravens: the one creature in the chapter with no storehouse and no barn is the one God feeds. He will not divide your estate. He came to be your estate.
All ten lepers believed Jesus, and all ten were cleansed by nothing but His word on the road. Then the priests preached them a second sermon — only God cleanses leprosy, your obedience did this, don't you dare give the glory to a man from Nazareth — and nine believed that preacher instead, praising God with their tongues while blaspheming Him in Christ. They had a Bible verse, and they thought they did well. "Your faith has saved you" is Christ's ruling handed down against theirs: not the going, not the offering, but faith alone, because Jesus alone was already cleansing before they had walked ten steps.
