Last Sunday of the Church Year, 2021 – Remembered, So Remember

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

Jude 20 But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, 21 keep yourselves in the love of God, looking forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. 22 And have mercy on some, who are doubting; 23 save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh. 24 Now to Him who is able to protect you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy, 25 to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. (NASB)

The Epistle of St. Jude is the forgotten epistle. It is the fifth smallest book in the Bible. It consists of just 25 verses for a total of 461 words.¹ The Epistle of Jude is read only once during the Church Year and only when we are in series “B” of the lectionary. That means it is read just once every three years and on the Last Sunday of the church year.

Jude doesn’t get much attention in our confessions or dogmatic books either. Various editions of the Book of Concord contain only one citation from Jude, and in each edition it’s an add-on by the editors and not in the original.

In Luther’s section on the Lord’s Prayer in the Large Catechism, the editors of some editions cite Jude 20, among ten other texts in a list intended to confirm Luther’s point that the Church must “exhort and encourage people to pray, as Christ and the apostles also did.” (R. Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000], 441)

The epistle was written by Jude who identified himself in verse 1 in this way. “Jude, a bond-servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James.” James was one of Jesus’s half brothers. Thus Jude is a half brother to Jesus. He wrote his epistle in the mid 60s a.d. By that time most of the apostles had been martyred.

The general theme of the epistle is that the church must contend for (v. 3), true Christian doctrine. Believers must resist and oppose false teachers and remain steadfast in the true Christian faith. In order to do this they must remember Christ and His doctrine. The heresies of Gnosticism (God gives some people direct and special revelations apart from the Holy Scripture and Antinomianism (Christians are free from obeying moral law) were threatening the church, especially in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey).

The theme of contending for doctrine and biblical truths is probably one of the reasons modern Christians don’t pay much attention to the epistle. It’s about doctrine, good and faithful teachers verses false teachers and false doctrines. It’s about contending for the faith against every kind of departure from it.

In regard to the Last Sunday of the Church Year and the second coming of Christ, Jude is all about keeping Christians faithful to the end so that you will enter into the eternal life won for you in Christ Jesus. Jude wrote (21) “Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.”

The epistle of Jude reminds us that Jesus is what He has said He is– both Savior and Destroyer. “To remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe” (v 5).

That God the destroyer of peoples and worlds is not a popular, warm, fuzzy, and comforting thought to contemporary Christians. It doesn’t fit with modern notions of God, which is a bit ironic. After all we live among a people who live to destroy. Our generation is the destroyer of families, communities, countries, common sense and reason, wisdom, good traditions, education, God ordained institutions, and more. We destroy whatever we don’t like in the moment without understanding. But to suggest that God is the Destroyer of all that is unclean, heaven forbid!

The Lord God has destroyed before. The flood in Noah’s day. Job 12:2 [God] makes nations rise and then fall, builds up some and abandons others.” The Egyptians. Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Psalms were written to be used as liturgy in the Old Testament church. Imagine singing the lyrics of Psalm. 59:13 “Destroy them in wrath, destroy them so that they will no longer exist; So that people may know that God rules in Jacob, To the ends of the earth.” In fact the word “destroy” or “destroyed” occurs some 250 times in the NASB.

The Lord God is God and the Son of God, Christ Jesus will return for His church and destroy all that has not been washed clean in the blood of the Lamb.

Between now and when we leave this world or Jesus comes back to destroy and create again, Jude tells us what we are to do.

1. “[Build] yourselves up in your most holy faith.” How do you build up yourself in your most holy faith? You are to listen, learn, and put into practice the doctrines of the Word of God. In verse 3 Jude told us to “contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all time handed down to the saints.” In 17, Jude says we “ought to remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We can’t contend for the teachings of the prophets and apostles and build ourselves up in the “most holy faith,” unless we learn, know, and remember the Words of God, which by the way, guide and direct us to our future.

2.“[Pray] in the Holy Spirit.” God pleasing prayer only comes about when the prayer is informed and directed by God’s Word. Prayer, whether a personal formulated in the mind of the individual Christian or in the form of carefully constructed liturgy for the church service is to be based in what the Bible actually teaches. Only then is it God pleasing and beneficial to us.

3. You are to “keep yourselves in the love of God.” You are to stay in the love God the Father has given you through Baptism, thus the opening salutation of Jude. “May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you.” Prayer is about the future. Prayers looks forward. “Keeping” is about here and now so that you have an eternal future in heaven.

4. You are also to be “[Waiting] for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Mercy is what happens when you do not get what you deserve. We confess each Sunday morning in the church service that by virtue of our sin we deserve temporal and eternal punishment. But God has mercy on us so we don’t get what we deserve. Jude is offering here comfort for the Christian. The One who is going to come again to destroy, is the One who comes to show mercy by forgiving our sins and saving us from destruction.

5. While you build, pray, keep, and wait you are to “have mercy on some, who are doubting; [and] save others.” Christians are suppose to be about forgiveness, mercy, and caring for one another. We are to be concerned about our loved ones’ and our neighbors’ eternal future.

In the Gospel lesson Jesus adds to the list in verse 33. He tells us to “watch out, keep alert. 35 “Therefore, be on the alert.” and 37 “Be on the alert!”

In English it sounds like Jesus is using the same words in all three verses. But Jesus uses a unique word in verses 35 and 37. We translate it as “Stay awake!”

The Greek word used here is “gregoreo,” (gray-gor-yoo’-o) It comes from the perfect tense of the word “egeiro,” (eg-i’-ro) which is often translated as “resurrected” (e.g. Jesus egeiro-‘d Lazarus from the dead; Jesus was egeiro-‘d on Easter Sunday). The perfect tense of a verb in Greek focuses specifically on the result. The thought is that something has happened in the past which has lead to the present condition, which is now being described. The shoe is tied now because it was tied a while ago and it is continuing to be in the state of being tied.

When Jesus commands us in verses 35 & 37 to “gregoreo,” He is not simply commanding us to keep an eye out, to keep watch, to stay awake. He is commanding Christians to think, behave, and prepare as the already forgiven and resurrected Christians that we are now. “Stay awake,” “Stay resurrected!” “Stay alive.”

Gregoreo is used by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He commanded Peter, James, and John to “stay awake,” “to keep watch” and pray with Him. Jesus then went off to pray, “Father, if it be Your will, take this cup of suffering from Me, but not My will be done, but Your will be done.”

When He returned to them He found them asleep. “Could you not stay awake/keep watch—gregoreo-—for even one single hour? Keep watch/stay awake—gregoreo-—and pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

Jude in the epistle lesson and Jesus in the Gospel lesson are reminding us that we are not to be caught sleeping, unaware, un-attentive, or forgetful. Jesus says to us, 31 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. . . 33 Take heed, keep on the alert; for you do not know when the appointed time will come.”

We are waiting for Christ’s return, but it is a busy and active kind of waiting. But we tend to neglect the words of God’s Word– the doctrine and the history recorded in the Bible.

That is by the way what neglect is–it’s forgetting. Neglect is failing to remember something that we are suppose to remember. Neglect means that we did not give proper or necessary care or attention to something.

Jude calls all Christians, pastor and laity to contend for the faith and remember what God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have done and continue to do for us and our salvation. We are to remember because we are remembered by Christ. He has not and will not forget us. John 14:3 “If I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming again and will take you to Myself, so that where I am, there you also will be.” The only thing that He forgets about – is our sin. “FOR I WILL BE MERCIFUL TOWARD THEIR WRONGDOINGS, AND THEIR SINS I WILL NO LONGER REMEMBER.” Hebrews 8:12

The Creator an Destroyer is coming again. All we know is comint to and end. Isaiah 51, the Old Testament reading. “Then look to the earth beneath; For the sky will vanish like smoke, And the earth will wear out like a garment And its inhabitants will die in the same way. But My salvation will be forever.” St. Peter wrote, “We are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.” (2 Peter 3:13b)

Jude is an epistle that gets to the point and does not waste any time. We are to remember Christ and all His doctrines. We are to remember that He will come again, this time as Savior and Destroyer. We are to contend for the doctrines of the Bible as we wait.

This is not only the word of Jude the half brother of Jesus, these are the words of God Himself and as such Jude and God want to make sure that we all know God remembers us and our present and future is in His hands. Thus the epistle and the sermon this morning concludes with this benediction.

24 “Now to Him who is able to protect you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy, 25 to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever.

Amen.

The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen