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29 July 2026 · Friday of Trinity 8 (observed) · Matthew 23:16–22; Hebrews 3:12–14
“Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift?” (Matthew 23:19).
In the holy name of Jesus. AMEN.
The haggling in the temple courtyard went like this. A man wants to close a deal, and he wants you to believe him, so he swears an oath. He swears by the temple. Everyone standing there knows what that means. It means nothing. He can walk away from that one. So you press him, and he swears again, and this time he swears by the gold of the temple, and now the matter is settled. Now he is bound. Now you can go home satisfied. That is the practice standing behind our Gospel today.
We should ask why. It sounds peculiar, doesn’t it? The gold can be collected. If he breaks that oath, somebody can go and get the gold. Nobody can collect the temple; he has no right to it. So the temple became the cheap oath and the gold became the expensive one, and every man in that courtyard had learned the difference by the time he was twelve.
Jesus calls them blind. “Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?” (Matthew 23:17).
They had it backward, as usual, in the one direction that damns a man. They thought the gold was what made the temple worth something — and the temple was ornate with gold, the furnishings and the walls themselves. But gold is gold in the temple, and gold is gold in a pagan treasury. There’s nothing holy about it. It becomes holy when a man lays it up in the house of God, and the house of God is not holy for its stone or its cedar or its gold, but, as our Lord says, because of “Him who dwells in it” (Matthew 23:21). Holiness runs down from God to the thing and never back up.
These woes aren’t complaints about men who have been dead two thousand years. We do the same arithmetic. Our Christianity has a weight in our own minds, and if we’re honest we know what gives it that weight. The years. The giving. The volunteering. The confirmation class you sat through, the parents you buried, the fact that you’re here on a Wednesday night when hardly anyone is. That’s our gold, and we can count it. We think it counts for something.
That’s the whole attraction. A holiness you can’t count makes you nervous, because you can’t audit it, and if you can’t audit it you’ve no way of knowing where you stand. There’s all the talk now about auditing the gold at Fort Knox, and we know how likely that is — paper claims and all. It’s why the Pharisees could weigh out a tenth of the mint and the anise and the cumin off the windowsill and let justice and mercy and faith go by untouched. Our hymn writer today lived in a time when gold and silver were currency; you could weigh it out. Nobody has ever found a scale that will hold mercy. So you swear by the gold. Our Lord’s word for that is hypocrite, and He doesn’t mean playacting. He means a man who wants a righteousness that will hold still long enough for him to measure it.
This is Christ taking the Law into His own hands and explaining it spiritually, without softening it. And this is what we love to do — the lesser matters rather than the weightier ones, the tithing and the measuring and the scaling, the things of the Law, rather than mercy and forgiveness and love, the things of the Gospel. Our Confessions say that when a man hears the bare Law and nothing about Christ, only two men ever walk out of the room: the bold hypocrite who swells with the opinion of his own righteousness like the Pharisees, or Judas, who despairs and hangs himself (FC Ep. V 8). Both of them die. And one of them is smiling when he does it.
Take what you’ve laid on the altar. All of it. The years, the giving, the mornings you got up when you didn’t want to. Carry it out and leave it in the car, in the parking lot. What did it ever weigh, apart from what it was lying on? The gift does not sanctify the altar. Not one thing you’ve brought here made itself holy on the way in.
But if the gift doesn’t sanctify the altar, then the altar doesn’t need your gift in order to be holy. It was holy before you got here. It was holy on the mornings you didn’t come. It’s holy because of Him who dwells in it, and He doesn’t go somewhere else when your giving falls off or your years run out, or your heart grows cold in the afternoon on a Tuesday.
Luther says it in the Catechism. Pile up the bones of all the saints and every consecrated garment you can find, and it won’t help you, because all of it is a dead thing that can sanctify no one. “But God’s Word is the treasure that sanctifies everything” (LC I 91). That’s why the water in the font isn’t a little bath. That’s why the man in the collar saying I forgive you all your sins isn’t offering you his personal opinion of your case. The Word makes the thing holy, and the thing makes you holy, and you contributed nothing to the transaction except the sin that made it necessary.
And our Lord didn’t stand outside the arrangement and lecture the men in the courtyard about their bookkeeping. He came down into the temple He had built, and He became the gift. He is the altar, the sacrifice on it, and the priest who carries it up. The blood that sanctifies is His own, and He carried it in Himself, once, and it was enough, and it is still enough this evening. It is Christ who sanctifies you — not you, and not your gifts.
So when the writer to the Hebrews tells you, “Beware lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God” (Hebrews 3:12), hear what he’s warning you about. He isn’t warning you that you might announce one day that you’ve become an atheist. He’s warning you about the slow drift of a baptized man who intends to get his holiness in order, and intends it again next week, and never gets around to it. He has mistaken the whole business from the start: what he needs is Christ’s holiness applied to him. Sin’s whole trade is the deceit that there will be a better day for repentance than today, and there won’t be. There is only “Today” (Hebrews 3:13). And the remedy he prescribes costs you nothing you weren’t already given. Talk. Daily. One of you putting Christ into the ear of another, forgiving one another as you have been forgiven, which you can do to your wife over coffee and to the man in the pew beside you on your way out.
“For we have become partakers of Christ” (Hebrews 3:14). Have become. Past tense. Finished. It is done, and it was done to you. And when he adds, “if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end”, don’t turn that into one more thing you must accomplish, one more piece of gold to swear by. He is commending you to remain in what Christ has already given and still gives. The holding is not the strength of your grip. Ask anyone who has sat with a man dying in the faith with nothing left in him. What holds is the thing held onto, and that is the promise of Christ. He keeps you, by this Word, by this water, by this altar.
The altar sanctifies the gift. And the gift on this altar is His own body and His own blood, laid there at His command, for you. It will sanctify you the way it has sanctified everything else it ever touched, by Him who dwells in it. So He invites you: come and eat, and be sanctified.
This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie · St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School — Sherman Center, Random Lake, Wisconsin
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