Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Verse (Revelation 3:7)
And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: ‘The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens.
Prayer: O come, Thou key of David, come, and open wide our heavenly home. Make safe the path that leads on high, and close the path to misery. Amen.
For the next four Wednesday nights during Advent, I’d like to present to you four sermons of a different kind from our usual Sunday sermons. These sermons will be a little bit more like a bible study, where each week we are going to have a sit and chew over one of the four verses of one of my favourite Advent hymns: O come, O come, Immanuel.
This is actually a hymn that people either love or hate, so I’ve found out! There are people who look forward every Advent to singing it (like me!) and there are people who wished it were dead and buried.
But also, it’s a hymn that has a real depth to it, a mystique, or a mysteriousness from a faraway time and place. And some of the thoughts that are in it are so deep and mysterious, that many people don’t know what it’s talking about.
Well, it’s time to change that! And so I’m going to take one verse each week over the next four week, and explain what it’s talking about, what bible passages it comes from and to highlight what this has to do with us in our life in the church.
“O come, O come, Immanuel” has a very interesting history. The words are actually based on what were called “the O antiphons”, which were little verses sung at the vespers, or the evening services, during Advent. In fact, there were seven of these little verses, one for every day of the week before Christmas Eve. In the hymn which we sing today, we only have four verses, but originally there were seven. And every verse begins by calling upon Jesus by some prophetic name from the Bible. The last one before Christmas Eve is “Emmanuel”.
So these seven mysterious names for Jesus, which these verses use are: Wisdom, Adonai (which is the Hebrew word for Lord), Rod of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring, King of Nations, and Emmanuel. And if you took the first letter of each of these titles in Latin, and spell them backwards, you can make a little hidden message: ERO CRAS, which translates as “I will be tomorrow.” Of course, this is very appropriate, because the last verse is sung on the day before Christmas Eve, when Christ is born! “I will be tomorrow.” “I will be born on Christmas Eve tomorrow!” Now ain’t that clever!
And for this little series in Advent, I’m also going to take the verses of our hymn backwards and start with verse 4, in which Jesus is called “the Key of David”.
So let me read to you the verse again:
O come, Thou key of David, come, and open wide our heavenly home. Make safe the path that leads on high, and close the path to misery. Rejoice, rejoice! Immanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
The original verse, on which this hymn is based goes like this:
O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel; that opens and no one shuts, and shuts and no one opens: Come, and bring the prisoners out of the prison-house, those that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.
The first thing I want to have a look at is this strange little expression: Key of David. What does it mean to call Jesus the Key of David? And why is this significant as we prepare for Christmas in this Advent season?
This turns up in the bible in two places:
The first one is in Isaiah chapter 22, and this is the first place where this expression turns up. In this passage, the prophet receives a message from the Lord to go to the steward of the king, whose name is Shebna. And it turns out that Shebna has made a big, flashy tomb for himself, so that he would be remembered. He wanted to make a big name for himself. At the same time, he wasn’t doing his proper job, and he was “living it up”, but not according to the law of God. So God threatens to depose him and give his office to another person, called Eliakim. This is what we read in Isaiah 22:
Thus says the Lord GOD of hosts, “Come, go to this steward, to Shebna, who is over the household, and say to him: What have you to do here, and whom have you here, that you have cut out here a tomb for yourself, you who cut out a tomb on the height and carve a dwelling for yourself in the rock? Behold, the LORD will hurl you away violently, O you strong man. He will seize firm hold on you and whirl you around and around, and throw you like a ball into a wide land. There you shall die, and there shall be your glorious chariots, you shame of your master's house. I will thrust you from your office, and you will be pulled down from your station. In that day I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your sash on him, and will commit your authority to his hand. And he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. And I will fasten him like a peg in a secure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father's house.
This is the first time we see this expression “Key of David” in the bible. But then in the book of Revelation we read:
And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: ‘The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens.
“‘I know your works. Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.
Jesus is called the Key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens.
And first we ask the question: what is this key? What’s it for? In this sense, it’s the key to the kingdom of heaven, which Jesus uses. When Jesus died on the cross, and rose again from the dead, he opened the kingdom of heaven for all believers. Because we receive the forgiveness of sins, the door of heaven is open.
But what does David have to do with all of this? Jesus is descended from King David. And whenever we see Jesus connected to David in the bible, we have to keep in mind that Jesus was a true man, a true human being. He had a family. If you remember as well, in the Christmas story, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, which is also called the city of David. That’s why Joseph had to go there to be registered with Mary, because he was a descendant of King David.
Now, here’s the mysterious thing. We would think that the only person who is able to open the door of heaven is God himself. The key is God’s key, for God’s heaven, and God’s kingdom. But it is the Key of David – Jesus is a true man, descended from the house of David. So we see here Jesus Christ – the true God who has the power to open the doors of heaven, but also true man, born of the virgin Mary, who opens the doors of heaven as a man who died on the cross and rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven.
And so Jesus says at the beginning of the book of Revelation:
“Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hell.”
So in the church, the door he opens and no one shuts is the door of heaven. The door he shuts but no one opens is hell.
And this is what Jesus Christ wants the church to tell the world: The door of heaven is open. God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not die, but have eternal life – the doors of heaven will be open.
Also, we read in 1 John: “The reason why the Son of God came was to destroy the works of the devil.” The doors of hell are shut.
But there’s also one other thing. Jesus Christ himself gives these keys to the church. We read in Matthew 16 that Jesus said to Peter: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
And also in Matthew 18: “Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
And also there’s another passage like this in John 20, on Easter Sunday where Jesus says to his apostles: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”
Now, we see here how Jesus gives his keys to the church. Now, when Jesus says this to Peter, there are two things that are not true.
First of all, it doesn’t mean that St Peter will be waiting for us at the pearly gates of heaven when we arrive. You probably know all the jokes about St Peter at the pearly gates. And also, the Roman Catholic Church claims that the pope is the successor of Peter, but this doesn’t mean that whatever the pope and the Catholic bishops come up with on earth, God will give his seal of approval to in heaven.
But what it means is that on earth, we in the church receive the forgiveness of sins. And so pastors in the church are given what is called the Office of the Keys. As Martin Luther writes in the Small Catechism: “The Office of the Keys is that special authority which Christ has given to His church on earth to forgive the sins of repentant sinners, but to withhold forgiveness from the unrepentant as long as they do not repent… I believe that when the called ministers of Christ deal with us by His divine command, in particular when they exclude openly unrepentant sinners from the Christian congregation and absolve those who repent of their sins and want to do better, this is just as valid and certain, even in heaven, as if Christ our dear Lord dealt with us Himself.”
Pastors, then are called and ordained servants of the Word. This means that as a pastor I don’t have authority to say whatever I like. Where Christ has opened the door of heaven, I have to keep it open. Where Christ has closed the door of hell, I have to keep it closed. In preaching, it means that pastors are not really allowed to preach whatever they like, but are servants, in fact, slaves of the word. The ministry doesn’t belong to pastors, it belongs to Christ. We only say what Christ has said, and when we do this, we are opening the door of heaven for people. We say, “As a called and ordained servant of the word, I announce the grace of God to all of you. And on behalf of my Lord Jesus Christ and by his command, I forgive you all your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ”, is what St Paul says. The ministry of the church, the pastoral office, is under so much attack today. There are many people that think that there is no need for pastors in the church. There are many churches that don’t even have pastors, and then whoever has the loudest voice and the biggest personality leads the church. That’s not how Jesus set it about. St Paul says, “How are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe on him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”
Now my feet are probably a bit smelly right now, but that’s not the point. The office of the ministry in the church is sent to you to open the door of heaven for you. It’s there because people don’t come to that conclusion by themselves. Christ crucified needs to be preached, and people need to be forgiven, both publically and privately, through the ministry. As a pastor, I need the ministry too. My sermons are sermons for me: St Paul says to Timothy, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by doing so you will save both yourself and your hearers.” And often when I go down to Melbourne, or a pastor comes to visit me, I ask him to speak the words of the absolution, because I need to hear it too.
And pastors are chained as servants and slaves to only preach only one thing, and are to bless the church with one thing: the forgiveness of sins. In the creed, you will notice that the forgiveness of sins comes just after we say we believe in the church. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins – because the church, through the office of the keys, is where we receive the forgiveness of sins.
As it also says in the small catechism: “In this Christian Church, the Holy Spirit daily and richly forgives my sins and the sins of all believers.”
That’s the keys to the kingdom of heaven which Jesus Christ has in his hand, the same Jesus Christ who has the keys to heaven in his hand, the same Jesus Christ who is descended from the house of David, and is the Key of David.
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, we thank you that you are the key of David, and that you have opened the kingdom of heaven for us. Keep us strong in the faith, which we have received through the office of the keys, and send us the Holy Spirit. Keep us firm in our faith in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen.
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