Seeing God’s Mercy With Our Ears: Sermon for Oculi, the Third Sunday in Lent

Third Sunday in Lent, Oculi                       
March 3^rd , Year of Our + Lord 2024
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches, 
Custer and Hill City, South Dakota
Seeing God’s Mercy With Our Ears
Exodus 8 and Luke 11

Sermon audio available HERE. 

   See with your eyes, hear with your ears, and turn to the mercy of God.  That sounds right. 

    But it doesn’t work that way.  God has revealed and declared His Kingdom, His merciful plan to rescue us from every evil of body and soul and bring us to live with Him in perfect happiness, forever.  If only we will see with our eyes and hear with our ears.  But our eyes deceive us, our ears are stuffed up with the noise of the world, and we too often seek relief anywhere but in the one place God has promised to deliver His mercy. 

    Some fools make themselves deaf and blind, because they don’t really want mercy.  Submitting to God and begging for mercy clashes with their self-image.  Pharoah is one such wise-fool.  As are the opponents of Jesus in our Gospel reading, who accuse the Lord of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the Devil.  These are really the same people, even though almost 1,500 years lie between them.  And such proud souls are still easy to see, all around us in the world today.  Intelligent, well-informed people who can see the evidence, but refuse to acknowledge the presence of God, doing His mighty works.  God’s mercy puts a big crimp in our plans for personal greatness and self-actualization.  There’s a reason that many elites don’t just reject Christianity, but rather they hate and attack it.  Such wise fools, ancient and modern, make up lies and false accusations, denying the truth they can see.  Instead of acknowledging God, they instead promote lies that serve their selfish desires, for the short term, at least. 

    Other souls recognize their need for God’s help.  And Jesus is attractive to them.  But when they see what God’s mercy truly looks like, they avert their eyes.  It’s too hard to look at it.  God’s plan of salvation is such a downer.  Except when it’s worse, when God’s mercy looks downright terrifying.  Such folks want to maintain a connection to Jesus and His mercy, but without really looking too closely.  They avert their eyes, and point out some side show.  They nod a bit toward the finger of God in their midst, but prefer to shift attention, their own and everyone else’s, away from the stark realities of mercy, to focus on softer, secondary things.  We can see this view displayed by the woman in the crowd. 

    This dear woman has just seen and heard a preview of the great drama of salvation, the final conflict between God and Beelzebul, between the Creator and that fallen angel who had  enslaved humanity.  Somebody’s house is about to fall.  Jesus is about to engage in the final battle with the strong man, in order to plunder his kingdom. 

    Which is to say, Jesus is about to fight unto death in order to win sinners back from the power of death, and hell, and Satan.  ‘Fix your eyes on Jesus’ is the proper cry; ‘watch Him fight and die, for us.’  But no, that’s too intense. 

   At just this moment, to change the subject, our unnamed woman in the crowd decides to sing a hymn of praise to Jesus’ mother, Mary: “Blessed is the womb who bore you and the breasts at which you nursed!”  This woman redirects us to Mary.  Other misguided souls might encourage us to treat Church as just a social club, or to elevate doing good in the community above repentance for sins and forgiveness.  The desire to focus on anything but Christ crucified is still strong.    

    And yet this woman’s words are true enough.  There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the amazing and mysterious fact that God chose an unknown Jewish girl, Mary from Nazareth, to conceive and give birth and nurse His eternal Son.  A sign from heaven, indeed.  We should marvel that the Christ entered into His eternal battle, through Mary’s womb.  In fact, we have a big holiday every December, to celebrate just this event, through which Mary is truly the most blessed woman, ever.  But Mary’s big role in the Divine Drama is part of the opening act, not the climax.  As Jesus approaches the final battle, it is not time to sing praise to Mary.  It is time to open our eyes and unplug our ears, to see and hear clearly what God is doing.   

    In fact, even in the middle of her opening act, there was just a little praise for Mary.  From the beginning, the focus was the finger of God.  The focus was always on God’s saving acts, performed in this world, within our human calendar.  Just listen to Mary herself.  Mary gave us a great song of praise, the Magnificat, which she sang in response to the words of her cousin Elizabeth.  Elizabeth had first celebrated Mary, the mother of her Lord, because Mary in that moment carried God’s Son, Elizabeth’s Savior, in her womb.  Quite right. 

    In response, Mary sings.  And, in all of her magnificient song, Mary says just one thing that could be understood as self-praise: “All generations will call me blessed.”  But the rest of her song reveals that even that statement gives all the glory to God.  For Mary goes on to declare her blessing is that the Mighty One did a great thing to her.  She sings of God, fulfilling all His promises to reverse evil, to cast down the self-important and mighty, and to show mercy to the lowly. 

    All this God was doing by sending the Savior, who, two millenia earlier, He had promised to Abraham.  The long awaited Seed, the Savior of the whole world, was the Baby growing in Mary’s womb.  And she is truly a great preacher, because her song points us to Christ.  Mary never teaches us to praise her, but rather consistently tells us focus on Jesus, and to listen to Him.    

    Following His mother’s example, Jesus gently redirects the woman in the crowd, turning her away from celebrating Mary, and calling her to hear God.  Jesus corrects this woman’s focus on His mother’s maternal service by proclaiming,  “Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and keep it!”  Like Mary did. 

    But, we don’t hear so well.  Our hearing is very imperfect.  We prefer to see things with our own eyes.  Still, as precious as our sight is, we are so easily deceived by images.  Today many worry about the power of Artificial Intelligence to create pictures and video so good that our eyes can hardly distinguish from reality. But, this is just the latest iteration of an ancient problem.  We innately believe what we see, even though time and again events teach us that our eyes are easily fooled.  People are worried that AI will mean we won’t be able to tell what is fake on the internet.  This overlooks the fundamental reality that everything we see on the internet and television is fake.  It’s a copy, an image of the real thing.  To one degree or another, what we see on screens is at best a copy of reality.  That copy that may be more or less accurate.  But what we see on our screens is never the real thing. 

    Screens with their flickering and flashing light can intensify the fakery, transfixing our eyes, and our minds, and our hearts, like cattle at a feed trough.  And the digital feed we are given is often very unhealthy.  Screens also isolate us from the real world and real people. 

    But remember, the real world is full of deception too.  Just consider how big trucks are sold as the way for men to look really rugged.  Or think about make-up, hair dye, girdles and push-up bras, high heels for women and lifts in men’s shoes.  False-fronts on downtown buildings, and manufactured ‘stone’ siding on the front of our houses.  The world is full of visual deception, because we so much want things to look better than they really are. 

    Our propensity for and susceptibility to visual deception can create real difficulties in our daily lives.  Being fooled is humiliating.  And maintaining a fake image is exhausting.

    Much more serious, however, is our natural tendency to view the things of God through the same faulty lenses.  Seeing with our eyes ought to work.  But we cannot see the things of God rightly.  And we do need to see them rightly.  No matter how intelligent, anyone who refuses to submit to God and seek His mercy is a fool.  And, however warm our feelings for the young woman who bore and nursed the Son of God, nostalgia will not save us from the power of Beelzebul.  So Jesus calls us to ‘see’ in another way. 

    Our Savior is mercy incarnate.  He is the infinite compassion and love of God revealed in the flesh and blood Son of Mary.  To deliver His mercy, Jesus decrees a temporary re-wiring of our senses.  He institutes a new way for us to see.  Christians are to see with their ears, until that great Day when He will bring us fully into His Kingdom, when we will finally see God with our own eyes, face to face. 

    What does it mean to see Jesus with our ears?  In matters of salvation and Christian living, Jesus tells us to distrust our own eyes, and to disregard every voice except His own.  Without the Word of God, without the Word of Christ, without the voice of Jesus our Shepherd, our eyes are blind to God’s mercy.  So, in mercy, Christ declares the difficult truth that is behind the finger of God.  We are called to rightly understand what our eyes see, but only through the Word which reveals the hidden truth of God’s mercy. 

    The Exodus of Israel from Egypt, with all the mighty wonders God did through Moses, the long history of Israel, full of great battles, the selfless and heroic service of Mary and Joseph, called to care for God’s Son, from conception through infancy, childhood and adolescence, all these wonderful stories of God’s faithful people are prelude.  None of this history has any lasting value apart from the final act.  The great finale of God’s Drama of Deliverance, the Story of Salvation, reveals the King who was born to die for His people.  The Cross is the final revelation of the finger of God. 

    Hidden in the painful sight of Christ crucified is the love of God, poured out to take away the sins of all people.  But then the glorious risen Christ, the ever-living victor over Beelzebul, only showed Himself to a few disciples, from time to time, over just forty days.  Christ chose to deliver to the world the Good News of His forgiving love only through the Words of His Apostles.  No blazing bright victory tour, no slick and dazzling media blitz.  Just a few transformed souls who heard and finally understood the mystery of God’s hidden display of forgiveness and love and new life. 

    The Apostles and the Early Church imitated Jesus by forgiving each other, as God in Christ had forgiven them.  So also, we forgive one another.  As Peter and Paul made people see the true Savior through their simple words, so also we walk by faith, not by sight.  We live by faith in Him whom the Holy Spirit has revealed to the eyes of our heart, through the vision of our ears, which have been opened by God’s truth. 

    These sins which Paul warns against today, sexual immorality and impurity, covetousness, filthiness, foolish talk, crude joking, these are all tools of deception, tempting distractions that seek to take our eyes off the saving finger of God, the great work of Jesus.  Imitating God starts by hearing daily the Good News of Jesus, which sets us free from sin and unites us with God, today, and forever.  The sins Paul warns against are all part of the natural darkness of this world.  But the light of Christ has dispelled this darkness.  The pleasure and distraction sin offers do not last.  Sin brings pain and destruction into our lives.  But even more, sin seeks to deceive us into wandering farther and farther from the true and eternal victory, Christ’s victory, hidden in defeat, the new life that was taken out of death, the new life, which He won for us. 

    And so we pray:  Holy Spirit, shine the light of Your truth in our ears, that our hearts may ever be fixed where true joys are found, in the mystery of Christ Jesus, risen from the dead and reigning on high to prepare our place in the Kingdom of Heaven.  Guard us by Your Word in this true faith, until that great Day when we will see the Father face to face, with You and the Lamb, Christ Jesus, reigning in glory, forever and ever, Amen.