Eyes That See

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
February 28, 2010

Eyes That See
Luke 13:31-35

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him,
"Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you."
He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me,
'Listen, I am casting out demons
and performing cures today and tomorrow,
and on the third day I finish my work.
Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way,
because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed
outside of Jerusalem.'
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets
and stones those who are sent to it!
How often have I desired to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,
and you were not willing!
See, your house is left to you.
And I tell you, you will not see me
until the time comes when you say,
'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”

What do we do with this passage?
It is one of the more inscrutable,
mysterious passages we find in the Bible.
The lectionary assigns this text for Lent,
and we do find a few hints of Lenten and Easter themes here:
Jesus speaks of the “third day”
and also hints at his death in Jerusalem.
There’s a nod to Palm Sunday:
“And I tell you, you will not see me
until the time comes when you say,
'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

But what do we make of the Pharisees
trying to warn Jesus of Herod’s threat?
Weren’t the Pharisees part of that group of
unyielding, arrogant religious leaders
who thought of Jesus as a trouble-maker?
Weren’t the Pharisees the ones Luke tells us
“rejected God’s purpose for themselves”?
(Luke 7:30)
Hadn’t Jesus himself referred to them as a
“brood of vipers”?
(Matthew 3:7)

And Herod – what about him?
This was the son of the Herod
who had been king at the time of Jesus’ birth,
the son no better than his father,
the son who made his way into the history books
by arranging for the death of John the Baptist
to fulfill a vow he’d made to his step-daughter,
because her dancing pleased him.
(Matthew 14:1-12)
He clearly had murder in his blood

But it is Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem that should be our focus:
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
the city that kills the prophets
and stones those who are sent to it!
How often have I desired to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,
and you were not willing!”

This is such a powerful and sad statement,
a cry of frustration as much as anything else.
A cry from the Son of God:
“Why won’t you listen to God?
Why do you constantly turn deaf ears to God?
Why do you turn blind eyes to God?
Don’t you know how much God loves you?
Don’t you see how God watches over you?
Why do you reject God at every step, every opportunity?
Why do you go through each day
at best ignoring God,
and at your worst, doing everything possible
to blot out God from your lives?”

The author of the apocryphal book we call the Fourth Book of Ezra,
a book written just a few years after Luke’s gospel,
included a similar lament,
only in that book God is the speaker:
“Have I not entreated you as a father entreats his sons
or a mother her daughters
or a nurse her children,
that you should be my people and I should be your God,
and that you should be my sons and I should be your father?
I gather you as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.
…I sent to you my servants, the prophets,
but you have taken and slain them…”
(The Fourth Book of Ezra, 1:28ff)

This is God’s lament, Christ’s lament,
words we hear our Lord speak.
They are words we should hear,
words we should pay attention to,
for they are words directed to us, you and me,
as much as they were directed to the people
who lived in Jerusalem 2000 years ago.
For we too are often as indifferent as the men and women
who lived in Jerusalem,
men and women who, like us,
thought themselves to be men and women of faith,
even favored in God’s eyes,
yet like us, were often deaf to God’s words,
blind to God’s presence.

This is a profound text for us to read and hear anytime
but especially for us during Lent:
to hear Christ say to us that he longs to watch over us,
to gather us up and protect us
“in the shadow of his wings”, as the Psalmist wrote.
Yet even as he longs for us,
we turn from him,
turn from his Father, our Father, in Heaven.

We cannot deny that these words apply just as much to us,
including Jesus’ words that we kill the prophets.
We do kill them: not literally, of course;
we kill them just as effectively
by ignoring their words,
ignoring their teachings:
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
Amos, Hosea, and all the others.

We kill them with our certainty that
they spoke to others, not us,
that the words we read now
are quaint words directed to a group of people
in a different time, a different place,
a group of people we all nod and agree
certainly needed to be chastised and rebuked.
We forget that the Bible is the living word,
and that God speaks through the prophets to us
here and now just as surely as God spoke
to the children of Israel,
the citizens of Jerusalem
so long ago.

Even if we hear the words, what do we do?
We take them apart and reassemble them in a fashion
that we find more appealing, less discomforting.
Even words that are designed
to ignite a flame within us, move us,
we take and drain of their life, their urgency.
When we hear messages we really don’t like
that really get under our skin,
we are quick to condemn the messenger:
“How dare you say such a thing to me?”

God’s instructions to us through the prophets
and through Christ are so simple:
Love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your might;
Love your neighbor as yourself;
Look after the poor;
Feed the hungry;
Live honestly, simply, faithfully;
Trust God.

We know them so well;
We could recite these verses in our sleep.
But then why is it that we pay so little attention to them?
Why, for example, do we tolerate a world in which
fully a third, close to two billion people, live in poverty?

Why is it, to take a timely example here in our own country,
that we are not doing everything we possibly can
to help those men and women who are out of work?
Our unemployment rate stands at close to ten percent;
It is probably closer to twenty percent
if we add back in those who have given up looking for work,
or those who have taken jobs far removed from
what they are trained for and are prepared to do,
the systems engineer who works as a custodian,
the financial analyst who works behind the counter
of a fast-food restaurant.

Yet, how quick we are to say
that our responsibility to the unemployed is limited.
Suggest, for example, that those of us who have jobs
might pay a little more in taxes
to help those in our country who can’t find jobs
keep their families fed,
keep their homes, keep their dignity,
perhaps even create jobs for urgent needs we have
such as rebuilding roads, bridges, schools -
inner-city schools unsafe, literally falling apart,
children here in our own community stuffed in trailers
in overcrowded facilities -
and the very idea is shouted down as a form of socialism
that couldn’t possibly be a way
we live out our discipleship,
our Christianity.

In a book written a number of years ago
a history professor took a look at how we have viewed
unemployment over the past few centuries
and what he found is that
what we have done is labeled the unemployed as criminals,
or sinful,
or lazy,
having only themselves to blame.
This makes it so much easier for us
to close our eyes to their needs.
(Garraty, Unemployment in History, 9)

We see what we have conditioned our hearts and minds to see.
If we condition ourselves to see an unemployed individual as lazy,
someone who is simply getting a lesson in tough love,
or more likely, as simply someone we don’t see at all,
then we will never see that person as God sees him:
a child of God who may well be hungry,
may need some encouragement,
perhaps some training and new skills,
someone who needs a job:
Scripture gives us such a simple lesson
“Why are you standing here idle?...
Because no one has hired me.”
(Matthew 20:6ff)

We are called to see the world with the eyes of Christ,
to see the world as though we are looking through the eyes of Christ.
The people of Jerusalem saw things as they wanted to see;
saw what they wanted to see.
Their eyes were not charitable eyes,
eyes that looked with kindness or mercy;
they were envious eyes, covetous eyes,
eyes prowling, looking for what to buy,
to grab and grasp.
We are always at risk of seeing the world as they did,
seeing through eyes that are envious, covetous,
that are not merciful, that are judgmental.
It takes work to see through the eyes of Christ!

The passage that preceeds our text
is the passage in which Jesus reminds us that we are called
to enter by the narrow gate.
that the road to discipleship is hard,
which is why few take it.
We prefer the wider gate, where the road is easy.
This is the road Jesus teaches us
is preferred by most of God’s children;
the reason why God laments in Ezra,
why Jesus lamented in Luke.

It his book The Cost of Discipleship
the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns us
of the dangers of seeking the easy road,
the road that we think is the path to cheap grace,
the road that assures us of forgiveness
without having to acknowledge our sins,
without having to worry about repentance,
without having to worry about changing our ways.
without having to change the way we see things.

Bonhoeffer tells us that what we should see
as we walk through life
is the image of Christ before us,
the image penetrating into the depths of our being,
filling us and making us more like Jesus,
more able to see as Jesus sees.

If we see through Jesus eyes,
we will see that each day we face choices,
as we talked about last week,
narrow gate choices and wide-gate choices,
and we’ll know that the narrow gate
leads to the better path,
even if the wide-gate path looks more exciting and inviting.

If we see through Jesus eyes,
we will see that Jesus is standing there
watching over us
“as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,”
and we’ll go him, rather than running all around
scurrying all about in our dash for happiness,
wealth,
security.
We’ll stand in the “shadow of his wings”
confident,
at peace,
assured.
And it is there we'll find that
we can see as Jesus sees.
AMEN