READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Exodus 8:16-24
Ephesians 5:1-9
- St. Luke 11:14-28
Grace to you and peace. (1 Thess 1)
Who speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard, saying:
“When a strong
man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are safe”
Thus far from God’s Word, caused to be written in order that
you contemplate what God has given you. Not only in your body and soul, your
members and all your senses, but what God has and is giving you today. That is
an eye to see what the prophets and righteous men of old longed for: their
crucified and risen Messiah.
This is the greatest and final purpose of an eye. And since
Jesus has caused us to see Him each Sunday, we should strive towards that
fulfillment and invite others to find the same, in His Church.
Famous last words, is the cliche. And by that we mean that
this strong man has just raised his death flag. He has cast his hubris over the
realm and manifested his authority. Good on you, chat. And yet, by doing so, it
feels as if those could be his last words. That, by declaring victory, he has
invited calamity. It is the last entry in his journal, just before he sleeps,
and just before the thief breaks in and steals.
Our strong man has failed to listen to the Word heard in our
Introit, “Mine eyes are even toward the Lord” (Ps 25:15). That is his
eyes failed him in assessing his own strength. The very things he was counting
on to count his worth, failed. He counted his weapons, he counted his servants,
and he counted the cost yet something missed his eyes that grew wide, as the
stronger man came crashing in.
What was it his eyes missed? If he were blind, we could give
him that excuse, but I’m assuming he wasn’t. So it was something right in front
of his face. To put the 8th Commandment construction on things, there is always
going to be something we miss, the chink in the armor, and leave it to our
enemy to find it for us. By, then its too late, though.
So what was it his eyes missed and why is it so important
for us to find out? That second question is easy: because we have the same
eyes. The same eyes that assessed, the same eyes that counted, and now the same
eyes that miss something we carry around with us every day.
Really, this should not be that big of a surprise. I’m sure
you face many things, day to day, that were not on your radar. Things that you
didn’t see coming. Things that “if only I…then I could have…” It is a regular
occurrence for us to miss something. Usually, it is easily remedied when later
found out, but sometimes it is more detrimental.
The unclean spirit, in the last half of our Gospel reading,
saw an opportunity and seized on it. He jumped in that clean house with 7 of
his buddies and was successful. In a negative way, of course, yet he saw an
opportunity and took it. Now, what does an opportunity look like? Color? Shape?
Size? He saw something unseen and came out ahead of his competition.
So now we pass into the realm of the unseen and how can our
eyes compete? Our Lord is leading us to true seeing, for if a demon can see it,
then surely if we ask our Lord Christ, He will be quick to give us sight, and
not a serpent or scorpion. No, if we ask, He is sure to give us the lamps of
our bodies, as He says later in St. Luke chapter 11.
And He better or we are lost, twice-over. Once, with the
Daily-Life things we mentioned earlier, which are not trivial to us in this
life. But twice with the Kingdom of God and His Christ. For we hear Jesus
towards the End of the Church Year speak of false-christs saying, “if anyone
says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it”
(Mt 24:23). So now we need eyes to see even the unseen kingdom of God or
find ourselves against Jesus. Lord have mercy.
The Lord does not stop there. For even He has eyes to see
and His eyes see everything. This is disconcerting, because He catches
everything we miss and misses none of the sin we commit against Him. It is all
within His eyes that never sleep. The Psalms say, “The eyes of the Lord
watch over those who do right; his ears are open to their cries for help"
(Psalm 34:15), but who does right?
In the middle of our Gospel chapter, Jesus calls the eye,
the lamp of the body. He says, “When your eye is healthy”, that is “When
your eye is undivided and singularly carrying out the duties for which it was
designed, then your body is full of light. The word for light is only used in
one other place, to describe the cloud over Jesus at His Transfiguration.
However, Jesus continues, if your eye is bad, that is, if it
is evil, doing the work of the evil one, the devil, then your body will be full
of darkness. The darkness of Proverbs 4:19, “The way of the wicked is like
darkness. They don’t know what they stumble over.” And the darkness of
Exodus 10:21, a darkness that can be felt.
Felt as Jesus commanded of His disciples on easter morning, “See
my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Feel me, and see. For a spirit does
not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Lk 24:39).
We’ve come at last to our answer and the Proper Preface we
hear during Communion at Christmas seals it for us when it says, “for in the
mystery of the Word made flesh You have given us a new revelation of Your Glory
that, seeing You in the Person of Your Son, we may know and love those things
which are not seen”.
When the eye sees Jesus, it is no longer in darkness. For
Faith does not grope about in the dark. Faith leads on and on to find the Rock,
the steady and trustworthy flesh and blood of Jesus Christ to focus on. Jesus
makes blind eyes see…Him. He gives the blind the ability to see Him as the Lord
and master of their faith.
And Jesus’s eyes are the eyes of God. They are the lamps of
His Body and His Body is set on a hill, on the stand of the cross for all to
see and believe that God has given Himself over on behalf of sinners. Which
means, in Jesus, the eyes of the Lord that watch over those who do right, are
watching Jesus do right, perfectly, for us.
And because He does right perfectly, His eye sees clearly.
Clear enough to take the plank and speck out of your eye, such that your eye no
longer be evil. Yes, your sin has made you evil, a divided being, seeking your
own cause and your own well-being. In fact, it has become your strength to
oppose God in this way.
That you use the very gifts God gave you against Him, by
becoming strong, fully arming yourself against anything God may do, and
declaring your prosperity. In your sin, you raise your own death flag, daring
God to come against you, because you have given Him credit for these things and
plus, He was the one who gave them to you, right Adam?
But you missed something, in your evil preparations. Yes,
you missed the Stronger Man, but you didn’t miss his overwhelming strength, you
missed the source of said strength. You trusted in your armor, He trusted in
God’s mercy to destroy your armor. Not to destroy you, but to save you from it.
The Stronger Man, is Jesus Christ, and His battle is against
evil and good. Good as in our own good works you throw in God’s face. How you
trust your own integrity and have hope in your own, manufactured fear of God.
The Stronger Man, in a great show of violence, destroys that which keeps you
from Grace, by destroying Himself.
This is what we, and the strong man, miss: the unseen mercy
and love of God. Unseen only until Christ. For until Jesus it was just an idea
on paper. Now it is flesh and blood on the cross. The mercy we couldn’t see in
Advent, is brought to new-born light at Christmass.
True seeing is seeing what God has done and what He is doing
today. What He has done is make Pharaoh and Egypt quake and fear at their own
sin against Him. What He is doing today is making us “light in the Lord”, as
our Epistle taught.
Yes, now that the eye is good, that the lamp of the Body of
Christ has been purified by His precious blood and sanctified by His Holy
Spirit, healthy, of one single unity in Jesus, now we are light as Jesus is the
Light. For Jesus is the only Light of the world, and you have been baptized
into Him.
Now, there’s not too much we can do about everyday affairs.
Life is struggle here in this corrupt world. You will lose more than you win
and you will miss more than you gain. But what of it? What is it to gain the
whole world, but lose your being? What is the world to me with all its vaunted
pleasure? Yea, though heaven itself were void and bare, Lord Thee I love with
all my heart.
That is, since we have been given the Word, the heavenly
treasure of treasures, what else do we need? Everything after that is icing on
the cake, the cherry on top. We just don’t need it, and yet since we have been
given such a great high treasure and a life to live with it, live with it we
shall.
We shall strive to see only good and not evil. We shall take
all sights captive to Christ. We shall have eyes only for our spouse. We shall
not look to the left or to the right, but keep our eyes on Jesus. Because He
works still and has more wonders to show us.
Wonders that we not only get to see, but smell, touch,
taste, and hear. The Lord overwhelms our wickedness with His kindness shown in
Body and Blood. He defeats our death flags and false gods for us, so that we
may fear, love and trust in Him above all things.
We may only see the material realm, at the moment, but Jesus
has put eternal promises on and in the material. We begin to see His Presence
as He breaks through our blindness, revealing our sin, and proclaiming His
forgiveness. The promises Jesus makes for us today are what He uses to bring
the immaterial, eternity, and material together, for our salvation.
In one Jesus, our eyes are given to see, two natures: God
and man. And that is peak. O Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,
according to Your Word. For mine eyes have seen Your Salvation…” and with those
words we die with Him and with those words we are raised with Him.
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