Bible Text: St Luke 18:31–43 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
There is nothing we say in church more than “Lord, have mercy!” We call it the Kyrie, which is Greek for “Lord.” It’s the greatest privilege of the Christian, the right you were given in your Baptism, that you get to call on the Lord over sin and pain and death and hell, and ask Him to have mercy on you, knowing He will, because He died to give it.
But this Kyrie has its detractors. You see it in our Gospel lesson: the blind man cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me,” and people tell him to stop. To stop. It seems cruel, doesn’t it? To tell a blind man to stop crying out to Jesus for mercy! But that’s exactly what they do and that cruelty is set deep in the human heart, and it’s in yours and mine unless Jesus rips it out. I made a call once to someone I was trying to get to come to church, and she was very honest with me: I don’t want to go to your church, all you do there is say, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, it’s not happy, it’s depressing, I don’t feel the Spirit. I’m not sure that’s all we do here, sometimes we say alleluia, we’re allowed to smile and rejoice, Jesus is risen from the dead, He has conquered all our enemies, He’s opened the way to everlasting life, and no matter what trials and problems we deal with day by day, that remains the reality, that stands, even if everything else falls, Jesus is risen and He blesses us daily with far more than we deserve; but at the same time, this is the focus of the Christian Church and it’s what we will continue to cry out here, by God’s grace, until our Lord Jesus returns: Lord, have mercy on us: forgive us our sins, heal our diseases, take away our pains, mend our divisions, open our eyes to the truth of your word, give us strength in our weakness to fight against the devil’s temptations, without You we’re helpless and lost and have no strength, Lord have mercy on us.
Why don’t people want this Kyrie? (Why have so many churches moved away from “Lord have mercy” and toward “happier” lyrics and praise music and inspirational speeches?) They don’t like it because the Kyrie confronts sin and pain and evil and death, all the hard realities that people who are enjoying themselves are trying hard to avoid thinking about. They want to be blind to them. When you’re having a party, the guy who brings up depressing stuff is the downer. You don’t want him there. And most people want to live their lives that way – blind: avoid the hard things, don’t think about them, don’t talk about them, don’t deal with them. Out of sight, out of mind.
That’s the disciples in our Gospel. They’re on their way to Jerusalem for what? A feast, at least that’s what they’re expecting. And that’s a good time. And who are they with? They’re with Jesus. Who has people hailing Him as King. It’s a good place to be. And as Jesus explains things to them, it starts out sounding pretty wonderful: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished.” As long as Jesus stops there, it’s wonderful. He’s the Son of Man, that means He’s the long-awaited Christ, the promised Savior of Israel, and they’re with Him. Everything written about Him in the prophets is going to be fulfilled. They’re going to see the fulfillment of Scripture! What is that? Triumph for God’s people. A King who will usher in peace. Rivers running in the wilderness. Freedom.
And then Jesus starts talking about His suffering. “For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit on. And they will flog Him and kill Him, and on the third day he will rise.” And what does the Holy Spirit say? They stopped listening. They don’t understand a word of this. It’s “hidden from them.” As soon as the message turns from joy and happiness to the reality of sin and suffering and death, they close their ears.
That’s how deep-seated our aversion to dealing with sin and its consequences is. The disciples are blind to it. But the blind man can see it. That’s very clearly what the Holy Spirit is teaching us here. So Jesus says, at a different time, when he healed a different blind man, Jesus says, “For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” Jesus’ point? You are blind, spiritually blind, if you think you don’t need Jesus to be mocked and spit on and beat and crucified and dead for you. You are blind if you think you can live life without crying out, Lord, have mercy.
People want to be happy. And they think being happy means ignoring sin and death. So they’ll make up things. I’m basically a good person, so I’m going to go to heaven when I die, so why all this talk about sin and sacrifice and cross and blood? It’s a downer. Or, I got saved once upon a time, God had mercy on me then, when I needed it, but now I don’t need that, I’m just living the blessed life now.
But being blind to the obvious is not happiness. It’s delusion. And it is for us Christians to thank God for taking away our blindness, no matter the depressing things we have to see in ourselves, and whenever our eyes grow dark again, and we don’t see why we need this Jesus having mercy on us now, then we beg God to open our eyes. And He does. He sends us pains and anxieties and crosses and we cry out to Jesus to have mercy on us. He preaches His law to us, and we see our festering pride and our selfishness and our bitterness and our lust, and we can’t be happy anymore unless He has mercy on us and forgives us. We fear death and we see the vanity of life, and we pray, Lord, have mercy, and He does, He shows us death crushed under His feet, pierced for us, He gives us life in His blood shed for us and poured into our mouths.
Why can the blind man see? How does he know to cry out to Jesus for mercy? Because he knows his need. He’s blind. That’s bad. He knows it, feels it, experiences it every day, wants rid of it. And this is what we always have to keep in front of our eyes. Anything else is blindness. My sin, your sin, is real, it’s in us, the pains of our bodies, the pains we see around us in the people we love, are real. Our death is real, hell is real, God’s judgment against sin is real. We need mercy.
And what else does the blind man see? He sees that Jesus can have mercy, will have mercy on Him. He knows it. He won’t let anyone tell him otherwise. They say, Stop it, and he yells louder, have mercy on me. There is no stopping this blind man. That is Christian faith. The whole world can tell us stop it, our conscience can say, you don’t deserve it, our rationalist, materialist mind can say, there’s no use, the devil can try and convince us that we don’t need it, but faith sees, it is blind to everything else, but it sees Jesus, and it knows that God, our Maker, has become a man for us, has become our Brother, and He has gone to Jerusalem, and He has willingly, for you, suffered his sacred face to be spat on, His honor to be mocked, His back to be whipped, His hands and feet to be pierced, His soul to be in anguish, His life to be taken from Him. He bore your sin and your pain and your death and everything that makes you cry out for mercy. He bore it for you and that is the guarantee He will have mercy on you.
It’s very beautiful that while people are yelling at the blind man, telling him to be quiet, literally keeping him away from Jesus, it’s Jesus who stops and issues the command that the blind man be brought to Him. Jesus suffered and died to give you the right every Sunday, every day of your life, to call on Him for mercy. He will give it.
And that means that there is no true joy except where this is this constant refrain, “Lord have mercy.” It’s the refrain of our life. In good times and bad times, always, Lord have mercy on us. It’s not that we Christians are killjoys. It’s that we’re not blind. And we don’t need some cheap imitation of happiness, we don’t need a joy that will end, that will be taken from us when we die, that lacks sincerity. We want the joy that covers all the holes in our lives, that is permanent, that is unshaken, so that no matter what changes we experience in this world our hearts are fixed where true joy is found. Because Jesus has mercy on us today, tomorrow, and forever. Amen.