Ears You Have Dug For Me

It’s the time of year for sappy sentimentality to croon out of every radio and department store speaker.

As soon as I hear anything about Christmas shoes, old lovers in grocery stores, or chestnuts, I wish I could close my ears.

Yet I have my own sentimental list of things I do around the Christmas season. I always bring out the Christmas picture books. We listen to Handel’s Messiah and Christina Rosetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter. I bake pumpkin cookies and cinnamon rolls.

And every year, I have the lingering guilty feeling that I didn’t do enough to focus on the Reason for the season. I didn’t celebrate Advent as thoroughly as I should have. I haven’t been listening to Him like I should because my ears are just so full of everything else! It ends up being the season of shoulda, woulda, coulda spirituality.

At church, we always set up the same porcelain Nativity Scene, and we make sure to turn the manger backward. Mary, Joseph, the Shepherds, and Wisemen all face the congregation with joy and amazement on their faces, but I know the truth:

The manger is empty.

Many years ago, some small child stole the Jesus right out of the manger, and it has been empty ever since! (Shhh! Don’t tell!)

It’s like the embodiment of empty Christmas traditions.

The real Jesus celebrated the incarnation by saying, “In sacrifice and offering You have not delighted, but You have given me an open ear…”

Another translation says, “ears You have dug for me.” We know that God knits a baby together in its mother’s womb, but thinking about Him using His fingers to dig an ear canal is a funny image. The incredible complexity of the outer, middle, and inner ear would have taken some careful digging.

The Lord didn’t dig ears for Jesus just so that He could go on preaching, teaching, and practicing religion like some painted porcelain statue whose ears are fake, closed, and deaf.

The same goes for you and I. Our ears are not just for listening to Barry Manilow sing White Christmas, praise the Lord. Our ears are for listening to God.

Wait. Don’t we listen to God with our hearts? Isn’t that where His still, small voice speaks? Well, sure. However, He gave us ears so that we could hear His Word read aloud. He gave us ears so we would understand how the church is a Body, made up of so many different parts. He gave us ears- He dug them for us- so that we could learn to listen to Him with our hearts.

It’s complex, like the ear.

It makes me thankful that the fake Jesus is missing from our church Nativity scene. It leaves room for the real One.

When we invite Him into our hearts, He lives through us and speaks to us, telling us what His will is and directing us to walk with Him, follow Him, abide with Him every day of the year.