“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Jesus repeats these words numerous times throughout the gospels. It’s an interesting concept, as most of us have ears—therefore we can hear. There is the occasional person whose ears don’t function quite right, yet I somehow don’t think Jesus is saying that people who struggle to physically hear can’t hear the call to come to Him.
Looking at the historical context, I can see a lot of people who had ears but couldn’t hear. The pharisees and other religious leaders; the zealots; even His own disciples. They all had a different idea of what Jesus was going to be, and a lot of them were wrong. Unbelievably, embarrassingly wrong. (As a side note, we seem to think nowadays that we are so much better than those pharisees because we can see who Jesus was and we understand… This is coming from a world of hundreds of different denominations. I can guarantee we do not understand it all.)
I think the call to hear with our ears is a call to let God give us ears to hear. Instead of listening by our own might, we are called to let God teach us how to hear. We grow in understanding Jesus’s words as we grow in our walk with the Lord. It is a call to spend more time with Him.
“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
