Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God the Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!
This past week we were getting caught up on some episodes of The Chosen. If you’re going watch a TV show, might as well be about Jesus, right? This one episode we were watching did a neat job of illustrating the growing tensions between Jesus and the Jews. The Pharisees and the Jewish leaders weren’t taking too kindly to Jesus and His popularity with the crowds. And even more so they resented Him for His teachings and how He wouldn’t go along with their traditions and such. So you had this growing friction between them. But at the same time, you also had Jesus doing all kinds of miraculous stuff. Messiah type stuff. He’s healing and driving out demons and doing all kinds of signs and wonders, helping people and loving the unlovable. So His fame starts to spread far and wide too. These two kinds of “competing versions” of Jesus start to emerge amongst the crowds. You’ve got those who think He’s a blasphemer and needs to be cancelled and deleted from society and others who love Him and want to make Him King!
And then in the midst of all this, we have this: “And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue” (MK 7:32-33). Talk about a first impression! Can you imagine a total stranger coming up to you, sticking his fingers into your ears, spitting and touching your tongue?! And it was your own friends who brought you to this guy! It wasn’t quite what the people had in mind when they brought their friend to Jesus, I guarantee you that. All they wanted was for Jesus to place His hand on him and bless him! But here Jesus goes, sticking His fingers in the man’s ears and touching his tongue with some Saviour saliva! … It all sounds like a Wet Willy gone bad!
St. Mark, being a man of few words, doesn’t tell us anything about the man whose ears and tongue didn’t work. We don’t even know his name. He was one of the many hearing impaired, living in silence, struggling daily to communicate with people whose ears did work. He’d never heard the sound of laughter or music or God’s Word. He also spoke with great difficulty. Even the most casual of conversations, stuff we take for granted all the time, was a struggle.
This guy came from the region of the Decapolis, the “ten cities” in Gentile territory. Ten no-name towns across from the sea of Galilee. It wasn’t the sort of place you would have expected a proper Jewish Messiah to make and appearance, but then Jesus never fit anyone’s profile of a proper Jewish Messiah.
The Decapolis was the place where Jesus had cast a legion of demons out from a man and into a herd of pigs who subsequently jumped off a cliff into the sea. The people of the region weren’t too fond of that sort of thing going on in their community and so they asked Jesus and His disciples to take a hike. But word had spread about Jesus’ power over demons and diseases, and so the next time He showed up in the area, some people were actually sought Him out.
That’s the bridge of how Jesus and this man whose ears and tongue didn’t work got together. Some friends believed enough about Jesus to bring their friend to Him. In our day, we call that “evangelism” and assign it to church committees and synodical task forces. We talk a lot about it, and about how we should be doing more of it. But what it boils down to in the end is bringing people you know to Jesus to have Him bless them. It really isn’t any more complicated than that. ‘Jesus, won’t you please lay your hands on our friend?! His ears and tongue don’t work. We heard what You did with the demons, and so we figured You might be able to help him.’
Jesus takes the man aside, away from the crowds. He doesn’t want to make a show. This isn’t for TikTok and Instagram. What Jesus does is so different from the so-called celebrity “faith healers” of our day. Jesus never sought celebrity. And He doesn’t use the misfortune of others to draw attention to Himself. He is completely there for that man who couldn’t hear or speak. Just imagine, this poor guy has the Saviour of the world’s undivided attention. Appropriately, Jesus uses a bit of sign language. He reaches out to him in a way the acknowledges him personally. Jesus reaches out to the man where he was and deals with him in a way he can understand.
Jesus takes His fingers and sticks them in the man’s ears. Then He spits on his fingers and the touches the man’s tongue. He touches what is broken with the Creator’s touch. The Good Physician is at work. He is hands on, not distant and removed. Touch is vitally important to healing. Do you remember the good ol’ days when the stethoscope was the first piece of equipment that got between doctor and patient? Now we have scanners and x-rays and MRIs, computers and machines taking place of human touch. We have medical tests galore, but we are touched by few.
If you ever watched video clips of Mother Theresa at work among the poor and the dying of India. She literally touched everyone she met. There was always a hand on the head or the shoulder, even as she fed or bathed someone. She touched the untouchables with her hands, the poor and filthy and diseased. Her hands brought comfort and hope and healing in the name of Jesus. When Jesus touched someone, they were touched by the hands of God. God is a hands-on God, who stepped down from His glory in heaven, to step into our human flesh, to dwell among us and touch us through His own humanity. Fingers in the ears, spitting and loosing tongues. He is the God who deals with us as the human creatures that we are. None of this out of body “spiritual” nonsense we hear about today. God deals with us in the grubby, ordinary, earthy, everyday way of our human existence. When Jesus stuck his fingers into that man’s ears, they were the very fingers of God. When Jesus touched the man’s tongue, it was the Messiah making the man sing the praises of God.
Jesus looked upward to heaven. “That’s where your help comes from,” He was saying to the man. “Your help comes from God, and I have come to bring God to you.” He is our go-between, the mediator between God and man. He prays for us. He intercedes for us. He touches us with God’s touch. Jesus sighs. He groans. He knows how deep our human brokenness is, and what price He will have to pay to heal it. He knows the cost of this healing: a cross of suffering and shame. Death to destroy death. Jesus knows our human suffering and sorrow. He knows our weakness. When He groans on our behalf, they are the same groanings with which the Holy Spirit prays for us in our weakness.
Finally, Jesus speaks. St. Mark gives us the Aramaic original: Ephphatha! Be opened. Be released. Jesus wasn’t simply speaking to his ears, he was speaking to the whole person. ‘Be released from your bondage. Be free.’ Jesus was releasing him from everything that held him bound and captive. “Be released.” Jesus the Messiah came to proclaim release to the captives. To those who are bound in sin and death, He came to speak a liberating Word.
The Word of Jesus is living and active, Spirit and life. His words fall on deaf ears and cause them to hear. His words fall on mute tongues and cause them to speak. At the sound of Jesus’ word, Ephphatha! the man’s ears could hear and his tongue was freed and he spoke plainly and clearly. Mark doesn’t tell us what he said. But the attention is always on Jesus, not on the miracles or those who receive them. All we know is that he spoke plainly and coherently. His ears were opened. His tongue was loosed.
And then oddly, Jesus ordered everyone not to speak. ’Tis is a little bit ironic, since he just loosened the man’s tongue! The man can now speak clearly, yet Jesus puts a gag order on him and the others. Jesus didn’t want to be known as merely a wonder worker. If all that people saw in Jesus was a cure for their temporal problems, an ear and tongue specialist, they missed the point. If all we see in Jesus is quick therapy, we have missed the point. The apostle Paul said that if our hope in Christ is only for this life, if all we look to Jesus for is a solution to our problems, then we are of all people most to be pitied.
There was more to Jesus than miracles. The miracles were signs that God had come to us to touch us. Isaiah had spoken of it centuries before. “Your God will come,” he prophesied. “He will come with vengeance, with divine retribution, He will come to save you.” The eyes of the blind will be opened. The ears of the deaf will be unstopped. The lame will leap like the deer. Mute tongues will shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the dry wilderness, streams of water in the desert. Burning sand will break out in bubbling springs.
Messiah has come in Jesus Christ. He came to save us by absorbing into Himself all the sin and evil and brokenness, all that had gone wrong with us, all that had come into the creation because of the fall. He came to take up our sicknesses and diseases into his own body, to battle the demons that darken our lives, to take up the devastation that crushes us. He came to free us from everything that binds us, that imprisons us, that keeps us from being God’s free children. He came to break the chains of sin, death, and the devil. He came to bring in a new creation with His own dying and rising. This is a new-creation in which blind eyes see, and mute tongues speak, and the lame leap, and water flows in dry, desert places.
That’s why Jesus didn’t want anyone to say anything about what happened. It was too small, too soon. There was much more of Jesus to come. His death on the cross. His open, empty tomb. His ascension to glory. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Then His disciples would speak, openly and plainly. But yet the people of the Decapolis told everyone about what happened. The more Jesus tried to quiet them, the more they spoke. People were overwhelmed at the power of Jesus’ words. With a simple word Jesus did what no man could do, and yet he did it in such a human way. Through His humanity came the power of God to save, to set free, to release from bondage. And people just had to talk about it. “He has done all things well,” they said. “He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
We have even more to say about Jesus than they did! Greater things even than making ears and tongues work again. Jesus has died for us on the cross and risen from the dead for us. He reigns over all things for us. That’s something to talk about! He has said Ephphatha to us in our Baptisms. He’s opened our ears to hear His Word. He’s anointed our tongues to sing His praises and to pray to Him and to proclaim Him. And He continues to put His forgiveness into our ears, His body and blood upon our tongues. Remember always, it is Jesus who is at work in and through you. And He does everything well. He’s the One who opens ears. He loosens tongues. He forgives sinners. He raises the dead. He gives eternal life. He’s does everything well. Trust Him to do everything well with you, now and forever more. Amen!
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