Bible Text: Mark 7:31-37 | Preacher: Pastor Andrew Richard
There are several Gospel readings during the course of the Church Year that begin with Jesus changing location: “When Jesus had come down from the mountain” (Mt. 8:1, Epiphany 3). “Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up on a high mountain by themselves” (Mt. 17:1, Transfiguration). “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness” (Mt. 4:1, Lent 1). “Jesus departed to the region of Tyre and Sidon” (Mt. 15:21, Lent 2). “Jesus went over the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias” (Jn. 6:1, Lent 4). “As Jesus drew near Jerusalem” (Lk. 19:41, Trinity 10). “As Jesus went to Jerusalem He passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee” (Lk. 17:11, Trinity 14). “Jesus went into a city called Nain” (Lk. 7:11, Trinity 16). “Jesus got into a boat, crossed over, and came to His own city” (Mt. 9:1, Trinity 19). Now when you heard some of those verses, you probably thought immediately of the event that followed: Jesus’ Transfiguration, Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, Jesus raising the widow’s son in Nain. And it might be tempting to think of the rest as mere historical facts that we can pass over. But the Holy Spirit is not in the business of recording things we don’t need. The Apostle John notes that “there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (Jn. 21:25). Such a statement leads us to hold fast to every word that we do have in the Bible, since of all the things the Holy Spirit could have recorded for us about Jesus, words and deeds that could have filled volume after volume, He chose these particular words: “Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee” (Mk. 7:31). Those words began our Gospel reading, and we dare not pass over them in haste, for the Holy Spirit chose that detail over a hundred thousand others to set before the Church. Why?
Jesus had departed from the region of Galilee and went to the region of Tyre and Sidon because the Pharisees and scribes had been challenging Him, rejecting Him, and refusing to hear His Word. This departure serves as a warning to us that if we reject Jesus and refuse to listen to Him, He will take His Word elsewhere. The Jews refused to listen to Him, so He took His Gospel to the Gentiles. But then Jesus returned. “He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee.” And in this we see Jesus’ compassion. As it says in Lamentations, “For the Lord will not cast off forever. Though He causes grief, yet He will show compassion according to the multitude of His mercies. For He does not afflict from His heart, nor grieve the children of men” (Lam. 3:31-33). Jesus came back. He came back among a bunch of sinners who closed their ears to His Word. And He came back to show how He wants to deal with man’s deafness to His Word.
“And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment” (Mk. 7:32). This man is a picture of what all of us are by nature. Man’s ears were once open to the Word of God. But when the devil questioned, “Did God really say?” (Gen. 3:1), man closed his ears to the Word of God and filled them with the devil’s lie, “You will be like God” (Gen. 3:4). Man’s tongue once spoke only the truth according to the Word of God, but man took Satan’s words into his heart and believed them, and out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks (Mt. 12:34, Lk. 6:45). Man became deaf and mute to the things of God. He keeps on hearing, but does not understand (Is. 6:9). Sinful man does not understand God, does not understand the world, does not understand his own nature. He is like a deaf man trying to figure out what’s going on, and getting angry or acting like he understands in an effort to cope. That’s what you see going on in the world around us. It’s easy simply to be scared of the violence and chaos with which the world operates. But it’s not so much scary as pitiful. You want to walk up to people and say, “There is a God, and He doesn’t want this life for you. You’re destroying yourself and angering God. But there is mercy in Jesus, the Son of God. He will give you a new life.” Now you might not put it so bluntly unless you’ve actually gotten to know somebody, but however you say it, it’s worth saying with confidence, because you actually hear and understand. You know the truth about God and the world and yourself. You have something to say. Your words might fall on deaf ears. But sometimes when Jesus falls on deaf ears, the ears hear, and that’s what we see in the reading.
There are several things about this healing that are unique. First, Jesus takes the man away from the crowd. Jesus often heals in the presence of a crowd, and for good reasons. Sometimes Jesus heals in the presence of all in order to strengthen faith. For example, when Jesus forgives the paralytic’s sins and the Pharisees immediately begin calling the legitimacy of that forgiveness into question, Jesus proves that He has authority on earth to forgive sins by healing the paralytic with a word. The paralytic’s faith was strengthened to believe the Absolution, and so were all believers strengthened who witnessed it. Sometimes Jesus performs healings in order to fulfill prophecy and prove that He is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Our Old Testament reading had one such prophecy: “In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book” (Is. 29:18). When John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus if He is the one to come, Jesus points to His fulfillment of prophecy: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them” (Mt. 11:4-5). Those were all a fulfillment of prophecy.
But Jesus does not perform today’s healing in the presence of a crowd. Instead, “He took him aside from the crowd privately” (Mk. 7:33). There’s no one else around, and Jesus acts simply for this man’s sake, because He has pity on him. This is the Lord you have. The things that He does for the benefit of many are the same things He does for the benefit of one, and this is an important doctrine. “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29). “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (Jn. 3:16). The things that Jesus does for the benefit of many are the same things that Jesus does for the benefit of one. The Lamb of God takes away your sin. God so loved you that He gave His only begotten Son. If everyone else in the world were righteous and you were the only sinner, the Son of God would still have taken on human flesh, borne your sins, fulfilled the Law of God for you, died on the cross to blot out your sins, and bestowed on you all His righteousness. Your Lord’s pity is not like the world’s pity. The world pities oppressed groups, or what it deems to be oppressed groups, but doesn’t know how to have pity on an actual, individual human being. Jesus, on the other hand, has compassion on mankind as a whole because He has compassion on every individual person who has ever lived. His pity is personal, and that pity is yours. To prove this, at your baptism He baptized you. In private confession He pronounces the Absolution to you. At the altar He gives His body and blood to you. Jesus deals with you personally, as he dealt with the deaf man.
The second unique thing about this healing is that Jesus looks up to heaven and groans. Our fallen condition grieves Him, and in this groaning we see the heart of Christ. It is as if He says, “Alas! What has become of you? I made these ears to hear, and yet they are deaf. I made this tongue to speak, and yet it is mute. An enemy has done you harm. Yet here am I. I have come to save you.” Jesus continues to groan over the fallen creation. This groan is not out of frustration, nor is it out of helplessness, but it is a powerful pity in which He feels our pain and is driven to action.
Now it’s certainly true that Jesus has compassion on all aspects of our fallen and corrupted nature. But here Jesus specifically groans over man’s ears and tongue, and the only one who heard that groan was God in heaven, because there wasn’t a crowd, and the only man with Him was deaf. Jesus groaned to His Father in heaven over man’s ears and tongue, because the ears and the tongue are central to the kingdom of God. The Word of God is the means by which the Holy Spirit works to create faith and bring people into the kingdom of God. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Rom. 10:17), as it says in Romans 10. Jesus groans because this man’s physical problems are every man’s spiritual problems. By nature man can’t hear rightly or speak rightly the things of God, and so long as that remains unchanged, man is damned eternally. So Jesus groans over the worst problem in the world, not war or famine or natural disaster or tyranny, but over man’s deafness to the truth and love of false doctrine.
Jesus’ groan teaches us what to groan to God about. We should groan that the devil’s lies plug men’s ears to the truth, and we should pray God to hinder false teachers and put them down, to open men’s ears to receive the truth, to keep our own ears open so that we gladly receive His Word and understand it. The biggest problem on earth is that men do not hear the Word of God, that is, they do not receive it, understand it, and believe it. We feel many afflictions much more than we feel this one, and certainly, pray to God about any problem or affliction that you suffer. But Jesus shows here the biggest one, and it is the very first thing He taught us to pray about in the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be Thy name.” How is God’s name kept holy? “God’s name is kept holy when the Word of God is taught in its truth and purity, and we as the children of God also lead holy lives according to it. Help us to do this, dear Father in heaven. But anyone who teaches or lives contrary to God’s Word profanes the name of God among us. Protect us from this, heavenly Father!”
The third unique thing about this healing is the method by which Jesus restores the man’s hearing and looses his tongue. “He put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue” (Mk. 7:33). Jesus put His fingers into the man’s ears to show that He was opening them up, that He was putting Himself there in place of the deafness, that He was plugging the man’s ears to everything other than the truth of the Gospel. Jesus spit and touched the man’s tongue to show that He was taking the clear Word from His own mouth and putting it in the man’s mouth. In our conversion Jesus has performed the same miracle on all of us. Jesus has cleaned out your ears, dug out the lies and put His Gospel there instead. You rejoice with the psalmist, “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire; my ears You have opened,” or more literally from the Hebrew, “You have dug out ears for me” (Ps. 40:6). There’s an image of Jesus taking out Satan’s dirt and rocks and performing a great excavation, going to great lengths to get His Word to you, so dearly does He love you. Jesus has also put His fingers into your ears and plugged them to everything but Himself, such that you have no desire to hear the devil’s false doctrine and have the dirt back, but only want to have Jesus in your ears.
Jesus has taken from His mouth and put into yours. He has taught your tongue to speak. In the reading we heard that the man “spoke plainly” (Mk. 7:35). The word there isn’t “plainly,” but orthōs. You know this word from terms like “orthodontic,” which means “right teeth,” and “orthodox,” which means “right opinion.” The man spoke orthōs, that is, he spoke “rightly.” And so it is with you. When Jesus puts His Word into your ears and onto your tongue, you speak rightly. His Word teaches you the nature of God and the world and yourself. You hear what’s going on. You hear that there is a God who created you and everything; who does not demand to be appeased by you, contrary to every pagan religion, but has Himself offered His only begotten Son to reconcile you to Himself. You hear that the Son of God has become a man and was named Jesus because He came to save. You hear that man needs saving, that you need saving. There is an adversary who prowls around looking for someone to devour, and you need saving. There are desires in your breast that are clearly wicked and that you cannot even fully comprehend, such that the good you want to do you do not do, but what you hate, that you do, and you need saving. But you hear Jesus. You hear His cross and passion, you hear His Word of forgiveness, you hear that He is coming again on the Last Day to raise you incorruptible and set you free from Satan and from sin forever. And thus you speak rightly. You speak according to the truth of God’s Word.
Dear saints, you can hear. You can speak rightly. The Lord has opened your ears and loosed the bond of your tongue. Don’t let the devil and the world tell you that you’re naive or don’t understand. When your flesh gives you fits of doubt, remind yourself of what you have heard. Recite the Ten Commandments, Creed, and Lord’s Prayer. Those words are determinative of reality, no matter what your flesh has to say. “Ephphatha,” Jesus has said. “Be opened.” That’s why Jesus returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee: to say that word, to have mercy on deaf and mute mankind, to dig out the ears of those who could not hear, to loose tongues in truth. “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praise” (Ps. 51:15). Your Lord is indeed merciful. May He perpetually keep your ears open to His Word and guard you from lies. May He put down false teachers and hinder Satan’s false doctrine. May He grant you always to speak rightly according to His Word. The Lord is faithful, and you may have confidence in Him, that He will do it, for, as the crowds proclaimed, “He has done all things well.” In the name of Jesus.