Bible Text: St Mark 7:31–37 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
Very clearly Jesus’ healing of the deafmute is very different from his other miracles. Usually he just speaks the word and it happens. Because He’s God, the eternal Son of the Father, and what he speaks is. Just before our reading is a typical miracle (if you can call any miracle typical), the syro-phoenician woman, whose daughter is oppressed by the devil, who famously had the great faith to say Amen to Jesus calling her a dog and seeming to refuse to help her, but she said, “Yes Lord, but even the little dogs under the table eat the scraps that fall from the children.” And what does Jesus do? He says a word. Go, the demon has left your daughter. That’s the usual way. Jesus speaks, it happens, that’s it. But here you have Jesus taking the man aside, you have him putting his fingers in the man’s ears, you have him spitting and touching his tongue, you have him groaning loudly and looking up to heaven. It’s very different. It’s unique. Why?
First, Jesus takes the man aside, by himself, away from the crowd. And you would think this is so that it’s just Jesus and him, it’s private, and no doubt there’s something to that. But taking him aside from the crowd actually means that the whole crowd can see what Jesus is doing. If Jesus kept him in the crowd, only the few people surrounding him could see the miracle. But now the entire crowd sees, and we know that, because they are all talking about it afterward, they’re all saying those famous words, “He has done all things well. He makes even the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.” So Jesus does the miracle for all to see. And He makes them really see it. He gives them sign language, the fingers in the ears, the spit and the touch on the tongue, the groan and looking up into heaven, to show them all what he’s doing.
Because what he does for the deafmute, He does for all. That’s the first point. The groan of Jesus tells the story in words that cannot be uttered. The translation says he sighs. That’s fine. But sigh is onomatopoeia, “sigh” sounds like it means, “sigh.” The word in the Greek here is stenazw, and it can mean sigh, but it’s no sigh here, it’s groan (which by the way is another onomatopoeia, “groan”). Paul uses the same word in Romans 8, when he says, “all creation groans and is going through labor pains until now.” And women aren’t “sighing” when they’re going through labor pains. Jesus groans, the word literally means, that things are pressing in on you, and Jesus feels it; he groans because He is bearing the sin of the whole world. It’s pressing on him. Not just the sin, but as Isaiah says, “He bears our infirmities.” The pain of the deaf mute, his loneliness, his incapacity to speak or to hear, these are symbolic for all that sin puts on us, on you and me. And Jesus, the eternal Son of God, bears it all. He puts the whole world’s sin and pain and death on His shoulders and He bears it to the cross, it presses in on Him, it kills Him, and He conquers it in His groaning and in His death.
If it is on Him, it is not on you. We call Jesus the god-slayer. Because he annihilates false gods. There was a false god, a titan, named Atlas. He bore the world on his shoulders. That was his punishment. And we become worshippers of Atlas when we allow ourselves to think that the world is on our shoulders, that everything depends on us. That we are bearing all the burden of family troubles, of work troubles, of the troubles of friends, of the church, of the school, of the college, of the country. No. Jesus has slain Atlas. He has freed you from the horribly prideful and at the same time the horribly desperate burden of thinking everything depends on you. It doesn’t. You just do your duty. You work hard in the calling God gave you, as husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, teacher, student, worker. You do that, and you pray, you confess Jesus, and you leave all to the Son of the God who did take the world’s trouble on Himself, who did bear it, and who rose from the dead, who is in complete control, and you trust Him to work all things for good to those who love Him, as He promised, and you love Him; He will do it. And that doesn’t mean everything will go well all the time, it doesn’t mean everything will be a success in your life – Jesus also promises crosses and trials because we need them. But cast your cares on Him, because He cares for you. Don’t try to be an Atlas and carry the world on your shoulders. Atlas is dead. The whole pagan idea that everything depends on you is dead. Jesus slayed it by carrying your burden Himself. Remember that, remember His groaning, and His triumphant cry, “It is finished.”
Second, Jesus puts his fingers in the man’s ears and spits and touches his tongue. He’s teaching us that these two organs, the ear and the tongue, are by far the most important we have. They are what we need to pay attention to. They can do more damage and more good than anything else in all the world. No bomb has ever been dropped except because a tongue spoke the command and an ear heard it. No peace has ever been brokered except by tongues speaking and ears hearing. Nations rise and fall because tongues speak and ears hear. Relationships are destroyed or they flourish by tongues speaking and ears hearing.
And these organs, the ears and the tongue, they are what distinguish us Christians from those who don’t know Jesus – what we hear and what we say. Everything else may look the same between believers and unbelievers – we work, we eat, we sleep, we cry, we laugh, we die like everyone else. But our ears hear different things. And our tongues speak different words. And that makes all the difference.
What is by far Jesus’ greatest concern in this miracle is to teach us that our ears exist to hear Him, His voice. He knows what we have allowed our ears to hear. The gossip, the slander, the nasty words, the yearning to hear good things about you and bad things about others. He knows worse, actually. The worst thing we hear isn’t nasty talk and gossip about others. It’s bad talk about God. What we call false doctrine, false teaching, but that’s all it is, it’s bad talk about God. And it plants seeds of doubt, “Am I good enough for God, have I done enough to deserve His love, is He even there, and if He is, does He care about me, are my sins really that bad, how do I know Jesus died for me, that He actually forgives my sins, that God is in control of my life for my good, that the Bible is true?”
There is a long tradition, going back to the early church, that Jesus groaned here, because he knew that the man he was healing, and every believer after him, would use our ears badly and our tongue badly. That even after Jesus opens our ears to hear the word of God and our tongue to speak his praises, we would misuse it, hear bad things, believe them, or at least let them cause doubts in our minds, and use our tongue to speak lies. So Jesus groaned. And that’s true. That’s exactly what happens. But Jesus healed him anyway. And He died for him. And He died for you anyway. And He made you a Christian anyway. He opened your ears to hear Him anyway. Knowing that after He did it all, you’d still hear and say bad things.
And that’s why this miracle is so important. The sticking the fingers in the ears, that’s not the miracle. The spitting, the touching the tongue, not the miracle. Not the groaning, not looking up into heaven. None of that opened the man’s ears or loosened his tongue. It was the word. Jesus’ speaking. Ephphatha, be opened. There is nothing false or evil that you’ve heard with your ears, that has caused you distress or a bad conscience that can’t be washed out by the word of your Savior, nothing that causes doubt that cannot be annihilated by the truth of the Son of God crucified for you. There is nothing so wicked that has passed through your mouth and off your tongue, that cannot be confessed with the same tongue and then receive complete forgiveness as you take the body and blood of your Savior into your mouth and hear His words, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.
Jesus says Ephphatha, be opened, he opens your ears to hear good things. Christian ears actually want to hear Jesus call out our sin, our worries, our unbelief, our lusts, our unjust anger, our fear of death, our misspoken words, we want to hear it, because these are our burdens, and Jesus points them out and he condemns them only in order to take them all on Himself and suffer for them and forgive them by His blood. And to tell us to come and find our rest in Him. And we do.
And then He sanctifies our tongues. He sets them apart to say beautiful things.
I will never forget when I was a kid and I said something I wasn’t supposed to (I can’t remember what), and my track coach heard it and he yelled at me and said, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” That stuck with me, because I love my mother, and to think that I would use the same mouth to dishonor her as I use to kiss her cheek was a very bad feeling. The question for all of us Christians, when we are tempted to use our tongue to say evil things, is “Do you confess Jesus with that tongue?” “Do you take the body of Christ into that mouth?” And then to realize how much we love Him, because He has first loved us. He has never failed us. His word has always forgiven us. He has protected us from all kinds of dangers, brought us out of so much trouble. He has stayed true to us even when we have been false.
Our tongue has become the organ of the Holy Spirit. It confesses the words of eternal life, words that have the power of God to give life from the dead, to make the deaf hear and the mute speak. When we by faith in the Son of God confess the creed every Sunday, when we sing the gloria, when we sing hymns confessing our Creator and our Father’s great love for us in sending us His Son, when we bring it home and pray to the Father in the name of His Son and by His Spirit, we are joining with angels and arch-angels and with all the company of heaven. And this is what He created us for. So let the Amen sound from his people again, gladly forever adore Him. He has done all things well. Amen.