Text: Mark 7:31-37 (Isa 29:17-24,
2 Cor 3:4-11)
In the name of + Jesus. Amen.
Our Lord was wandering through Gentile territory, a place known as the Decapolis, the Ten Cities. These little city-states were under Roman control, populated by various pagan peoples. They didn’t worship the true God. They didn’t have the Scriptures. But on this day, they had Jesus.
One thing this region had, as did everyone else, was sickness, not to mention brokenness, sin, death, dysfunction, violence, oppression, and hopelessness. Indeed, such things are part of the whole world. We are all plagued by such things.
Of course, our Lord came to His own people, the children of Israel, being the Messiah prophesied for thousands of years. Jesus is, in the words of Isaiah, spoken seven centuries earlier, “the Holy One of Israel.” The prophet declares the Word of the Lord that “the deaf shall hear the words of a book… the eyes of the blind shall see. The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among mankind shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.”
Israel will expand to cover the whole earth, not as a conquering superpower, but because Israel is being expanded to include the Gentile peoples of the entire world. The chosen people are not a single ethnicity, because all have been blessed and redeemed and healed and forgiven and made new by the Holy One of Jacob. God’s promise, spoken through Isaiah, is that “they will sanctify My name, they will sanctify the Holy One of Jacob and will stand in awe of the God of Israel.”
And so Jesus opens that which was previously closed. He opens the kingdom to sinners, to Gentiles, to those of low estate, to those who suffer debilitating disease. He has come to fix the broken world and to put it all aright. And in His earthly ministry, we see little previews of what is to come for the entire world.
And on this day in the Decapolis, “they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged Him to lay His hand on him.” They may or may not have known anything about the prophet Isaiah. But there is no reason to think that they did. They weren’t looking for a Messiah, but they found one anyway. More accurately, the Messiah found them. They weren’t looking for forgiveness, life, and salvation, but that’s just what came to them that day. They just wanted their friend to be healed.
Clearly, they heard that Jesus could do it, and they had faith – at least faith enough to give it a shot. And they begged Jesus. Another word for “to beg” is “to pray.” When we pray, we are not technically just “talking to God.” We come to God not as a conversation partner, but as a beggar. In fact, this was one of the last written words of Dr. Luther before he died. He said, “We are all beggars.”
We bring nothing to God other than our prayers, our needs, our crosses, and our pleas for mercy. Just like this Gentile man from the Decapolis who could not hear.
And, dear friends, not hearing is more than an annoyance. It is more than a debilitating condition of life. St. Paul teaches us that faith comes by hearing. We need to hear to be able to hear the preaching of the Word, to be able to hear the forgiveness of sins. To be deaf is to be isolated and left without comfort. And this man also suffered from not being able to speak clearly. It made it hard to even communicate what he wanted and needed.
Deafness can also be spiritual, by refusing to hear, by avoiding the Word of God, by staying away from where it is proclaimed. And when we never hear God’s Word, how can we speak it?
But this man’s friends pray to Jesus on his behalf – just like we do when we pray for those in need. This list of names that I read every Sunday during the prayers is just that. Each of those people on that list has some serious need. And we are interceding for them to Jesus. We believe that He is merciful and He hears our prayers, dear brothers and sisters. He has come into our world to fix it, and to restore us to what God created us to be.
And we get a little glimpse of it here in this Gospel reading, calling to mind that glorious day in the pagan land of the Decapolis.
Jesus uses His own saliva and His own hands – even as He will use His own body and His own blood to save us at the cross. And our Lord looks up to heaven, and “He sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’”
Isn’t it interesting that He looked to heaven before saying “Be opened.” Jesus not only opens the man’s ears, but opens the heavens to people to whom it was formerly closed. “Be opened,” says Jesus. He “opens the kingdom of heaven to all believers,” as goes the ancient hymn known as the Te Deum. And this man was a believer, dear friends. He witnessed the miracle with his own eyes, heard it with his own formerly closed ears, and he became able to tell what had happened to him, and for him – all because of Jesus.
For “his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” And even when our Lord tried to keep a lid on things for the time being, the people could not help but tell the good news, “zealously they proclaimed it.”
Jesus also opens our ears, dear friends, filling them with the Good News of forgiveness, life, and salvation, and the promise of the resurrection, of a new world freed from sin, death, and evil. He opens our hearts to hear that we have been grafted into Israel. The former division of people into ethnic groups that are chosen and unchosen has gone away. For the Church is Israel. The Church is the chosen people. There is no racial favoritism in the kingdom of the Holy One of Israel.
Jesus has opened the kingdom to all believers! And he releases our tongues to speak, to confess, to rejoice, and to proclaim. He charges the church to zealously proclaim it. For the time has come for the whole world to hear the Good News.
“Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God,” as St. Paul proclaims. “Our sufficiency is from God.” For as the people who witnessed this miracle zealously proclaimed, “He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
And this is only the beginning, dear friends. He has come to open up a new world. He has come to open the hearts of all believers, and to open the graves of the fallen. He opens our ears and our mouths, and he has opened heaven to all of us. And so we zealously proclaim: “To Him be the glory, now and forever.”
Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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