Hearing and Speaking - Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Trinity

Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
September 4^th, Year of Our + Lord 2022
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer and Hill City, South Dakota
Hearing and Speaking 
Mark 7:31-37 and Romans 10:5-17

   Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 

   Maybe we’ve discovered the key to spreading the Gospel: order the people not to tell anyone the Good News about Jesus, and then they are sure to proclaim it loudly and widely. 

   Is Jesus using reverse psychology to trick the crowds into proclaiming Him to their friends and neighbors?  That doesn’t quite sound right.  Let’s put a pin in that and return to it later. 

   Before we talk about talking about Jesus, first we had better learn to hear and to speak.  Like our deaf and speech impeded friend, we need help from Jesus for this. 

   Our younger granddaughter, Rosemary, is almost two, and she is speaking a bit more clearly ever day.  She has been confidently and demandingly speaking gibberish for some time now.  She has known for a while what she means to say, but it is pretty hard to discern.  Rosemary is not a quitter, however.  She developed the habit of calmly repeating the same sound or series of sounds, over and over, often pointing for context clues, until her parents or grandparents finally decipher what she means to say.  Now, in the last few weeks, her vocabulary and pronunciation have been improving by leaps and bounds.  Her formerly unintelligible one, two, or three word phrases are bit by bit growing into clear sentences.  It’s a lot of fun. 

   Babies of course begin to learn to speak by first listening.  As parents and sister talked to her and one another, Rosemary listened and learned.  First comes listening and understanding, then the beginnings of speech.  Like the man Jesus helped in our reading from St. Mark today, if a baby has hearing problems, learning to speak can come very slowly.  If one is deaf from birth, learning to speak correctly and clearly can be a real problem.  But with good hearing and a chatty, communicative family around them, babies quite naturally learn to speak. 

   We aren’t given much background on this deaf man.  It seems likely that he had been deaf from birth, and so as a consequence he never learned to speak correctly.  Unnamed people bring him to Jesus, seeking help from the Man who, in this same mostly Gentile area, the Decapolis, had exorcised the man living among the tombs, (Mark chapter 5).  You remember the man possessed by a legion of demons.  Deaf ears and a speech impediment must have seemed like light work for this wandering preacher who had done so many things well.  And it is.  The Creator of the human ear and tongue can easily cure these organs when they do not work right.  Certainly the people think, Jesus can heal by laying His hand on the man, which is what they beg Jesus to do. 

   Jesus does what they ask.  He heals the man, including by touching him. 
But what a strange miracle!  Jesus took him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. ³⁴ And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” ³⁵ And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

   Picture that for a moment.  Jesus put His fingers into the man’s ears.  He spits.  Where did He spit?  On the ground?  On His own fingers, before touching the tongue?  Then Jesus looks up into heaven, and sighs.  Or groans.  Like a woman in childbirth, or the Spirit interceding before the Father for God’s people.   It all seems unnecessary.  Jesus at other times heals with just a word, even from a distance.  But not with this man’s ears and tongue.  This time we have uncomfortably intimate touch, spit, groans and sighs, and “Ephphatha.”  Be opened.  Jesus commands the man to be opened, and with this strange miracle the Son of God imitates the Holy Spirit’s work of conversion, teaching a primary and essential lesson. 

   The flesh and blood Savior Jesus Christ comes to those who cannot hear His Good News with their ears, nor confess with their mouth the saving truth that Jesus is the Lord God.  Jesus the Christ comes, and He “ephphathas” them.  Jesus shows that He will get just as intimate as is necessary to heal and to save.  I dare say all of us would recoil at someone putting their fingers in our ears, spitting and touching our tongues.  How much less would we tolerate watching a beloved Teacher submit to torture and suffering?  But what seems distasteful, unnecessary or even horrible to us is in truth healing, salvation and all joy to those deaf and dumb to the Gospel of God’s grace and mercy.   

   What Jesus did for the deaf and speech impeded man, the Spirit of Christ continues to do for spiritually deaf and dumb sinners.  Indeed, from her early centuries, the Church included this Word, “Ephphatha,” “Be Opened,” in her baptismal liturgies.  What Jesus did with His fingers and spit and voice, the Holy Spirit does through the fingers and voice of the pastor, combining God’s Word not with spit, but with the Water in the font, to give the faith that comes by hearing to those brought to Holy Baptism. 

   In this miracle in the Decapolis, we can see a visible foreshadowing of that glorious means-of-salvation chain that Paul described in Romans.  For the crowds call on the name of the Lord Jesus to save this deaf and stuttering man, for they believe Jesus can do it.  They believe because they have heard Him preach and heal before.  Jesus preached because He was sent from heaven, down to earth, for precisely this reason: to heal the world with the Good News of God’s Saving Mission. 

   In the same pattern, the Lord through His Church still sends preachers, public preachers like me, and private preachers, like you, confessing Christians who dare to speak of Christ to people with ears stopped up with the lies of the world.  And through this proclamation, mine and yours, the Spirit works, when and where He wills, to create faith.  Ear, mind and heart opening faith, faith that informs and looses the tongue of sinners to call on the Name of Jesus, the Savior who has died and risen again to take away all their sin.  Jesus’ feet are indeed beautiful Gospel feet, feet scarred by Roman spikes, that nailed the Holy One of Israel to the Cross, in our place. 

   And here we realize why Jesus forbid the crowds from proclaiming the miraculous healing of the man’s ears and tongue.  Jesus in this miracle did give us a pattern and picture of the Spirit’s work of conversion, of the delivery of salvation to the spiritually deaf and mute.  But this miracle in Decapolis, this physical healing, while it is certainly amazing and good news for the man, it is not the Gospel.  Jesus wants to keep His healing miracles somewhat under wraps, because they could not save souls eternally.  The Word of Christ that saves through being heard is not just the Word of temporary healings.  No the saving Word of Christ is the Word of the Cross, the Word of Jesus’ great work, dying under God’s wrath, to pay for the sins of the whole world, so that in His Resurrection He could share His righteousness and His new, eternal Life with all who hear and believe.      

   Jesus wasn’t using and doesn’t use reverse psychology to move His people to speak and spread the Gospel.  No, Jesus uses the Gospel to move His people to speak and spread the Gospel.  To believe in, confess, call on and speak of Christ is the natural reaction of the sinner who has been transformed by God’s forgiveness.  To be useful in God’s Mission, we poor, habitual sinners have a daily need for our ears to be cleaned out, to have the Spirit remove the garbage shouted into us by the world and by own sinfulness.  Then, with ears opened, we can hear again who Jesus is and what He has done and is doing for us, despite our sinfulness.  So the thing you should do daily for your own eternal self-interest is also the thing that prepares you to fulfill your role in the Lord’s ongoing outreach to other sinners.  Ephphatha!  Be opened to the Word of Christ crucified and resurrected, for you. 

   Right now I think that most of the time my granddaughter Rosemary listens to her family and tries to speak to benefit herself.  She desperately wants to be able to communicate, mostly to get things she wants.  Which is how we still are, most of the time, no?  Even still, Rosemary’s improving speech gives joy to us.  And by God’s grace, Rosemary in the years to come, will learn more and more to bless others with her words, her parents, her sister, and others, as a matter of course.  This is what happens in good families: by being loved, we learn to care and love for each other, especially with our words. 

   This is also what happens in God’s family.  Rosemary’s development offers us a picture of the Christian in relation to God’s Word and God’s Mission.  You and I need to hear Jesus, we need the Spirit to send us preachers, to create and sustain our faith, to open the ears of our hearts and loose our tongues to call on the Lord and sing His praises.  So we see that it is the individual need of each sinner that starts the conversation.  But then, as the Spirit with the Word grows our knowledge of Christ, our speaking becomes also a blessing for others, another source of Good News, another set of beautiful feet, used by God for His purposes, to bless you, and the people around you. 

   Ephphatha.  Be opened.  For yourself, and for the life of the world, Amen.