Healed Ears And Tongues

Mark 7:31-37

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.

St. Mark 7:34-35 Then, looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” Immediately his ears were opened, and the impediment of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke plainly.

Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord…  There’s a lot of deafness in the world today; it is a far worse deafness than the physical kind.  Sometimes it seems like the whole world has gone deaf – deaf to the truth. Too few will listen to reason and forcefully stop the horrendous looting and rioting in cities across this land.  Too few want to hear or see the heinous facts of abortion and how an unborn child is ripped apart and murdered.  “It’s only peaceful protesting!”  “It’s only bodily tissue.”  Facts and truth are replaced with emotions and feelings and denial.

As nasty as these things are, I submit that, even worse, people, even Christians, don’t want to hear the Gospel.  I wonder how many Christians across this land chose to stay home from church this morning or found better things to do than hear God’s Word?  And of those who have come to church, how many of us or them listen gladly and willingly according to the meaning to the Third Commandment?

How about speech?  We could complain about our society’s growing suppression of Christian speech.  But the real problem is that, more and more, Christians are unwilling to speak the truth of Christ, whether for fear of persecution, or for lack of conviction on their own part.  It’s a speech impediment.

In our Gospel for today we encounter a man who suffered from physical deafness and a physical speech impediment.  The One who healed him is the same One who sends His Spirit today to heal and open ears and tongues.   Many in the world will remain unhealed because people harden theirs hearts and their ears to the Gospel; none of us ought to be among them.  As Jesus cried out urgently, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Mt 11:15)   By His Spirit’s work through the Word, Jesus gives ears to hear, and we dare not close them in boredom or self-absorption or unbelief.  We are gifted each and every week with the freedom to listen to the healing Gospel of Christ and, by God-given faith, believe it.

As is so often the case, there is nothing hard to understand in Mark’s account of Jesus healing the deaf man who could neither hear nor speak.  The word about Jesus had gone out in Israel: “This man preaches about the kingdom of God.  This man teaches the Scriptures like no one else, with authority.  This man Jesus can heal diseases.  This man Jesus is kind and merciful.  He accepts no bribe.  He shows no favoritism.  He helps all who come to Him for help.  And He demands no payment, nothing in return.”

Jesus had just come back from outside of Israel – from the region of Tyre and Sidon – and the report had gone out that He even helped some of the Gentiles there.  “This Jesus is more than just a good man.  He is the Christ!  And He has come to help us all!”

That report, that word about Jesus, had gone out and had created faith in many who heard it.  As Paul wrote to the Romans, “Faith comes by hearing” (Rom 10:17).   But what about those who haven’t heard?  What about those who can’t hear?  As Paul also writes, “How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard?”  (Rom 10:14)

The deaf man had never heard anything, but his friends had ears.  They heard the report about Jesus, and they believed.  They also had tongues – tongues to confess faith in Jesus and love to lead others to seek help from Him.  But even their tongues were useless when it came to the deaf man.  So they confessed Jesus with their feet and with their hands as they led their deaf friend to the one Man on earth who could help.  And they used their tongues to beg Jesus to help their friend.  And, true to His reputation, Jesus did just that.

One thing stands out in this text that makes it different from other healing miracles; it is the process that Jesus used to heal the deaf man.  According to other healing accounts, Jesus didn’t need to use a process to heal people.  He could heal people simply with a word, as He did with the ten lepers.  He could heal people who weren’t anywhere near Him, as He did with the centurion’s servant.  So the steps that Jesus took to heal this deaf man are significant; they were done for a reason.

And that reason isn’t hard to figure out.  The deaf man’s friends demonstrated their faith in Jesus, based on the word they had heard about Him.  But their faith couldn’t help their deaf friend; they couldn’t believe for him.  He needed his own faith if he was to be saved, and not just saved from deafness, but saved from eternal death and condemnation.  Your faith can’t save your neighbor.  Each one needs his own faith, and only Jesus, by His Spirit, can give it.  So the signs Jesus used in the process of healing the deaf man were designed to preach the word about Jesus in the only way a deaf man could “hear” it, and to give that word time to take root in the man’s heart.

First, Jesus took him aside from the multitude.  That showed him that Jesus had time for him, that He was concerned for Him and ready to help, even though they were complete strangers.  That’s the way it has to be.  There has to be individual contact with Jesus.  That’s why Holy Baptism is always performed one on one, not by tossing a bucket of water on a crowd or hosing them down.  Jesus took the man away from the crowd for a moment to perform the healing.
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Then Jesus put His fingers in the deaf man’s ears.  Only doctors do things like that.  This shows a very personal concern; and it shows that only the fingers of Jesus can open deaf ears.  There’s a spiritual meaning to that, too.  In the Bible, the “finger of God” refers specifically to the Holy Spirit.  And it is another way of illustrating for us that the only way to open spiritually deaf ears – ears that can’t hear the Gospel so as to believe it – is for Jesus to send His Holy Spirit into our ears through His Word.  Again, faith comes by hearing.

Jesus then spat and touched the man’s tongue, because not only did his ears not work, but neither did his tongue.  Again, we see Jesus apply a very personal method of healing.  It reminds us just how close Jesus has come to us poor sinners.  The Son of God gave Himself human saliva and flesh and blood for the very purpose of pouring out His blood and having His flesh destroyed on the cross as payment for our sins.

This act of spitting and touching the man’s tongue is a picture of the Word of God going out from the mouth of Jesus, through His called and ordained servants.  It goes into the ears, of course, but then it takes root in the heart and makes its way to the tongue, so that, again, as Paul writes to the Romans, “with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation…Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Rom 10)

Next, Jesus looked up to heaven and sighed.  This healing miracle is not a medical procedure.  Jesus is not using some sort of Western or Eastern medicine.  Healing comes only from above, from the God of love who sent His Son to rescue poor sinners from the consequences of their own sins, including the inborn sin, the original sin and spiritual disease with which we all are born.  It’s a sigh from God – as He looks down at all the mess we’ve made of this earth, of ourselves, at all the disease and death we’ve brought on ourselves by our sins, as He looks at all the broken families, and the physical and psychological illnesses that plague our race – a sigh that says, “You did this to yourselves.”

What does God do then?  Does He turn His back and walk away?  Does He finish us off with wrath and condemnation?  No, He sends His Son who speaks a word of salvation: “Ephphatha!  Be opened!”  And the deaf man can hear and speak clearly.  This is what Jesus does for all of us spiritually; He sends His Spirit into our ears, into our hearts, promising salvation, promising the forgiveness of sins.  He works faith there, in those who do not stubbornly resist Him.  Then He speaks the word of forgiveness, the loosing of sins, the absolution.  And then our tongues are loosed to sing His praises.  This is what the opening versicles of Matins declare: “O Lord, open my lips; and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise.”   We have mouths so that we give thanks and praise to God for His mercy and help, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

To one degree or another we all have working ears and working tongues, at least enough to hear a sermon and speak the confession of sins and the Creed.  More importantly, God has opened your spiritual ears to believe the word you have heard about the kindness and mercy of Christ and to confess Christ, not with empty words of the tongue, but from the heart.  None of us were born with open ears; God did that for us through His Gospel.  In fact, God must continually hold our ears open through His Gospel, because our ears are like self-closing doors that automatically swing shut if not continually held open.

We see a little example of that at the end of our Gospel.  Jesus told the people not to tell anyone what they had seen that day.  He had His reasons.  His instructions were clear, and the people heard them with their ears.  But then their sinful flesh took over and stopped up their spiritual ears so that they stopped listening.  Instead of doing what Jesus said, they went out and did the opposite.  Now, it might be said that they had good intentions in spreading the word about what Jesus did.  But intentions are not really good if they ignore the word of Jesus.   The people that day saw a great miracle, but then hardened their hearts to Jesus’ word and gave way to their flesh, so that they ended up misusing both their ears and their tongues.

And we take a warning from that.  Jesus has not opened our ears so that we can turn around and shut them again.  He has not given us tongues to confess Him before men so that we can turn around and use them in ways He has forbidden.

No, we get to use our God-given ears and tongues for the purposes for which God gave them to us: to hear His Word and believe it; to hear His Word and put it into practice, and to speak and to sing the praises of Him who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light.

The very best ways to use our ears is to continue to hear Christ’s Gospel – that He took all our sins to Himself on the cross; that He suffered horribly for them all; that He died to take the full-bore punishment that we deserved for our sins; and that He rose from the dead to defeat even death and hell for us.

And the very best ways to use our tongues is first to receive Christ’s true body and blood from this altar each and every Lord’s Day and other times when it is given.  This is where Christ comes to us in the flesh – His flesh and blood – and takes up residence in us, in order to deliver His forgiveness, life, and salvation.

And second, to use our tongues to tell others about Christ’s love and forgiveness for them.  We get to share His love with others – that wondrous love of God for all mankind.

Thanks be to God that we have been given healed ears to hear and healed tongues to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.