Stand Firm and Let Jesus Do What He is Going to Do

[Music] please be seated and good morning the four gospels represent among all of the other things that they represent a written record of the words and actions of jesus during the 33 years that he walked the earth as a man as the god-man many of the actions that are chronicled in the gospels are accounts of the miracles signs and wonders that jesus performed during his three years of his public ministry that is the time between his baptism in the jordan river by john the baptist and his eventual essence ascension back to heaven and a large percent percentage of the excuse me a large percentage of those miracle signs and wonders involved the miraculous healing of individuals afflicted with physical diseases or disabilities lepers the blind paralytics and so on now every healing miracle of jesus recorded in the gospel let us understand had a twofold purpose a twofold purpose first to be a compassionate manifestation of the mercy of god in the life of someone in need that was always the primary purpose and then secondly to give authoritative evidence that jesus was indeed who he said he was namely the son of god and that the kingdom of god had indeed come upon mankind we read of one such healing miracle in today's gospel from which deacon bud just read mark chapter 7 verses 31-37 but while this is the story of one healing among countless healings that the lord performed it has several unique elements that set it apart and that are highly instructive for us today one of the first things we notice about the story is when it takes place it immediately follows jesus deliverance of the demon-possessed daughter of the syrophoenician woman a fairly familiar passage of scripture you may remember that that encounter included a very provocative verbal exchange between jesus and the woman in which in which he says to her responding to her plea for help it is not right that to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs to which she replied yes lord but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs part of the significance of that encounter lay in that the gentile woman's faith and persistence in the face of what she could easily have construed as an insult in what jesus said to her but both her faith and her persistence paid off in the deliverance of her daughter from demonic bondage so jesus moves on from there with his disciples to an area known as the region of the decapolis greek word for ten cities or ten towns there were ten greek towns east on the east side of the sea of galilee in what would today be modern day jordan so he is still in territory that is largely gentile not jewish and there he encounters a man whom saint mark describes as death and who also had an impediment in his speech actually he was mute he wasn't able to speak we read that they presumably the people of that area who had heard of jesus reputation as a healer brought this deaf speech impaired man to jesus and they besought him to lay his hand upon him a little personal aside here i've shared with you i think at least once before about an experience that i had some years ago before i was an anglican priest when i was working in the corporate world as the head of human resources for erickson retirement communities they're the ones that run oak crest village and and charlestown in catonsville it was erickson's practice then to have their executives to go through a yearly day of exercises designed to simulate some of the physical ailments that many elderly people have to deal with commonly as a way of increasing everyone's awareness of and sensitivity to the residents of the retirement communities what they had to deal with in their day-to-day lives the exercise there were and there were many of them was it was all day long a number of different ones that we don't have to go into but the point is that the exercise that i personally found most intense that day was one where for several hours i wore specially designed ear muffs that effectively blocked out all sound dead silence total dead silence i say it was most intense for me because it had the effect of creating a terrible sense of isolation from those around me i could see others i could see that they were talking but i could not hear a single word that they were saying or any other sound for that matter and i found it really really disconcerting so this was the plight of the man that they brought to jesus coupled with an in inability to speak intelligibly brought on no doubt by his inability to hear plus in that culture the man's impeded speech quite possibly made him a social outcast as many of his contemporaries would have associated his inability to speak with a diminished mental capacity only adding to his acute sense of isolation so the man is a pitiful case but the lord takes pity on him and he does so in an unusual way first he takes him aside privately away from the gawking crowd in order to create a more personal atmosphere where the lord could concentrate on the man's need and the man can concentrate on the lord and on his ministry to him and rather than simply laying his hand on him which again saint mark tells us is why the people brought him jesus places his fingers in the man's ears as if symbolically to penetrate and clear and unseen blockage then jesus spits either directly on the man's tongue or possibly on his own fingers but he places the saliva his saliva on the man's tongue now as we think about this i i believe there are two things about these actions that are significant first jesus does not immediately speak to the man because of course the man can't hear rather he communicates in a way that lets the man know that he knows what the problem is he touches the man's ears with his finger fingers he applies his own saliva to the man's tongue but wait a minute he spits on his tongue think about it shouldn't the man be offended by this would you be offended that someone you went to for help in essence spit on you just saying think about it at that point at that point couldn't the man have just misconstrued what jesus was doing and just turned on his heels and walked away thinking to himself this is nuts they bring me to a guy who's supposedly able to heal me and he sticks his fingers in my ear and he spits on my tongue what is that i've been spit on before he may have thought i don't have to take this can you imagine if this were in the time of covid but here's the question what would have happened if he'd been insulted by jesus actions and walked away at that point probably nothing meaning he would not have been healed but he's not insulted any more than the syrophoenician woman was insulted at the insinuation that she was a gentile dog for like the woman the deaf mute was desperate and jesus was the answer to his desperation so if there was even the slightest hint of offense on the part of the man he does not give in to it but he stands firm and lets jesus do what jesus is going to do let me say it again he stands firm and let jesus do what jesus is going to do as unusual as it may have seemed as uncomfortable as it may have been the man lets jesus do what he is going to do because he has nowhere else to turn and because the man has enough faith and enough wisdom to surrender himself entirely to the only one who can help him do you think there might be a message in that for us today of course there is it's the message to trust jesus even when he's doing something unusual in your life even when he's doing something you don't understand has that ever happened to you has the lord ever done something in your life that you thought was really weird really unusual that you didn't understand it's happened to me a couple of times in my life and so jesus then looked up to heaven and here's what mark tells us he does he sighed the lord sighed why why did he sigh i'm thinking that there was so much compassion welling up in the lord's heart at that point that it just overflowed from him in the form of a sigh and then he speaks a single aramaic word spoken with the authority of the very one who created this man along with his ears and his mouth in his mother's womb ephatha he says to the man be opened spoken to the man or probably more precisely spoken to the man's ears and tongue and then we read immediately his ears were opened his tongue was released and he spoke plainly and then we read these words in verses 36 and 37 and jesus charged them to tell no one but the more he charged them the more zealously they proclaimed it and they were astonished beyond measure saying he has done all things well he even makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak and so the first voice the man's newly opened ears heard was that of jesus and the first words his newly restored voice spoke were a joyful proclamation of what jesus had done and our old testament reading this morning that we just heard a few moments ago from isaiah chapter 35 we read these prophetic words about the coming of the messiah verses 5 and 6 then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped then shall the lame man leap like a heart and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy now there's both a physical and spiritual significance to these words where the messiah will come where jesus will come and will heal both physical and spiritual deafness and muteness in the sacrament of baptism the church includes a brief prayer rite known as the rite of ephatha if you've been to a baptism recently hopefully you've seen the priest include that in the sacrament in the right of aphatha the priest touches the ears and the mouth of the baptized as he recites these words quote the lord jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak may he touch your ears to receive his word and your mouth to proclaim his faith to the praise and glory of god the father amen so that in effect becomes an essential part of the mandate of our baptism all of us the mandate of our baptism to receive the lord's word and to proclaim his faith to the praise and glory of god in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit amen i

Channel: Fr. Edward Meeks

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Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021