“WHAT IS EPHATHA BUT FORGIVENESS?”
Saint Mark 7. 31-37
12th Sunday after Trinity: 22 August Anno Domini 2010
J.W. Watson
"I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth." What is today's GRADUAL but an acknowledgement of Christ's forgiveness of your sins? You may praise him for His omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, but if that's all you laud Him for you might well be a crypto-Muslim.
The Reformer is correct because Saint Paul was correct: Where there is the forgiveness of sins there is life and salvation!
You fear, love and honor the God/Man because He took on flesh and blood and "stood in" for you in the work of obeying the Law. You love and cling to your Savior because He saved you when He died for your badness on the cross. What is your "praise" but, as Melanchthon said, your continual "reception" of all His good and gracious gifts? His "praise" IS continually in your mouth because His absolution is first in your ears, and His Body and Blood are first in your mouth.
The events in this Gospel's continuing story occurred sometime just before the "feeding of the 4,000." The Lord's final trip to Jerusalem was fast approaching. He had to go to the City of David and the tree so that He might go to the City of Shawnee with all the fruits and benefits and blessings of the tree!
"They brought to Him a man who was deaf and who had an impediment in his speech." WHY? Why do you sing the Kyrie during the Mass? Why do we say in this morning's Introit: "Make haste, O God, to deliver me, make haste to help O Lord?"
Is it because they had heard, that they thought, that they knew, that they hoped (i.e. had FAITH) that this Nazarene Rabbi would help their friend? Yes. At the very least they were of the hopeful opinion that the Galilean was a "healer." At the Spirit-created best, they were looking for the Consolation of Israel and had nascent stirrings that Jesus could be Messiah!
The key to the Scriptures is Jesus Christ and Him crucified for the forgiveness of sins! You don't come here to Augsburg to be healed. If the Lord eases your chronic pains of aging, that is good. If the Lord minimizes your aches, arthritis, insomnia and anxiety attacks that is good. If the Lord sees fit to cure you of cancer, hypertension, Parkinson's, and blindness, Hallelujah! But that's not why you are gathered by the Spirit to Christ through the Word of Christ. You are here this morning, now, to receive Jesus' forgiveness. Get that wrong and you may end up following a false idol.
The deaf-mute had some physical problems with his cranium… that wasn't the problem. The man was dead in his trespasses, a sinner who needed remission and redemption from the bondage of the world, the fallen flesh, and Satan! He wasn't deaf, he was dead. He didn't have an impediment of the tongue; he had an impediment of the soul.
But he was carried by his own "spiritual" sponsors to the Font of Forgiveness. to the Washing of Regeneration and the Water of Life.
They sought Your Lord to lay His hand upon him, why? True physicians don't heal with prescription pads they heal with hands. True empaths don't talk about feeling another's pain and heartache; they embrace, hug, touch, carry, and apply love. Yes Christ's words are all-sufficient. But Jesus didn't forgive the world, or you, by uttering a speech, the Jerusalem Address, but He, the WORD MADE FLESH, had your sins nailed into His Body, your trespasses bleeding Him to death.
Did the mute's friends remember the story of how Elijah stretched himself, his body, out upon the top of the dead boy, hands to hands, face to face? Or how the prophet Elisha, doing essentially the same thing, put his own mouth on the mouth of the corpse (soon to be vivified)? It matters not. The crowd wanted a hands-on meeting and they weren't worried about germs or Jesus' hand accidentally touching their mouths.
The Messiah takes the mute aside privately so that there will be no distractions, no outside intrusions, and the man can focus all of his attention, and his main sense remaining (sight) on the Christ.
Jesus sticks his fingers into the man's ears. The very fingers of God were inserted into the mud-man's clogged canals so that there would be no further obstructions, but only clarity and freedom.
Even as the fictional maker/creator Geppetto hollowed out the wood-filled head and ears of the idiot block of wood to craft Pinocchio, so too the creator Lord gives "body and soul, eyes, ears, and all your limbs, your reason and all your senses, and still preserves them…" And He drills a passage way for you to hear Him, see Him, touch Him, and taste Him, even as He let the Romans drill into His sacred Flesh.
Christ looked up to Heaven and sighed. This was not an audible of desperation or an attempt to dramatize His actions for the Disciples and the friends of the mute. Luther is again correct when he states that the sigh indicates the Lord's true, inner, Human, compassion and feelings when confronted with the tragic effects of the Devil worked upon so many people.
Don't be offended or "grossed out" that Christ spits. He also bleeds like a butchered Lamb. Don't be put off, but rather let the Spirit put Him, and his Imputed Righteousness, upon you! When the Second Person of the Holy Trinity spits out saliva, it is the TRUE Saliva of God; it is another form of Water from the Rock. Virtually ALL scholars of Scripture (except for the fastidiously fussy) say that Jesus probably spit directly on the mute mans tongue (for that is precisely what He does to the blind man's eyes later in chapter 8). But it's not just water, (here TRUE HOLY WATER) but water comprehended and bound to the Word. The mouth of God which dispenses the liquid is the same mouth which not only made the oceans, but which can still the seas and restore Peace with God… by Forgiving SINS!
"Ephatha" is an Aramaic imperative! Peter was there and heard the Lord utter it. Saint Mark, Evangelist and friend of Simon Peter's inserts the Greek word dia/noich/thetai for the benefit of his readers. But both words mean exactly what the English Divines have translated for us: BE OPENED! It means to be completely and totally opened… and free.
It is tantamount to the Lord saying "LUO" (be loosed), be remitted, be untied, be forgiven, be absolved! Christ's Water united with His Word does what it says.
If this were only another miraculous physical healing story, then you should all be the most pitiful of naïve dupes. For if Jesus is only about fixing your broken flesh whenever you should so request Him to, you will reject the Faith of the Fathers and turn to more manageable and timely antibiotics, surgeries, transplants, and universal health care boondoggles.
Being healed was a gracious gift that the Mute man would always remember. But he died nonetheless (maybe hard of hearing once again due to old age, maybe impeded from clear locution due to rotten teeth and gums).
No, the Miracle is that Christ loves you. The healing is that Jesus takes your sins into His own flesh so that one day soon, at the resurrection of the dead, you will have new, permanent, perfect, glorified, eternal flesh. The real miracle is that God became man in your flesh, and tabernacles with you in actual physical means.
For the same reason now as 2,000 years ago. To forgive you all your sins.
Ephatha to you and for you-NOW…
In the Name of The Father and of + Son and of The Holy Ghost.