Imagine what life must have been like for the poor man described
in today’s Gospel reading.
He was completely deaf.
He couldn’t hear the voices of his family and friends.
He was unable to appreciate the song of birds in the
early morning. He
couldn’t listen as the Word of God was read and explained in
the synagogue. The
sounds you and I take for granted – the splish and splash of
rushing water, the whisper of wind in the trees, the bang of a
door slamming shut – all these had been swallowed up by the
silence which enveloped this poor man.
But his affliction was doubled.
For not only couldn’t this man hear.
He also was unable to speak plainly.
Oh, he could produce a few guttural noises with his mouth
and tongue, and you could tell from his pitch and expression
whether he was happy or sad, tranquil or in distress.
But that was it. His
ears didn’t do what God had designed ears to do.
And his mouth and tongue couldn’t say a thing that
anyone could understand. And
so he lived a life of isolation, cut off by his deaf, mute
condition from any real interaction with other people, trapped
in a world without sound and without speech.
Imagine being in his shoes.
Imagine, for a minute, that your hearing and speech had
been stolen from you, as from this man.
Imagine that you sat there, in your pew, unable to hear
as I preach Christ to you, unable to lift your voice in praise
to the God who gave you life and redeemed that life through His
dear Son, Jesus Christ, unable to add your amen to the prayers
and liturgy we use this day.
Because your deaf, speechless condition left you unable
to participate, you might as well be at an auction, or in an
airport terminal, than in the house of God. Unable to hear
God’s Word, unable to sing His praises -- what would be the
point of being here?
This man’s sorry lot was a result of sin.
His afflictions and impairments had their source in the
curse God placed upon creation after the disobedience of Adam.
Romans 8 explains the diseases, handicaps and various
crippling syndromes that afflict our human race when it says
that because of Adam’s sin, the whole creation was subjected
to futility.
And what’s the result? Ears
that can’t hear. Tongues that can’t form intelligible words.
Hearts that don’t work.
Lungs that become cancerous.
Limbs that are left powerless and immobile by accident or
disease or neurological incident.
Hurricanes, earthquakes, ice-storms, pestilence.
The whole creation subjected to futility – to vanity
– because of Adam’s sinful rebellion against his Creator.
The curse affected Adam.
It affected the deaf, speechless man in today’s Gospel.
And it affects you and me as well.
Despite what many people think, sin is no minor peccadillo, some
childish prank that God acts stern about but secretly finds
rather amusing. To
the contrary, sin destroys God’s good creation.
It destroys us. Because
of sin we grow old, and as our days increase our strength fades
away. Our minds
become clouded and don’t work as they once did, and in some
cases, such as advanced Alzheimers, don’t seem to work at all.
You’ve seen the wasting physical effects of our fallen
condition in your family and among your friends.
You’ve seen it in yourself.
The inevitable decay that is part and parcel of our life
in a fallen world isn’t because the universe has not
sufficiently evolved. No,
it’s a result of sin.
However, you need to understand that it’s not always been this
way. I repeat:
it’s not always been this way.
The sin, decay, disease and death with which we’re all
too familiar had no place in God’s original creation.
Genesis
1:31
tells us that when God
completed His work of creation, He pronounced it very good.
It all worked together the way God intended it.
No sickness, no stubbed toes, no accidents, no death –
because there was no sin. Adam
and his wife Eve perfectly trusted God and delighted in doing
His will out of gratitude for His many good gifts.
It was all very good – Adam and Eve included.
I don’t need to recount again the particulars of Adam’s fall
into sin. But I do
want to emphasize that because of sin, disease and death came
into the world as tokens of God’s judgment.
These things are evidence that all of us have sinned and
fallen short of the glory of God.
All of us came into this fallen world separated from our
Creator by the sinful nature we inherited from Adam.
And so in today’s Gospel we meet a man who had been grievously
injured by sin, unable to hear and unable to speak.
It wasn’t merely that his ears and mouth didn’t
function as they should. It
was his whole being that had been marred by sin.
Likewise, those who brought this poor man to Jesus for
healing had been grievously injured by sin too – for they too
experienced the afflictions of body and soul, emotions and mind
that sin leaves in its wake.
The same is true for Jesus’ disciples who witnessed the
miracle of healing and restoration Jesus was about to perform.
But not our Lord Jesus Christ.
As the Creator of all things He was holy and righteous in
all His ways. As the
Second Person of the Godhead become true Man, he was completely
free of the sin that troubles our fallen race.
Who
of you can convict Me of sin? Jesus asked His enemies.
As God in the flesh, Jesus was absolutely without sin.
If that weren’t the case He could not have saved us,
and we would still be in bondage to sin.
And so we have the encounter that St. Mark describes in
today’s Gospel. The
holy Creator meets one of His fallen sinful creatures suffering
under the severe impairments sin had brought upon him.
The poor deaf, mute man find himself gazing into the face
of Jesus and perhaps wondering, What in the world is He going to
do?
And what does Jesus do? Does
He say, Serves you right,
sinner, for disobeying God’s commandments?
Does He turn aside from the man as a hopeless case for
whom nothing can be done – someone who would probably be
better off dead? Does
He try to find a way to encourage him, to tell him to be brave
and don’t despair?
No. Jesus makes him
new. Jesus restores
him – recreates him, you might say.
What the Triune God will one day do on a large scale for
the entirety of creation, Jesus does on a small scale for this
man who cannot hear and cannot speak.
Behold, I make all things new! the One who sits
on the throne exclaims in the book of Revelation.
That’s what Jesus is doing for this man – making him
new.
So Jesus takes the man aside, away from the crowd, and ministers
to him individually. The
Creator who designed and made the ear places His fingers into
the man’s deaf ears in order to restore them.
The Creator who fashioned the mouth and tongue spits and
then touches the man’s mute tongue so that it might work
again. And then
Jesus sighs, looks up to heaven, and says to the man: Ephphatha,
that is, Be opened. And
Mark tells us that the poor man’s ears
were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.
His affliction and impairment were no more.
Jesus had taken them away.
He could hear. He
could talk.
This miracle of healing shows that Jesus is the One who came to
make all things new. He
came to undo the disastrous consequences of Adam’s sin, and to
remake the creation that groans under the curse of sin.
I mentioned how this deaf and mute man had been
grievously injured by sin, and how his friends, and the
disciples had likewise been grievously injured.
Indeed, all of us bear the marks of this injury.
But there was one Person present there in the region of the
Decapolis
who hadn’t been
injured by sin. And
that was our Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus, who was free of sin, healed the sad consequences
of Adam’s sin for this deaf and speechless man.
And He has done the same for us, by His death on the
Cross and His resurrection on the third day.
Jesus did it by taking the world’s sin to Himself, as though
it was His own sin, and being punished in order to bear the
guilt of sin away. Surely,
He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, the
prophet Isaiah declares. He
was wounded for our transgressions; He was crushed for our
iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and by His stripes we are healed. . .
The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
To cure the symptoms, you’ve got to cure the disease.
That’s what our Lord Jesus Christ came to do – cure
the disease of sin and death and condemnation.
But what a strange Physician this is!
For He cures us, not by writing out a prescription and
then forgetting about us. No,
this Physician cures us by taking our disease upon Himself.
He who is uninjured by sin of His own is wounded by our
sin.
St. Paul
writes that He
became sin for us so that in Him we might become the
righteousness of God. He
takes our sin away and makes it His own.
He takes our guilt away and makes it His own.
He takes our death away and makes it His own.
He takes away the condemnation we each deserve and makes
it His own.
And then, having died for the sin of the world, He’s raised
again to prove that His sacrifice was acceptable, and that God
has reconciled the world to Himself by Jesus’ sufferings and
death. Jesus did all
this to make us new creatures, children of God, heirs of
righteousness, through faith in His Name.
He did it so we could believe in Him and receive
forgiveness and life eternal.
In your Baptism, the Holy Spirit came to you and your Savior
said, Be
opened, and gave you ears that hear God’s Word and a
new heart that believes the Gospel.
You were made a new creation in Holy Baptism, for the
sake of Jesus’ holy, precious blood that He shed on the Cross
for your healing. He
made you a Confessor of His Name, for He is your only Savior
from sin and death and the condemnation of hell.
And He promises that at His return on the last day He
will raise you up from your grave, and will make your body anew.
And you nevermore shall experience weakness.
You nevermore shall experience suffering and sorrow.
You nevermore shall experience death.
The One who promises to make all things new will make you
completely new as well.
At the beginning of today’s service we sang, O
Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will show forth your praise.
That’s the way it works.
Through the Word Jesus opens our ears to hear and to
believe. And He
opens our lips to show forth His praise.
Think about it. When
Jesus enabled the man who was deaf and speechless to hear and to
speak plainly, I’m sure this man didn’t waste his time
talking about the economy and the winners and losers of the
chariot races in Caesarea Philippi.
Undoubtedly, he used his renewed gift of speech to praise
the God who in Jesus Christ had touched and healed him.
That’s what the crowd which heard this man speaking
did. Mark says the
crowd was astonished beyond measure, saying,
He has done all things well.
He even makes the deaf to hear and the mute speak.
Jesus does do all things well.
And by His holy life, His death, His resurrection, and
His return in glory, He will make all things new.
And they shall again be what they were at the original
creation. Very
good. No
more sin, no more disease, no more suffering and death.
All things will once again be very good because of Jesus.
We too will share in this perfection. That’s why we ask
the Lord to open our lips so that we can show forth His praise.
Out of thanksgiving to Jesus, and to praise Him for His
work of making all things new.
In Nomine Patris. . .
