& Be Amazed

He Does All Things Amazingly Well

9.14.24 [Mark 7:31-37] River of Life (16th Sunday after Pentecost)

Grace and peace are yours from God your heavenly Father, and his Son, Jesus Christ, and his Holy Spirit. Amen.

The history of medicine is filled with many mis-steps and mystifying theories and malpractices. There are the more infamous practices of giving cocaine to children with coughs, ingesting mercury pills to cure constipation, and arsenic for ulcers. That’s weird. But it gets weirder.

The Ancient Egyptians believed that putting moldy bread on your cuts would help them heal. Not only that, but they thought cutting a mouse in half and putting on your teeth or gums while it was still warm would soothe oral pains. If you had terrible headaches or epilepsy, many cultures would bore a hole through your skull. If you were sickly, doctors might slap some leeches on you to balance out your humors. Strange solutions like these weren’t just the norm thousands of years ago.

In the early 1900s, if you had asthma they might treat you with chloroform or give you an asthma cigarette. Around that same time, if you had rheumatoid arthritis, you might go hunting for a dead whale and cut a narrow channel in its floating corpse and tell you to lay inside it for a few hours to relieve soreness and inflammation. At this same time, some believed that milk would become white blood cells if it was transfused into the human body.

Any of these practices strike us as strange today. What’s really strange is that people went through these treatments and survived. In fact, they must have recovered at a high enough rate that the medical community began to believe that these strange practices cured them!

And maybe that’s how we process what’s happening in Mark 7. It’s one of the most hands-on miracles that Jesus does. And maybe from our perspective, it’s a little gross. But at the end of the account, the people are amazed and praising him, saying He does all things well.

So let’s take a look at why they said that and why that was more true than they even realized.

Mark begins with some geographic details. Jesus leaves the vicinity of Tyre and travels through Sidon and into the region of the Decapolis. All of these locations are Gentile territory. Jesus is going the long way around the more Jewish parts of Galilee because he’s withdrawing a bit from Israel. The leaders want to kill him, but it’s not the right time. Yet even here, the reports of his ability to heal have made the rounds.

How do they know about Jesus in a place he has never been?

Well, Mark 5 tells us. Before Jesus raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead, he confronted a demon-possessed man who terrified everyone. He identified himself as Legion because there were so many demons that were torturing him. Jesus freed that man and sent the demons into a herd of about 2,000 pigs. The pigs immediately ran themselves off a steep bank into the lake and drowned. People from nearby heard about this and begged Jesus to leave them alone.

And the man Jesus healed begged to let Jesus follow him. But Jesus refused. Instead, he told him (Mk. 5:19) to go to his own people in Decapolis and tell them what the Lord had done for him, how he had mercy on him. And everyone who heard his story was amazed.

So when Jesus arrived in Decapolis, it’s not surprising that they bring to him a man who had been suffering with deafness and muteness. They had heard of Jesus’ power to heal & they wanted to see it in action and this man seemed like the perfect test case.

But Jesus never did miracles to put on a show. So he took the man (Mk. 7:33) aside, away from the crowd and interacted with him in the only way that a deaf and mute man could grasp what he was doing. He put his fingers in the man’s ears. He spit in his own hand and then touched the man’s mute tongue. Each point of physical contact was tailored for this man and his maladies.

Then Jesus looked up to heaven and groaned. Then he spoke in Aramaic—his native tongue— (Mk. 7:34) Ephphatha! Which meant nothing to the man who couldn’t hear or talk, but to the disciples who were there watching and listening it meant Be opened.

Then it happened. His ears were opened. The fetters on his tongue fell off. And don’t miss the 3rd miracle. He began to speak plainly. Any speech-language pathologist would tell you that it can take months to see results. This man was healed in mere moments.

Of course, despite Jesus’ desire to heal without attracting a crowd, the people were overwhelmed with amazement & could not stop talking about what Jesus had just done. Even as he commanded them to stop talking about it, they continued to do so. He has done everything well, they said. And it was true. Everything they had seen him do, he had done well. But they did not yet know what he had come to do. They saw his miracle but they didn’t get why he groaned. Do you understand why the Son of God sighed deeply?

It’s not for the reasons you and I do. We sigh deeply when we don’t know what to do. Jesus knew what needed to be done to heal this man. He didn’t need to page through a healer’s handbook or check WebMD or scroll through a thousand dubious results on Google.

We also sigh deeply when we know what needs to be done and we know it’s going to be hard work. We sigh deeply when we see the pile of dishes or laundry. We sigh deeply when we see yard work that must be done. It’s not hard to figure out what needs to be done. It’s hard, sweaty, back-breaking work to get it done.

But that doesn’t seem to fit here either. Putting your fingers in someone’s ear is a little strange, but it’s not a strain. Spitting on your hand and touching someone’s tongue might be a little gross, but it’s not grueling.

Jesus doesn’t sigh because he doesn’t know what to do. Jesus doesn’t groan because this is a really tough case. He looks up to heaven and sighs because he sees all that is wrong here on earth—what is not like heaven—and he knows what it is going to take to redeem creation from its bondage to death and decay.

Jesus sees beyond the symptoms and longs for things to be put right. Do you? How many of our frustrations and complaints are about temporal, surface stuff? We sigh deeply because things are not the way we want them to be. We sigh deeply when things break or we’re stuck in traffic. We sigh deeply when we have to repeat ourselves. We sigh deeply when we see all the fees they’ve added. We sigh deeply when we see the same political ad for the 1000th time. We sigh deeply when our favorite team lets us down, yet again.

I’m not saying none of these things are of any importance. But do our deep sighs align with the deep sighs of God? Do we groan each time our greedy sinful nature gets the best of us? Do we sigh deeply because we struggle to put the sin of worry to death, or because we think we have so much to worry about? Do we sigh as deeply when we see so many people on the broad path that leads to destruction as we do when they’re in our way and we’re stuck in traffic? Do we sigh deeply when we recognize how many times God tells us the same things over and over again and we still don’t seem to get it? Do we sigh deeply as we confess our sins?

Jesus knows well how often our deep sighs express the deep hold that our sinful nature has on us and our world. That is why he came.

Jesus came to do all things well. He came to open the gates of heaven to people who were afflicted by their own sinfulness. He came to open our ears and hearts to his glorious Gospel. Jesus came to unfetter our tongues to speak plainly about all that he has done to redeem us. He came to overwhelm us with amazement and say: He has done everything well, he has even made me well.

The only way that Jesus could redeem his creation was by getting his hands dirty. Not in the way, we might use that phrase. He got his hands dirty by becoming our servant. By doing the things we are unable and unwilling to do. By submitting himself to the holy Law and suffering in our place for all the times we refused to hear or listen to what God demands. Even before we knew enough to beg God to save us, the Son of God stretched out his hands to save us. He allowed his enemies to spit on him, to hit him, to mock him, and to crucify him. And it was a gross, strange scene to our eyes.

As he suffered and died on the cross, he sighed deeply. He sighed deeply for those who were mourning for him but did not know why he had to suffer and die. He sighed deeply for those who were abusing him but did not understand what they were doing.

As he suffered and died on the cross, Christ looked to heaven as he said (Mk. 15:34) Eloi Eloi lama sabacthani, which means My God, My God why have you forsaken me? Those who were there on Good Friday thought he was crying out to Elijah. But he was crying out to heaven. To his Father. His cry for mercy was rebuffed so that we might be redeemed. There was no other way than this path. But this path of shame, of suffering, of death was how Christ did everything well for us. This is how he makes us well. By grace, our hearts and ears have been opened. Through faith, our tongues are loosened. By God’s power, we can speak plainly of all the wonderful and amazing things God has done. In his mercy, (Rom. 8:26-27) God the Holy Spirit helps us when we are so weak we don’t even know what to pray for. He himself intercedes for us through wordless groans because this is the will of God. In all things, even the gross things, even the strange things, even the sad things, God is working for our good. We are well taken care of because Christ Jesus has done all things well.

And, this time, Jesus has not commanded you not to tell anyone. Rather he has commanded you to go and tell everyone you can what the Lord has done for you, how he has had mercy on you. How he has demonstrated his love for the world. How he has done everything well. Amen.