The Gospel of Mark, Pt. 33 - A Strange, Symbolic Healing

Our modern approach to healing ailments and illnesses has developed through years of research and scientific discovery backed by technological innovation that has revolutionized the practice of modern medicine. But this wasn’t the story for the vast majority of human history. In fact, there have been, and continue to be to this day, many strange and weird practices that people will employ to heal the human body.

For instance, the ancient Egyptians crocodile dung for contraception, and they would grind up dead mice into powder to treat toothaches. Other ancient healing remedies included using hot irons to treat hemorrhoids, drilling holes in the skulls to treat headaches, and drinking urine to treat various illnesses. And even in more modern times, like in the 19th century, doctors prescribed cocaine for migraines and depression, while morphine and alcohol syrup was used to soothe crying babies who were teething. And we can’t forget the common practice of bloodletting through the use of leeches to treat a host a various diseases.

We’ve come along way since those primitive days, and today we’re going to encounter a strange method of healing that Jesus employed with a deaf and mute man that’s ultimately going to teach us some important things about who Jesus is and what he came to accomplish.

Mark 7:31–37 (SLIDE) “Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 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 mute speak.””

We left off last Sunday with Jesus’ interesting encounter with the Syrophoenician woman in the region of Tyre and Sidon, marking one of only a few instances in which Jesus ministers to Gentiles peoples during his earthly ministry. Remember, Jesus came first and primarily for the lost sheep of the House of Israel, establishing that God’s salvation comes first to the Jews, and then to the Gentiles. Now from the region of Tyre and Sidon in the north, Jesus and his disciples descend south along the east side of the Sea of Galilee and enters another Gentile region known as the Decapolis.

If you remember back from a few months ago, we read of Jesus visiting this area in Mark 5 when he journeyed to the country of the Gerasenes and encountered the demoniac known as Legion who was possessed by thousands of demons. Well Jesus is now back in the Decapolis region, Decapolis meaning “ten cities”, and in verse 32, we’re told that a group of people bring a man to Jesus who was deaf and had some kind of speech impediment. The Greek word used to translate the phrase “had a speech impediment” is a compound word that literally means the man had difficulty speaking or could hardly speak at all.

But before we get to Jesus’ interaction with the man, its interesting to note who brought the man to Jesus......it was the crowds. But if you remember back in Mark 5 and the end with Jesus’ healing of the demoniac, upon seeing what had happened to the demon-possessed man and to the pigs, the crowds actually begged Jesus to depart from their region. And this was for a couple different reasons.

For one, that demonstration of power and influence over a man who had likely wreaked havoc for just about everyone in the area likely created a certain level of fear in the eyes of the people. They had no way to make sense of what they had seen, and so maybe the attributed Jesus’ miracle to greater demonic powers. On the other hand, the fact that Jesus cast the multitude of demons into nearby herds of pigs, all of which eventually ran off a cliff and died, represented a significant economic loss to the local herdsmen. Remember, these gentile people placed a greater value on their pigs than on a man being healed from demons, and so they probably saw this as a threat to their future livelihoods......we can’t be losing all our pigs....this is gonna be bad for business!

But now here in our text in Mark 7, likely months after his first recorded visit to the Decapolis......these people who at first begged Jesus to leave were now welcoming him in with open arms and bringing people to him for healing. So one can only imagine all that the formerly demon-possessed man was doing to share his experience with Jesus and his liberation at the hands of the famed Jewish rabbi. And this leads to our first point to consider in the story for today.....(SLIDE) Jesus changes our hearts.

Our ultimate goal is the salvation of souls, and we always want to work to help bring people into a genuine, saving relationship with Jesus. However, we can’t forget that that can be a process at times, a long process sometimes, but God nevertheless works on the human heart long before we may see the visible fruit and evidence of salvation. And often times, that process is marked by interactions with people over a period of time through which they’re able to witness our genuine affections and allegiance to Jesus through our words and behaviors and our demeanor and attitude towards them.

Just the other night, I had a game involving a school that’s ranked #2 in the nation, and they almost lost on the road. And so after our game, we officials go to our locker room to shower and change and talk about the game. However, we stuck around in the locker room for extra 30-45 minutes because the discussions evolved from basketball to abortion and ICE operations and whole host of other social and political topics. You see one of my partners is a democrat city councilman for San Jose, and he’s also a self-professes Roman Catholic. So I began by asking him how his Roman Catholicism informs his politics, especially with respect to abortion issues, and that turned into a fascinating conversation.

But we’ve known each other for years, and he knows how politically and socially conservative I am as a Christian, and I know where he stands, so I have the relational capital to have these kinds of conversations with him and not turn them into shouting matches. Needless to say, by the time we left the locker room, I was jokingly telling some random people who were still in the gym that I had just flipped a Democrat politician over to the right!

But honestly, we left in good graces as we always do, we told each that we love each other, and I encouraged him not to just keep going to church, but be a Catholic who reads his Bible! My job isn’t to change his mind and his heart. My job is to share truth, with love and grace, and pray that God changes his heart. Jesus didn’t combat the gentiles in the country of the Gerasenes who were begging him to leave. He simply obliged and let his miracle and the testimonies that followed to speak for themselves.

Sometimes our calm demeanor.....our kind words.....our commitments to truth displayed through our gestures and love and grace towards those with whom we have serious disagreements can speak volumes. There’s a local Christian in our community who can be quite sharp and rude and insulting on social media when he engages with others on the opposite side of the political spectrum, and its just grieves me to no end, thinking that a representative of Jesus can be so harsh and unloving towards others.

The world will know us by our love and by our good works, and while we should never compromise on the truth of the whole counsel of God’s word, we should likewise be mindful of how we’re representing our Lord as a plea for those who are far from God to be reconciled to God through Christ Jesus. Our ultimate job is to share truth and show love, and let Jesus do that which only he can do through the power of the Holy Spirit. Remember, we needed a heart change too......and we still need God to soften and mold and mend our hearts......so how much more do those who are far from God need the same?

So now that people’s hearts and minds towards Jesus had changed with time, they were now welcoming him back, and they brought their deaf and mute friend to Jesus and begged Jesus to lay his hands on him in order to heal him. And then in verses 33 and 34, we’re introduced to this very strange and unique method of healing on the part of Jesus that we haven’t seen thus far in Mark’s gospel, and we’re only going to see something similar one more time in Mark 8. Let’s look again at Mark 7:33–34 (SLIDE) “And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.””

First of all, notice how Jesus takes the man aside and into a private situation away from the crowds, as though he didn’t want to make a public spectacle of the man. Now likely it was still within view of the crowds, but its possible that Jesus wanted to create a more intimate and private setting for the man. All the previous miracles of healing that Jesus had performed that we have looked at thus far in Mark’s gospel have been performed in very public environments. He’s healed in homes filled with people.....he’s healed in synagogues.....he’s healed out in the open in the midst of crowds.....but here Jesus chooses a more private and intimate setting, which really speaks to Jesus as a personal savior.

I want to caution Christians over-privatizing their relationship with Jesus by treating it as though its Jesus and them and no one else. I think that can be dangerous because we can potentially make following Jesus an entirely personally-defined enterprise that is absent of any real biblical precedent. Christianity is not about being a lone wolf with Jesus, and the fullness of the Christian faith can only be truly experienced in the context of community. That’s why I really like the phrase - Christianity is meant to be personal, but not private.

And so its the personal nature of this encounter that I believe is the most beautiful and powerful, which sets us up for the next point to consider with respect to this story......(SLIDE) Jesus connects with our hurts. Not only does Jesus take the man aside into a more private setting, but consider the method he employs to heal this man. He sticks his fingers into the ears of a deaf man, and then apparently spits onto his hands and touches the tongue of the man. In virtually all other healing instances that we’ve seen in Mark’s gospel so far, Jesus healed people by simply speaking to them. The only possible exception is when the woman with the issue of blood reached out and touched the hem of Jesus’ garment.

However, Jesus chooses to heal this man through physical touch. And as weird as this method may seem to us, it served as a very symbolically powerful moment that communicates theological truth about the true identity of Jesus. For starters, he touched the ears of the deaf man. In Jewish culture, this would have been very taboo as the ailing body part was often considered unclean, so touching the ears of a deaf person or the unmovable limbs of a paralytic, or any part of the body of a leper, would make you ceremonially unclean.

And even more strange was the fact that Jesus spit on his hands and reached into the man’s mouth and touched his tongue. Now there was a belief in their culture that saliva had healing properties. In fact, today we know that saliva has antiseptic and antimicrobial properties that assist in healing, especially with oral injuries. Now obviously Jesus didn’t do this because of the scientific properties of his saliva. Rather, in both the case of touching the man’s tongue as well as his ears, its as thought Jesus is communicating to this deaf and mute man in manner that is specific to him.......Jesus is physically connecting with his ailments.

Isaiah 53:4 says (SLIDE) “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows...” Now while Isaiah 53 overall has more to do with our spiritual sickness than our physical sickness, surely Jesus as our Suffering Servant identifies with all forms of our suffering. And this identification with human suffering is most powerfully exemplified on the cross. It was on the cross that Jesus endured the most severe forms of human suffering so that he could simultaneous identify with us while also setting us free from ultimately suffering the wrath of almighty God!

One of the most powerful realities to know and trust in is that Jesus as my personal savior connects with by hurts. When we’re hurting, its so easy to think that we’re alone.....no one knows.....no one cares.....and those lies take us only further into the depths of our despair. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth! We do not have a high priest who is removed and unfamiliar with our suffering, but he is well-acquainted with it! He’s gone through it himself, without sinning of course, and therefore he knows how we feel....he understands it......and he’s ultimately done something about it.

And until we experience full liberation from our suffering when we step into glory, I hope this story is a reminder for us all that Jesus is close to the brokenhearted and binds up our wounds. He is personally connected to our pains and our hurts and he promises to never leave us or forsake us. So when Jesus says at the end of the Great Commission in Matthew 28 that he is with us to the very end of the age, that’s not just a theoretical reality connected to our call to evangelize, but it is a theological truth about the closeness of God to those whom he loves. He’s not offering us some vague, abstract idea, but a relationship of connection and compassion and care......because he knows and understands our pain......he’s been through it himself......and he’s with us now.

And so after Jesus physically connects with this man’s infirmities, he looks up to heaven, indicating his prayerful communion with the Father, and then the text says that Jesus sighed or groaned.....some translations say he sighed deeply. This is an interesting Greek word that Mark uses here, because it rarely is used in the NT. It literally means to groan against.....to groan in pain....or to complain. It speaks of an inward moaning of the individual that becomes outwardly expressed through an audible sigh or groan.

James uses this word in his epistle to warn Christians not to grumble and complain against one another, but to develop patient endurance and avoid the judgment of God. Or in Hebrews, the writer exhorts church members to obey and submit to the leaders of the church because we’re watching over your souls, and it would be better for everyone that we do so with joy in our hearts and not with groaning, implying that church leadership can be difficult and create a lot of inward distress. In this context in Mark 7, it not that Jesus is struggling to perform the miracle, but that, again, he’s connecting so intimately with the man’s infirmities that he becomes so deeply moved with compassion. He’s feeling the weight of sin, not that the man’s condition is due to personal sin, but rather acknowledging that all brokenness and weaknesses are due to the existence of sin in the world as a result of the fall.

We’ve become so desensitized through social media and movies and television that our inward, gut reaction to the existence of sin has become muted in some ways. Its as though we too have become deaf and blind to the brokenness of the world, and so may this be a reminder to cultivate the heart and mind and eyes of Jesus and rightly recognize the brokenness of humanity and the effects of sin all around us, and let us be willing to step into the suffering of others and do something about it. And as Jesus continued to do just that, he says an Aramaic word “Ephphatha”......which means “be opened.”

Remember earlier in Mark 5 and Jesus’ healing of Jairus’s daughter, he speaks another Aramaic phrase “Talitha cumi”.....which means “Little girl, get up.” The use of the Aramaic in the gospel of Mark grounds the letter in history and even points to early dating as this was Jesus’ native language that he would have spoken on a regular basis. The last time we went to Israel, our tour guide who showed us around Bethlehem was an Arab Christian native to Bethlehem who spoke Aramaic. Keep in mind, Bethlehem has currently been under Palestinian control for years, so almost no Jews are allowed to enter that area. So as our tour there was wrapping up and he took us through all the areas that are associated with Jesus’ birth, he walked us down this dark hallway, and he proceeded to pray the Lord’s prayer in Aramaic....just as Jesus would have spoken it.

And I have to tell you, it was probably one of the most beautiful and spiritually moving experiences I’ve had. As we closed our eyes and listened to his words, it was though we could imagine the King of universe, in human form, praying in our midst. And that carried some weight to it. To the gentiles who were maybe within earshot of Jesus, his Aramaic words may have sounded like a magical formula. And it was common in that culture and at that time that faith healers would often employ special incantations that sounded like mumbo-jumbo.......like “abracadabra”.

But this was no mumbo-jumbo incantation on the part of Jesus.....this was the Creator of the universe speaking to his creation.....an in the instance of Jairus’s daughter and in the instance of this deaf and mute man......death and silence were overcome by the very words of our Lord. Remember.....those with ears to hear will rightly perceive and understand the good news of the gospel. And so the recording of Aramaic here and in other places in the gospels reminds us that God’s native tongue is life over death......healing over sickness.....and restoration over brokenness.

Proverbs 4:20–22 says (SLIDE) “My son, be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart. For they are life to those who find them, and healing to all their flesh.” The word of the Lord brings life and healing when we listen to the word and store it in our hearts. And this becomes reality when the Spirit of God applies the Word of God to our hearts and minds. Remember what Jesus says in John 6:63 (SLIDE) “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

And it was spirit and life that ultimately changed this man’s situation in a single moment. Mark 7:35 tells us (SLIDE) “And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” When Jesus steps into our situations.....when he steps into our sufferings.....when he steps into our weaknesses....the hope of our healing and our liberation become reality. Now our complete healing and liberation may not necessarily come in this life....but they are guaranteed in the life to come.

Now right after this healing, Jesus gives a very familiar command in verse 36, charging the crowds not to tell anyone about what had happened, but were told that the more he charged them, the more zealous they become to proclaim what they had just witnessed. Again, it was not the right time as Jesus still had much to accomplish on his way to the cross, and this was all within a gentile context, so Jesus still had work to do with the Jews. However, the fervor over his miraculous powers continued to grow amongst both Jews and Gentiles, which led to countless people being utterly astounded and amazed by what they saw. And this is how Mark concludes this story in Mark 7:37 “And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.””

This simple observation speaks volumes not just of what Jesus was capable of doing, but who the people were actively acknowledging Jesus to be, whether they were aware of it or not....which leads us to our last point.......(SLIDE) Jesus confirms our hope. As gentiles, these people were likely unfamiliar with Jewish Scriptures, and yet, their acknowledgement of Jesus’ works to make the deaf hear and the mute speak act as an unintentional confirmation of Jesus’ identity as the Jewish Messiah.

In Isaiah 34, the prophet warns of impending cosmic judgment that will be poured out amongst the nations. This prophecy tells us that the Lord is enraged against all the nations because of their wickedness and idolatry. And so from heaven to earth, all of creation will bear the judgment and vengeance of a Holy God. However, this is not the end of the story, and Isaiah 35 gives us all hope for a remnant that is promised to return to the very presence of the living God, represented by the holy city Zion. And so listen to the prophet which reminds us that in fact, Jesus, who is the Jewish Messiah spoken of from long ago, as confirmed our hope for salvation and everlasting life.....

Isaiah 35:1–10 (SLIDE) “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus; it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have an anxious heart, “Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.” Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it. It shall belong to those who walk on the way; even if they are fools, they shall not go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

And over 700 years after this prophecy was given.......many of these words became reality as Jesus of Nazareth inaugurated and fulfilled much of what Isaiah spoke about.......and this remains our hope to this day!