12th Sunday after Trinity + Mark 7:31-37 + August 19, 2018

Grace and Peace be unto you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today’s Gospel lesson shows us Christ’s compassion on a deaf mute. The man is brought to Jesus and those who bring him ask Jesus to put His hand on him. They had heard how Christ had touched others and healed them. Christ takes the dead mute away from the crowd and touches him, though probably not in the way that the man’s friends intended. Jesus sticks His fingers into the man’s ears. He spits and touches the man’s tongue with the spit. By doing these things Jesus communicates to the man that He intends to unstop his ears and loosen his rigid tongue. He then looks up to heaven since “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17). Then He speaks one word. “Ephphatha,” and with that word commands the man’s ears and mouth to be open. The man is healed at once because the One who has commanded the ears and mouth to open is the one whom formed man’s ears and tongue in the beginning. Jesus commands the man not to tell anyone, but it is impossible for faith to keep silent when it receives new life. With his new ears the man hears Christ’s word. With his new tongue he joyfully praises his savior and boldly confesses Christ and what He has graciously done for him.

The works of Christ we celebrate today are open ears and a loosened tongue. While it is good to give thanks to Christ that He healed this deaf mute, we give thanks for much more than that. We should give thanks to God all the more because what He does for this man He does for us. All Christ’s miracles illustrate Christ’s work that is for all mankind in the promise of the Gospel. He heals a leper by touching the man and we see Christ destroying the leprosy of sin in our flesh by becoming flesh. He raises a young man from the dead and we see Christ raising us from the spiritual death of sin right now, and physical death on the Last Day. So it is here with this deaf mute. He is a picture of humanity. The Triune God gave man ears so that he would listen to God’s Word, so that God’s Word would enter a man’s ears and penetrate His heart. The Triune God formed man’s tongue so that he might pray to God, asking Him for everything he needs; and so that man might praise God for His graciousness in answering prayer. Moses writes in Genesis 3 that before the fall into sin, God would walk with man in the cool of the day and speak with him.

But our first parents were tempted to listen to the word of the devil rather than the Word of the Lord. They used their ears to hear Satan’s lies instead of God’s command and promise. With their tongues they recited the deceptions they heard from the devil when they should have used them to recite God’s promise in faith, that it was true over against Satan’s lies. Since that moment, all mankind has had a hearing problem. The sin of Adam and Eve was that they failed use their ears correctly and this is what scripture diagnoses in all their descendants. We would rather listen to anyone but God in His Word. People will listen to talking heads on the news and believe what they say about the world. Mankind will listen to false prophets claiming that God speaks directly to them while ignoring the actual words of God spoken by His prophets and apostles in the Scriptures. We would rather listen to our own words about the things that interest us. By nature we are sinful beings who are curved in upon ourselves. This is why the world rejects the gospel. “The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). That’s the Holy Spirit’s diagnosis of the situation. Having cast aside the Spirit of God, mankind cannot understand God’s Word because it is spiritually discerned. We are congenitally deaf, spiritually speaking.

Since our ears are stopped up to God’s Word, we can’t use our tongues properly either. We don’t understand God’s promise to provide our daily bread so we complain that we don’t have enough. We can’t comprehend our how truly sinful we are by nature, so we tell ourselves how good we think we are. We can’t understand the things of God so we make up things about God, what He must be like, what He must want from us, and what kind of God He is, and then we’ve made an idol. Mankind would much rather praise itself than its maker. Humanity would much rather confess its own goodness and ability than God’s grace and power. Since our ears don’t work right, it’s no wonder that our tongues are off-kilter as well. Humanity has an ear problem and a tongue problem.

But Christ is compassionate toward sinners. He has pulled you aside, away from the multitude of the world. He has shown you, all throughout the Scriptures what He does for deaf mute sinners. Through the preaching of the Gospel, Christ has opened your ears to rightly hear His Word and believe it. For “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). The word of God creates faith in you because the Holy Spirit is present in and works through God’s Word. The Holy Spirit is the finger of God by which Christ drove out demons. In this way Christ sticks His finger into your ear and unstops it. It is only by the Holy Spirit’s work that you believe, for “no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). This is why Dr. Luther teaches us to say in Small Catechism, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.” The gospel shouts “Ephphatha!” into your ears and opens them so that the promises of Christ can enter your ear and penetrate your heart, creating faith in your heart which believes God’s Word to be true and the world’s words to be lies of the devil. The Gospel sustains your faith, fortifies your faith, strengthens it and grows us so that you believe God’s Word from the heart and trust His promises.

And that faith is not a general faith that God is good and that everything will work out. It is faith in all God’s promises given in Christ Jesus. It is faith that believes your sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake. It is faith that believes God has rebirthed you in Holy Baptism so that you are sons of God and co-heirs with Christ of every heavenly blessing. It is faith that years for His body and blood in the Sacrament and the forgiveness He gives you there. It is faith that trusts that Christ “has done all things well” in your life, whether things seem good at the moment or not. It is faith that trusts that at the moment of death the angels will take you to be with Christ in paradise and that there you will rest from your labors until He resurrects you from the dead on the Last Day. This is the faith the Holy Spirit create in your heart by unplugging your ears with His gospel.

That same faith will then come forth from your mouth. The faith the Holy Spirit creates will burst forth in praise of the One who has saved you from your sins and the eternal condemnation humanity deserves as David says in Psalm 51:15, “O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.” Christ loosens our tongues which only know how to complain and gossip and speak false about God and instead He brings forth His praise. The faith the Holy Spirit creates in your heart through the Word also loosens our tongues so that instead of confessing our own imagined goodness, we confess the grace and mercy of the God who has saved us. He plants His Word in our hearts through the ears, and that faith of the heart then confesses with the tongue that same Word of God, for to confess simply means to say the same thing as someone else. So we worship God and confess Him before men, not with our own words, but with the words God has spoken to us in the Holy Scripture, the words by which He has opened our ears so that we might hear and believe for the salvation of our souls. Today we celebrate unstopped ears and a loosened tongue. The deaf mute’s, but ours as well through Christ our Lord. Amen.

May the peace of God which surpasses all human understanding guard your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.