An Unusual Cure

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We gesture a lot to make ourselves understood, but sometimes we can misunderstand other people’s gestures. And if we don’t think about the context of what they’re gesturing, we miss the whole point of it. And we were talking about this at lunch today.

I think the most glaring example that I can recall from my life, I didn’t realize she was this young, but my sister, who is uh charla’s age was about jojo’s age at the time three four somewhere in there and we were leaving our church in norman one sunday morning we’d walked out to the parking lot we loaded in the car and as my dad put it today at lunch um my sister always had a problem with cars not not she wouldn’t want to get into the car she was a strong-willed child which apparently runs in the family now because we get to experience that. He said it was always a fight to get her to get in the car. So one particular Sunday morning, we’re loaded in the car, we’re leaving, we’re pulling out of the parking lot, and everybody just starts waving like crazy.

And my parents are just waving, thinking everybody’s just excited to see them on this day in particular. They’re just waving. It’s not until we got out to almost to the road, to the highway, that I told them, Chelsea’s not buckled in.

My sister had unbuckled herself and had opened the door and was hanging half out of the car. So they stopped and buckled her back up. They might have whooped her for, you know, because this was not the first time something like that had happened.

But they got her buckled back up. They, I think, engaged the child locks on the door, and off we went. But it still just cracks me up the thought that they thought everybody was waving just to be super friendly.

And now looking back on it, I think, why did they think that that day of all days, everybody just got real excited. But you don’t always assume half of my child is hanging out of the car. So without context, you really miss the importance of that waving gesture.

Now, I tell you that story because tonight we’re going to talk about a story from the book of Mark where Jesus made some gestures that seem really strange to us on first examination. And there have been a lot of explanations offered as to why he did what he did. And a lot of these explanations are really theologically profound.

But none of them really fit as I’m reading through. None of them really, I don’t know, I don’t want my reading of Scripture to be based on feelings. but as I’m reading through, none of them just felt like the explanation.

And I realized this week, and I’ve read some other commentators that make me think, I’m not completely out in left field here, because I’m not the first person ever to think about this. But if we look at this story in context and look at what was going on, we’ll understand what Jesus was doing. Because there’s a very simple explanation for what he was doing that also tells us something about the character of Jesus.

So we’re going to be in Mark chapter 7 as we continue our study of the book of Mark and come to this story of healing and the gestures that Jesus made. And if you would, once you find it in your Bibles, in Mark chapter 7, if you turn, excuse me, once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find the passage, it’ll be on the screen for you, but we’re going to be in Mark chapter 7, and we’re going to look at verses 31 through 37 tonight. And this says, again, departing from the region of Tyre and Sidon, he came through the midst of the region of Decapolis to the Sea of Galilee.

Then they brought to him one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, and they begged him to put his hand on him. And he took him aside from the multitude and put his fingers in his ears and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up from heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephphathah, that is be opened.

Immediately his ears were opened and the impediment of his tongue was loosed and he spoke plainly. Then he commanded them that they should tell no one. But the more he commanded them, the more widely they proclaimed it.

And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, He has done all things well. He makes both the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. And you may be seated.

So we look at this, and as I said, Jesus did some things throughout His ministry that look odd to us, until we look at them in context. This one, though, I’m reading it and trying to understand why in the world is Jesus sticking His fingers in the guy’s ears and spitting and touching mouths. What is happening here?

And there have been all kinds of, and I’m not going to go into all the explanations that I’ve read where people try to make this a, I don’t know, they try to make some sense of it and I think they fall just a little bit short. So I’ve asked, I haven’t really told him what we’re going to do, but I’ve asked my lovely assistant to come up here and we’re going to mime this out because I think the explanation is in the text for us if we consider what we know about this man. Now, what did I tell you, or what did it say in there that we know about this man?

He was deaf and mute, which means he couldn’t speak and couldn’t hear. Okay, so imagine you can’t hear, plug your ears, and I come to you and I start explaining everything I’m going to do. Right, you got all of that, right?

No, because he can’t hear me, right? I don’t know if they had sign language back then. I don’t know if they had their first century version of ASL back then where they could communicate.

So how would you communicate with somebody when you can’t speak a language they can hear and understand? We do it with people that speak different languages all the time, but we do kind of charades, don’t we? So imagine not being able to hear.

So I’m not going to make any noise because you can’t hear. So I’m going to explain to you what I’m going to do though. And then he healed him.

Thank you. You’ve been a lovely helper. Give him a hand.

When it occurred to me this week, wait a minute, the guy couldn’t hear. I realized he was explaining to the man what he was doing. Because again, it really, when I read that, I know this is not what it says, but when I read that about him sticking his fingers in his ears, I think of how dumb kids in junior high used to try to lick their finger and stick it in my ears and how irritating that was.

And just the whole thing made no sense to me. But he can’t hear. And so instead of explaining, I’m going to heal your ears now.

Or here, let me talk to you like you’re a stranger in our land. I’m going to heal your ears now. You know, it’s not going to get through.

He knows, the man I’m sure knows that he’s been brought to Jesus because he’s this healer. And so Jesus is telling him, I’m going to heal your ears because I know you can’t hear, so I’m going to heal your ears. He’s touching the man’s ears to let him know what he’s going to do.

Now the spitting is also questionable. And there were other times I really look forward to sitting down and trying to understand why he made clay with his spit for the blind man. But fortunately, I didn’t have to do that for this week.

If you want to mime a mouth that works and words coming out to somebody who can’t hear, one way you might do that is to spit the mouth I’m not going to do it up here I almost did but we’re indoors so that’s not a good idea the way to do one it demonstrates that the mouth functions and demonstrates something coming out of the mouth and then he demonstrates the mouth working his mouth working and touches his mouth and touches the man’s mouth he’s I I believe he’s miming to the man, your mouth is going to work just like mine. And suddenly, what Jesus did doesn’t seem so crazy, which I know Jesus is not crazy. So when I come to crazy things, things that seem to me to be crazy in the Gospels, I have to go into it with the assumption that I’m just misunderstanding something.

But when we start to look at it in the context of the story and who he was dealing with starts to make sense to me. And like I said, I went digging after that and came up with a few other people that suggested that as well. So I thought it’s not just me.

It’s not some bizarre new interpretation I’ve come up with. But I think ultimately when it says in verses 33 and 34, he took him aside from the multitude and put his fingers in his ears and he spat and touched his tongue. That’s another thing.

it took me a while to realize it doesn’t say he spat in his hand and touched the man. When I realized that’s not what it says, it just says he spat, and then he touched his tongue, and then looking up to heaven, he’s also demonstrating where the healing is going to come from. He’s miming and playing charades, for lack of a better word.

Everything the man needs to know to understand what’s about to happen to him. Looking up to heaven, and even though it strikes us as odd that Jesus would do all of this and not just heal the man. I mean, after all, He could have said, Ephathah at the beginning and just that was it.

But instead, He took the time to explain to Him, to communicate to Him. Because imagine being dragged in front of a crowd like that. If you had a disability like that, you’re deaf, you’re mute, wouldn’t you be a little bit self-conscious?

Because we all know how kind others can be, right? People are always kind to, you know, being dragged in front of this crowd, you can’t hear what’s going on, you’ve never met Jesus, but you’ve heard He has this incredible power, but you don’t know what to expect. You’d be a little nervous, wouldn’t you?

Jesus could have healed the man right away. Instead, Jesus had enough compassion to walk the man through what was going to happen, to make sure He understood what God was about to do. Now, that doesn’t mean that God always owes us an explanation of what He’s going to do and how it’s going to work.

Because we still don’t understand exactly how that works other than it’s the power of God, we don’t understand the physical mechanics of how God restored the man’s ears and his ability to speak. But he doesn’t have to explain that. But God in his grace gave an explanation of here’s what’s about to happen.

Jesus showed incredible compassion to this man. He demonstrated compassion by communicating to him in a way that he understood. Jesus was putting him at ease and helping him, not just so he would feel better about it, but so that he would understand that it was the power of God that was about to show up in a mighty way in his life.

Jesus demonstrated compassion another way. It’s really subtle in here though. He demonstrated compassion in the way that he sympathized with the man’s need.

In verse 34, it says that he sighed. Looking up to heaven, he sighed. Now this was not a sigh of stress or irritation.

We sigh all the time, or at least I do and don’t realize it. It took my wife a couple of years into our marriage to realize that’s just something I do and it doesn’t mean that I’m annoyed. But the first few times she asked me to take out the trash or something and I went, ladies, would that go all over you?

And finally, we began to understand each other. And sometimes I just sigh as I’m processing information. By the way, if I do that to you, that’s good for you to know.

I’m not put out with you. That’s just, my brain can only take so much pressure and that’s a release valve. All right.

So this was not a sigh on Jesus’ part of irritation or stress or frustration. It’s not like the guy came to be healed and Jesus went, okay, another one. Let’s This word describes a groan deep within him.

Something that he felt in his core. It’s an expression of his deeply felt emotions over the man’s condition. Jesus was moved with compassion over the man’s condition, looking at what he had had to deal with all these years, looking at the limitations and the struggles that he’d had.

And I’m sure from Jesus’ perspective, also understanding that stuff like that happens because of the presence of sin in the world. Now, it doesn’t mean that every time we have something wrong with us, that it’s a quid pro quo from God that you stubbed your toe and it means you committed some kind of sin that God said, fine, I’m going to zap you for that. Every time somebody gets sick, it doesn’t mean that their individual sin is the direct cause of it.

Sometimes it can work that way. We see in Scripture, but a lot of times it’s just the fact that we live in a fallen world. Sorry, when sin entered the world, it brought death and disease, and it just devastated all of creation.

And so it was the presence of sin in the world that led to things like this. And Jesus was moved with compassion. This is not the only time we see this in the Gospels.

I mean, the shortest verse in the Bible is Jesus wept. Jesus wept because Lazarus died. And even knowing that he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, he had compassion and he wept over Lazarus’ death.

even knowing he’s about to heal this man, he sighs deep within himself because of the compassion that he felt for the man. It wasn’t just compassion that Jesus demonstrated on this particular day. He demonstrated his power also.

And one of the ways that he demonstrated his power, probably the most obvious way that he demonstrated his power was by healing the man. Verses 34 and 35 tell us, Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephphathah, that is, be opened. And immediately his ears were opened, and the impediment of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke plainly.

So Jesus healed the man just by commanding him to be healed. It wasn’t the fingers and the ears that healed him, although he could have healed him that way if he wanted to. It wasn’t the spitting that healed him, although he could have done that.

It wasn’t the touching of the mouth. It wasn’t the gesture toward heaven. it wasn’t any of that that healed him.

It was the command to be healed. Jesus said it. And that’s all it took.

This is only possible because of Jesus’s supernatural power. This is not a normal way that things work in nature. Because we have people around us that are sick or facing injuries and surgeries all the time.

And if it was just the normal course of nature that we could say, hey, you’re COVID free. And they were. We would have done that by now, right?

Hey, you don’t need back surgery anymore. You’re good. You and I can’t do that.

That’s not how things work. So for Jesus to say, be opened, and suddenly his mouth was open and his ears were open, that’s something only the power of God can do. Which is fitting because Jesus told the man that it was the power of God that was going to heal him by the way he was gesturing.

He said, be opened. And even his illness, even his disability, had to obey the words of Jesus. And by the way, just as a brief little aside here, it says that he said, Ephathah, and that means be open.

There are a few places like this in Mark and some in the other Gospels. This is not Hebrew, this is Aramaic. Most of Mark, most of the Gospels are written in Greek, but sometimes they will quote Jesus directly in Aramaic, which is the language that he spoke.

It’s related to Hebrew, but I guess it’s a dialect of Hebrew. Now the reason why this is important, it really has not a lot to do with the message, but I think it’s important for you to know this if you don’t already. We see these fragments of Aramaic in the Gospels, particularly Mark.

Aramaic, unlike Greek, is not a language that everybody spoke all throughout the Roman Empire in the first century or the second century. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it was even as well known as Hebrew. Because you had people in other parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean area that would learn Hebrew because either they were Jewish or they had an interest in the Jewish scriptures.

You pretty much only spoke Aramaic if you were from that area. So the reason why it’s important that we see fragments of Aramaic in the Gospels and in Mark in particular is because that’s really hard to explain for people who say that the Gospels are forgeries made up by somebody centuries later. Oh, it was written by somebody in some part of the Roman Empire in like the 200s.

It was made up. Just happened to be somebody that knew Aramaic? I’ll buy that.

Not really, that’s sarcasm. These traces of Aramaic like Ephathah, they don’t prove that they were written by Mark, but they make it harder to make the case that somebody besides Mark or somebody besides somebody that walked with Jesus, They make it harder to make the case that it was a later forgery. I just thought you might be.

. . I don’t know if anybody else in here is as interested in that as I am, but I think that kind of.

. . There’s all these breadcrumbs through the Gospels that point to their authenticity.

But that was the word Jesus used when he said, Be open. And even the man’s disability had to obey and respond. And then Jesus demonstrated his power another way.

Not just by healing, but by showing too that particular circumstances and methods are not what heal us. This was a problem, well, not was, it is a problem that people have always had. We get, when God does something, we get attached to the method by which He does it almost more than we get attached to Him.

I think that’s why God did so many miracles by so many different means. I think that’s part of the reason why God told Moses to hit the rock for water the first time and told him to speak to the rock the second time. Because his faith wasn’t supposed to be in hitting the rock.

Hitting the rock doesn’t get you water. Faith in God gets you the water. Trusting God to do a miracle that only God can do gets you the water.

Same thing here. They came to him, and what did they ask Jesus to do? The people that brought the deaf man to Jesus, what did they ask him to do?

Well, they asked him to heal him, but what did they say? Put your hands on him. Because that’s how he did a lot of the healings, isn’t it?

But you don’t want to get to the point where you think, oh, it’s the laying on of hands that heals. Or it would be like after the woman with the issue of blood had touched Jesus’ garment, the hem of his garment. If everybody started coming up and saying, well, I need to touch the hem of the garment too.

Well, he’s not wearing it. It’s what he wore yesterday. Well, I’ll touch it anyway.

You’re starting to put your faith in the hem of the garment instead of Jesus. And so I think there are times that Jesus just switched things up because you look at these miracles, and if He’s doing them all just a little bit differently, the only commonality among them is Jesus. The only object or method or process that is involved here, the only thing that all of these miracles have in common is Jesus.

And so we don’t get the opportunity to put our trust in, well, if I just do this ritual, then I can access the power of God. If I just say these magic words, if I just do this combination of events, then I can get what I want from the Lord. No, when the only common theme, when the only commonality among all of this is Jesus, we have to realize that He is where we’re supposed to put our trust. Not the ritual, not the words, not the action, but in Jesus.

Their healing didn’t come from a particular circumstance. Their physical healing did not come from a particular circumstance. Their healing came from Jesus Christ. And that has a direct relation to our world today in spiritual matters.

Because so many times we are tempted to put our faith in all these things that surround Jesus. We’re tempted to put our faith in things like baptism, church attendance, the Lord’s Supper, giving, you name it. All of these things that sort of surround Jesus, and they’re not bad things, they’re important things, but we tend to put our trust in these practices and these rituals, or even objects, things that we can see and experience, when really the only commonality, the only power in any of it is Jesus.

And even when we come to Him for spiritual healing, like the healing from the consequences of sin, from the condemnation of sin, I should say, Our hope is not in anything else, not even good things that surround Jesus. It’s in Jesus. The power is in Jesus.

I had a conversation with Preston Condra this week who came and spoke to us a few months ago. Because I said, I needed to talk to him and said, walk me through something with evangelism. I said, because I’ve been sharing the gospel for years, I can explain the gospel I feel like every which way.

But there’s something in me because of my upbringing or whatever where I feel like, well, you’ve got to do something at the end so there’s some kind of confirmation. And I know in my mind, no words, no prayer are going to save anybody. No ritual, and I tell you this from time to time, there are no magic words that are going to save you.

Walking the aisle does not save you. There’s nothing mystical about this area in time and space that makes it possible only here for you to trust Christ and be saved. I said, yet I find myself still after all these years talking to somebody about the gospel.

I said, I try very hard not to lead somebody in the sinner’s prayer. Not that it’s evil, but I’ve seen a lot of people walk away with false assurance because they said a prayer and they thought that was enough. So I try to avoid that.

And yet you still want them to pray something and confirm something just to close the deal. Not to sound like it’s a sales pitch, but it’s got to be something. And we walk through some scriptures and he’s telling me, it says believe. He said, you want to stay there and talk to them and answer their questions as long as you need to.

But don’t feel like you’ve got to put your faith and trust in a prayer or them signing a card or doing anything. Jesus said they’ve got to believe. The Apostle Paul said they’ve got to believe.

And I know, I know, and hopefully you know as well. If we were asked, do you have to pray a prayer and say certain words in order to be saved? Hopefully we would all answer no. and yet in our minds even I have taught evangelism training and even in my mind there’s still this attachment to what surrounds Jesus and again there’s nothing wrong with praying a prayer it’s the feeling that we’ve got to even knowing it doesn’t add anything to our salvation that and I’m not calling anybody out on their evangelism practices I’m giving you an example from my life how easy it is to get attached to the things that surround Jesus that even the things that the gospel and without thinking about it, put more trust in those things than we should instead of trusting Jesus.

The power is not in the prayer. The power is not in in kneeling in in front of the stage here. The power is not it.

The power is with Jesus. Just like the power wasn’t in the touch, it wasn’t in the hem of the garment. The power was with Jesus.

And if we’re putting our trust in anything else, whether it’s for salvation, whether it’s for our sanctification, whether it’s for our walk with God, whether it’s just getting through daily life, if we’re putting our trust in anything other than Jesus, we’re missing where the power of God truly is. It’s with God the Son who became flesh and dwelt among us.