A glorious ministry to the hard-of-hearing

Sermon for Trinity 12

2 Corinthians 3:4-11  +  Mark 7:31-37

If someone were to ask you later today what you did this morning, you would probably tell them that you “attended church.” That’s certainly true. Another way of saying it would be—as we Lutherans sometimes say— “I attended the Divine Service,” that is, “the service of God.” That gets closer to the heart of the matter, to the reason why we gather together on Sunday. We mean it in two ways: We gather “in service to God” in the sense of giving Him our worship, giving His Word our attention, and declaring His praises. But we also mean it the other way around: We gather to receive the “service of God,” the “ministry” of the Word and of the Sacraments, or as St. Paul calls it in today’s Epistle, the “ministry of the New Testament.”

The Apostle Paul praises his “New Testament” ministry in today’s Epistle to the Corinthians. He doesn’t praise himself, but the ministry he was given to carry out. Why? Because it was so much better than the Old Testament ministry that God had given to the people of Israel. The focus of the Old Testament ministry was on the Law as Moses first proclaimed it from Mount Sinai and as the priests continually carried out its demands in the ministry of the temple, while the focus of the New Testament ministry is on the Gospel, as Jesus and His ministers have been proclaiming it ever since He instituted the New Testament in His blood on Maundy Thursday. Unlike the Old Testament ministry, whose main purpose was to keep showing people their sins until Christ came, the New Testament ministry’s main purpose is to preach Christ, who is our righteousness before God and the One who paid for our sins by His death on the cross. Unlike the Old Testament ministry, whose message was mainly condemnation for all who disobey, the New Testament ministry’s message is mainly justification—the forgiveness of sins—for all who believe. Unlike the Old Testament ministry, which was destined to pass away, the New Testament ministry remains forever, until Christ returns. The Old Testament ministry was glorious, because it was instituted by God and glorified by God, and it fulfilled God’s purpose. But for the reasons just mentioned, the New Testament ministry is far more glorious.

But the ministry of the New Testament, like the ministry of the Old, is carried out largely through preaching—oral, verbal, audible preaching. As Jesus said in the very same chapter from which today’s Gospel was taken, Mark 7, If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear! So it is a great disadvantage to be unable to hear. Not an insurmountable disadvantage, but a disadvantage all the same. Our Gospel tells us about a man who couldn’t hear when he was first brought to Jesus, but after he received Jesus’ “ministry,” he went away hearing and speaking. As we’ll see, it’s not only the physical inability to hear or speak that is the problem. There are other ways of being hearing-impaired and speech-impaired—worse ways, in fact. So if anyone has ears to hear, let him hear and receive today Christ’s glorious ministry for the hard of hearing.

The deaf man in our Gospel didn’t come to Jesus on his own. He had virtually no way of knowing Jesus. But he had faithful friends with working ears who had heard enough about Jesus to know that He was kind and good and merciful and able to cure disease and work miracles. So they brought their friend to Jesus and pleaded on his behalf, imploring Jesus to “place His hands on the deaf man.”

Sometimes Jesus healed people with just a word. But not this time. Instead, He wanted to minister to the deaf man first, to “preach” to Him with an elaborate set of motions and gestures, a form of sign-language, in order to teach the man some things that are even more important than the miracle of physical healing.

First, He took him aside from the crowd by himself. What does that communicate? No matter how busy Jesus is, no matter how many “important” people are crowding around Him, vying for His attention, He is happy to take time for a complete stranger who has come to Him for help. Not that anyone is really a “stranger” to Jesus. He already knows everything about everyone.

Next, He put his fingers into his ears. “I know these ears don’t work. But these fingers of God are powerful to open your ears.” And remember that the Holy Spirit is sometimes referred to in Scripture as “the finger of God.” Just as the fingers of Jesus will open deaf ears, so the Spirit of God, who works through the Word of God when it is preached and heard and pondered, enters through the ears and converts the heart.

Then He spit and touched the man’s tongue. We can’t tell from the text where Jesus spit, but it seems likely He spit on His own hand and then touched the man’s tongue. In any case, it certainly flies in the face of all the COVID-safe practices that are trumpeted in our society. Didn’t Jesus know how diseases are spread? Didn’t He know He was endangering that man, or in danger from that man, or giving us all a bad example? Of course, all that is foolishness and modern man’s arrogance. We’re so smart we know how diseases are spread. We’re so smart, we know how to prevent the spread of disease. We’re so smart, we know that preventing the spread of disease is the most important goal of human interaction. Again, foolishness. Jesus was teaching that man, and us, that He is entirely unconcerned with how “gross” human interaction may appear. He came to this earth to deal with us personally, closely, individually. He took on human flesh, with all of its secretions and fleshly vulnerabilities, in order to minister to us in person. Here He shows especially that healing comes from His mouth, from His body, just as His blood shed on the cross heals us from sin and fixes the tongues that are so slow to confess Him before men, that are impeded from declaring His praises.

Then He looked up to heaven and sighed. A sign that Jesus is now praying to His Father, the fount and source of all goodness. “I, Jesus, am right now interceding on your behalf. I, Jesus, am the Mediator between God and men.” We can put Jesus’ own words to this gesture if we look at what He said in John 11 as He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead: Jesus lifted up His eyes and said, “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. And I know that You always hear Me, but because of the people who are standing by I said this, that they may believe that You sent Me.”

Finally, He said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened!” Immediately the man was healed, both his ears and his tongue, healed through the Word of Jesus, through the ministry of Jesus, a ministry that focuses on God’s service to man rather than on man’s service to God. As Jesus once said, the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.

Now, as I said at the beginning, physical deafness isn’t the only thing that makes people hard of hearing. There are ear plugs out there that keep God’s Word out, and there are lots of noises out there, too, that drown out God’s Word, making people unable to hear it and, therefore, also unable to confess Him with the mouth. Self-righteousness makes one deaf to God’s Word, as we saw last week in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Why pay attention to God’s ministry of reconciliation if I’m pretty sure that I’m good enough on my own? Related to self-righteousness is self-sufficiency. What need do I have of receiving the ministry of God’s Word if I already think I have enough to live a good life on earth? The world’s deceitfulness also makes people turn off their ears to God’s truth. “Religion,” they say, “is for the weak and the weak-minded. It isn’t scientific. It isn’t real.” Then there are all the troubles of the world that distract us and keep us focused on all the bad things going on around us, so that we tune out the Word of God and the comforting ministry of the Gospel. The world’s concerns. The devil’s lies. The flesh’s laziness. All these things keep unbelievers from hearing the Word of God and threaten the hearing of believers as well. And when we’re slow to hear God’s Word, we also become slow to speak of Christ, as there are so many earthly things to dwell on and to complain about.

But Jesus has left a ministry in the world to treat all these forms of deafness, a glorious ministry of preaching and teaching and administering the Sacraments—glorious, not because it’s so outwardly attractive, but because it accomplishes glorious things, like bringing the dead to life. So Christians, like the deaf man’s friends in the Gospel, invite and urge their friends and neighbors and acquaintances to come to the New Testament ministry, to the Divine Service, to church. It’s a great act of love. And if you’re going to bring someone to church, with the hope and prayer that Jesus will open their ears to His Gospel, then we ought always to make sure that what they see and hear in our service is all centered on the Gospel. The last thing you want is to bring a friend to church and have the Word of Jesus drowned out by earthly things, or by false things. No, we want Jesus to communicate His Gospel through the things people see when they come to the Divine Service: the pulpit where the Word of the living Christ will be proclaimed, the baptismal font that reminds us how God first brings people into His family and gives them new birth and new life, the crucifix that reminds us of the sacrifice that made atonement for the world’s sins, the altar from where the body and blood of Christ will be distributed for the forgiveness of sins, even the Christians themselves who have gathered in faith and who are paying attention and singing and praying and earnestly participating in worship. All these visual aids, together with our liturgy, our hymns, our music—it’s all part of the glorious New Testament ministry, designed to get our attention away from ourselves, away from how we feel, away from earthly concerns, to point us to Christ and the gifts He holds out to us here, even the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear the Gospel and believe!

And believing, also speak, with tongues that have been loosed by the power of Christ. And don’t just speak about earthly things that are all passing away. Don’t just speak about COVID, or about work or school or the weather. Don’t just speak about right behavior or about the right political view. As one of the speakers at the RNC rightly said this week in speaking against abortion, “I’m not just pro-life. I’m pro-eternal life.” Take a lesson from that. With ears that have been opened and tongues that have been loosed by Christ and by His Holy Spirit, speak of better things, lasting things, things that point people to the glorious ministry of the New Testament, things that point people to Christ. Amen.