The Spirit still opens ears and loosens tongues

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Sermon for Trinity 12

2 Corinthians 3:4-11  +  Mark 7:31-37

In today’s Gospel, we see Jesus healing a man’s inability to hear and to speak. We need to understand what an important miracle that was. When God wanted to bring the universe into existence, He spoke, and what He said happened. The universe didn’t have to have working ears. When God wants something to happen, He has the almighty power to speak and to make it happen, whether anyone is there to hear it or not. Here’s another example. When Jesus wanted to raise Lazarus from the dead, Lazarus didn’t need to have working ears. Jesus simply used His almighty power to make it happen. But when God wants to deal with people, to convict them of sin, to persuade them to trust in Him, to teach them, to guide them, to strengthen them, He doesn’t use His bare, almighty power. Instead, His Holy Spirit works on people’s hearts through the words that they hear. So you can see why today’s miracle was so important.

And it’s also important for us, because there is also a spiritual kind of deafness and speechlessness that affects unbelievers, but that also affects believers. God has a lesson for all kinds of deafness and speechlessness in our Scripture readings today. So he who has ears to hear, let him hear!

The deaf man in our Gospel had some friends who cared about him, who wanted him to be able to hear. So they brought him to the One who could help. They asked Him to place His hands on the man, to heal him that way. But Jesus does much more than that. He takes the man aside and communicates with him using signs, symbols, and actions that the man can receive through his working senses, in order to teach us all some key spiritual truths.

First, He puts His fingers in the man’s ears. Your ears can’t be healed from the inside, Jesus shows him. The finger of God has to enter into your ears. Faith in the heart comes by hearing the Gospel. And it’s no coincidence that Jesus elsewhere refers to the Holy Spirit as the “Finger of God,” because it’s the Holy Spirit who enters the ears through preaching to work faith in the heart.

Jesus spits and touches the man’s tongue. What does that teach us? Your bodily healing comes from the body of Jesus. So does your spiritual healing. Through His body and the word of His mouth, the man’s tongue would be healed. Through the suffering and death of Jesus’ body, and through the Word that goes out from His mouth, a sinner’s tongue is also healed, as the Spirit of Christ enters your ears through preaching and creates faith, by which He applies the bodily suffering and death of Jesus to you. He even places the body and blood of Jesus directly on your tongue in the Sacrament of the Altar, freeing your tongue now to give thanks to God, to praise God, and to confess Christ Jesus before men.

Jesus looks up to heaven and sighs. Sighing in Scripture is a symbol of the prayers we utter to God in our troubles and sorrows and sighings. Very simply, Jesus teaches the deaf man to look to God in faith in every trouble, to seek God’s mercy for the sake of Jesus, to cast all his sorrows onto the Lord, because the Lord cares for us.

And then Jesus speaks the word of healing which any lip-reading deaf person could easily discern, “Ephphatha!” Be opened! And the man’s ears were opened, and his tongue was loosed. And the people were amazed.

But here we note a problem with the ears of the people who were there. Jesus commanded them sternly not to tell anyone about this healing. They heard His command with their ears. And then they went on to ignore it, and to use their tongues to do the opposite of what Jesus commanded. Now, we may think their intentions were noble. After all, they were telling everyone how Jesus “does all things well,” which was true, and which was intended to praise Him. But this is like when King Saul offered a sacrifice to God which God expressly told him, through the prophet Samuel, not to offer. And because of his disobedience, God stripped the kingdom away from his family, teaching us that you can’t praise God by doing the opposite of what He says, no matter how good your intentions were. You praise Him by keeping His word. Period.

There are several lessons for us in this simple Gospel, in addition to the obvious one that’s present in every miracle, that Jesus has divine power, and that He is kind and good and merciful to all who seek help from Him.

First, as I already alluded to, we have here a beautiful picture of how God the Holy Spirit works on our natural spiritual deafness and speechlessness, on our natural inability to know God until He reveals Himself to us in His Word, our natural inability to believe the Word we hear, and our natural inability to call upon God in true faith, because of the sinful nature, the original sin with which we’re all born. But then the Finger of God, the Holy Spirit, enters through our ears through the Gospel. That’s why Paul, in today’s Epistle, refers to the New Testament ministry as the ministry “of the Spirit,” or the ministry that brings the Spirit. The Old Testament was written on stone tablets. It consisted in commandments and laws, and it brought condemnation and death to Old Testament Israel as the Law revealed their sins and their desperate need for a Savior. It does the same thing to us as it reveals our sins and our desperate need for a Savior. But the New Testament ministry proclaims the Gospel, that Christ suffered and died for our sins, that Christ is the propitiation for our sins, the thing that makes God the Father happy with us and that makes us acceptable to Him. The ministry that brings the Spirit proclaims faith in Christ, and then, as the Gospel enters our ears, the Spirit works the very faith that’s required for us to be reconciled to God. And then our tongues are also healed at the same time, to pray to God rightly, through faith in Christ, claiming only Christ as our Mediator and Advocate before God. Our tongues are freed to give thanks to God and to praise God and to confess Jesus Christ as Lord, as we said before. As Paul writes to the Romans, For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. All that is the work of God the Holy Spirit, the Finger of God, to open our ears and to loose our tongues.

But there is also an application here for those who already believe, for those whose ears have already been opened and whose tongues have already been loosed.

It is entirely possible for ears that have once been opened to become shut again, and for tongues that have been loosed to become tied up again. If your mouth is full of rocks, there’s no room left for nutritious food, is there? So, too, with the ears. If your ears are full of earthly things, then there’s no room for the heavenly Word of God to enter. What do you listen to all day? What fills your ears and penetrates your thoughts? The news, that sounds worse and worse every day? The complaints of those around you? The false teaching of false teachers? The “sounds” that come from your own heart? How does it affect you? It can be depressing, can’t it? To the point of obsession, even. Sometimes we fail to hear God’s Word at all, and that’s dangerous for our faith.

Or, you can have a case like we have in our Gospel, where the crowds were actually listening to the Word of Jesus, commanding them to tell no one of the miracle He had just done. But it went in one ear and out the other, didn’t it? They heard, but they didn’t process. They heard, but they didn’t obey. They seemed to have some degree of faith in Jesus. “He does all things well!”, they cried. But that faith was weak, threatened by their ongoing deafness to what He actually said, and their refusal to do what He said. That’s how destructive false doctrine takes root, because people are sometimes eager to listen, but they filter it through their own human reason or through false beliefs that are lodged in their hearts. People are sometimes eager to listen, but their itching ears crave preaching that agrees with what they already believe, that agrees with what they want to hear.

And then there’s the tongues of believers. Tongues that may still be quick to criticize, quick to complain, quick to demean, to mock, to ridicule, quick to tear down, but slow to pray, slow to praise, slow to give thanks, slow to confess Christ before the world, slow to build up your neighbor, slow to encourage, slow to defend your neighbor, slow to speak up against the wrong and for the right in this world.

So we, too, need the ongoing ministry of the Spirit, the ministry that brings the Spirit, the ministry of the Gospel. That’s why our service is filled with the Word of God. That’s why the sermon is preached. So hear with your ears! Repent and believe! And then, obey God’s commandments! Receive the body and blood of Christ in your mouth and then use your loosened tongue to call upon God through Christ, to thank, to praise, and to confess! Use your tongue to encourage one another, and to defend your neighbor! Speak up for what’s right! Speak against the wrong! And know that, in all of it, you have the powerful Spirit of God working on you and in you by His Word, and working through you as He dwells in your hearts by faith, giving you all the strength you need to believe and obey, to pray, to praise, and to confess Christ in the world. It may not seem like much to you, these simple acts of hearing and speaking. But they are the very instruments God will use to defeat the devil and to make His kingdom come. Amen.

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