Trinity 12, 2024
Twelfth Sunday after Trinity: St. Mark 7:31-37
August 18, 2024
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“He has done all things well.” With these words the crowd hails the Christ. They marvel at the miracle.
“He has done all things well.” Easy words to say when things are going well. But things aren’t always going well.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer – the Lutheran pastor who resisted the National Socialists and was eventually murdered by them – he ran an underground seminary because the socialists had infiltrated the national church. His annual report at the end of 1936 opens with the closing words of today’s Gospel: “He has done all things well.” He then says those must be the words on their lips in days of anxiety and torment.
How easy, when the socialists take power and wreak their havoc on church and world, economies ruined and millions slaughtered – how easy to succumb to bitterness! How easy to lose all gratitude!
Yet still he confesses, “He has done all things well.” Then he moves to consideration of his own sin. He reflects on his own failings as a “frightening thorn”:
My neglect in ministry, my unfaithfulness in service to the congregation, my ingratitude, my anger, my lethargy in prayer, my entire recalcitrant, despondent, gloomy heart—what will become of it? The evil fruit of my sin continues its activity without end. How am I to put an end to it? [Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 14, p276]
He had his sins, and you have yours. I have mine. I say with St. Paul, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” [Rom. 7.24]. And here is Bonhoeffer’s insight into how Jesus gives the answer to that question, hidden in the words of the crowd: “HE has done all things well.” Not me—HE. When things go well for us, praise God. And when things are a disaster, with my own sins crumbling down on top of me, and the sin of the world breaking in and causing me anguish, we turn with our bitter resentment to the One who does all things well.
Most of us are worse off than the deaf mute presented to Jesus today. For our ears work, but we listen to the wrong voices. Our mouths work, but with them we slander, and curse, and grumble. We tell lies, and present ourselves, with our words, in a deceptive way.
Here’s how the Venerable Bede—the great scholar and historian of the early medieval era—puts it: “He is deaf and dumb, who neither has ears to hear the words of God, nor opens his mouth to speak them, and such must be presented to the Lord for healing, by men who have already learned to hear and speak the divine oracles” [Aquinas, Catena, vol. 2, p145]. In other words, the true deafness is to pay no heed to God’s Word; and the true impediment to speech is to say words not shaped by God’s Words.
What happens in today’s Gospel is not written for us to marvel at the power of Jesus. We would just need a little walking on water or turning that water into wine to get the point soon enough.
No, today we learn about who we are: corrupt, unproductive, in need of healing. And we learn who Jesus is: the God who takes our human nature into Himself in order to restore it, heal it, set it back on its path to communion with God and mending our fractured world.
It starts by Jesus taking the man aside. Why? He does this for two reasons: He doesn’t seek to put on a show, make a spectacle, and so gain praise for Himself. The other reason is that this is a man who gets ignored. He’s a nuisance. He can’t produce useful things for society. To most people, he doesn’t matter. But Jesus has singular focus on such. He stops and cares for the little, the least, the lowly.
The Architect of this man’s body comes to what He made and sees it damaged. He groans and sighs. He grieves the man’s condition.
He sticks His fingers in the man’s ears. He remembers how He fashioned those ears, so long ago, in the first man. He made them to hear the rush of the waters, the symphony of the birds, and rejoice at the Words of his Maker. He is hurt by their ruin.
He spits, and puts His own spittle on the man’s tongue. We think of applying spittle as repulsive, but in this culture it would not have been so. Coming from a physician, it was therapeutic. You dads and moms have probably touched your tongue, then wiped a smudge from your child’s face. This is that, but more. The Lord Jesus is joining Himself to this man, entering His plight, sharing His living human nature with this man’s dying human nature. He spits, touches the man’s tongue. As He does so, the Lord Jesus remembers how He made this tongue, a tongue for the first man to sing, and laugh, to speak words of truth and nobility. He touches the tongue and finds it bound in a prison. The man is likewise bound, unable to articulate his thoughts, his feelings, his frustrations, his faith.
And in these actions, fingers in ears, spittle on tongue, Jesus is telling the man, “I am here to help you.”
He speaks to the man, in Aramaic: Ephphatha! “Be opened,” the GodMan says. The Word penetrates deaf ears, and they hear! The Word from God’s tongue looses this man’s tongue, and he speaks. He speaks plainly, or better, “correctly.” In Greek, ὀρθῶς. It means “rightly” or “straight.” The orthopedist makes your bones right, and the orthodontist straightens out your teeth. The Lord Jesus, is the Orthoanthropist - He has come to make right what is crooked and corrupt. God becomes man to heal humanity.
You may need a speech therapist to help you correctly form words. But the speech therapy we all need is to speak in a way that pleases God. We should speak rightly about God, which is to confess our sins and confess the Creed. And how do we speak rightly about others? “We should fear and love God so that we do not tell lies about our neighbor, betray him, slander him, or hurt his reputation, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain everything in the kindest way.”
Finally, there is the hearing and speaking about our selves, our own difficult situations. Here, we take what is good in our lives and say, “He has done all things well.” And we take what is broken, corrupt, dying, and even our own sins, and say, “He has done all things well.” For He forgives sins, and the day is coming when He will take us aside, each of His baptized ones—for you matter to Him individually, and your family—and He will open your eyes blinded by death, your ears closed in death, your tongue stilled, your lungs collapsed. He will revive it all on the day of His coming. And we will laugh and sing and praise Him unto the ages of ages saying, “He has done all things well.”