The ears and tongue always go together. After all, they’re both the organs of language. If the ears don’t work, especially when you’re young and learning a language, then the tongue doesn’t work so well either. When you’re older, if the small bones inside your ear start to become stiff, no longer moving the sound vibrations from your eardrum, you begin to lose your hearing, and you speak too loudly. If you were born deaf, then you learn to speak by watching lips. Then your words come out slurred because you can’t hear what they sound like. Without words properly going into the ears, they will not properly come out of the mouth.
God gave us ears, two of them. With our ears, we do more than enjoy the sound of chirping birds and impassioned music. Through our ears, we also gladly hear and learn God’s Word, as Luther teaches us in the Small Catechism. Words are significant. As the Apostle Paul said, “Faith comes by hearing” (Romans 10:17). Hearing the Word has been the normative way that God’s people have received the Word throughout the centuries. Each person having his own Bible is a recent event in the life of God’s people.
God also gave us tongues to speak what our ears have heard. That’s how we pray, praise, and give thanks–as the Small Catechism also teaches us to do. We proclaim the goodness of God shown to us in Jesus, made personal and real by the Holy Spirit as He works in the Word and Sacraments.
Yet, we know the tongue is also a powerful muscle, for good and evil. It’s small. But it’s not small in its effects. It’s like the rudder of a ship. And we’ve all experienced our lack of control when it comes to using our tongues. At times, we’ve all said what we wish we hadn’t said. And once words leave our lips, they cannot be unsaid.
In today’s Gospel reading, we find Jesus healing a man who is deaf and mute. He can’t hear. And because of that, he never learned to speak.
But, right now, let’s do a quick review of the healing miracles in Mark’s Gospel up to today’s healing. Jesus drives out an unclean spirit from a man in the synagogue. He heals Peter’s mother-in-law of the flu, and then a whole crowd with all sorts of demons and diseases. He heals a man of leprosy. He raises a paralyzed man. For one man, He casts out a legion of demons. Jesus heals a woman who had suffered blood loss for 12 years and raises a 12-year-old girl from the dead. Then, He casts out a demon from a woman’s daughter.
There was demonic commotion, but healing, as well. And Jesus shows us that He deals with disease and death in the same way He deals with the demons–with His Word. And the result is never in doubt. When Jesus opens His mouth to speak, the wind, the waves, the devils and demons, even the germs and viruses obey, for Jesus is also the Creator of the world.
All of this gives us a picture of our real condition. Like the demon-possessed and diseased whom Jesus met, we are powerless and in need of His Word. After all, we are natural-born sinners, a disease we’ve inherited from our first parent, Adam. The leprosy of sin has made us unclean. Sin and death have paralyzed us, and we can’t pick ourselves up or make ourselves walk. Spiritually, we were all born as still births, spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins.
With the demon-possessed, it’s just more obvious. And like them, unless the Lord opens our ears, we won’t hear a syllable of His Word. Unless the Lord opens our lips, we will voice many words, but not in true, faith-based praise to the one, true God.
When Jesus heals the sick, raises the dead, or casts out demons, He is asserting His divine, messianic authority. When He walks on water, He’s treading on the back of the leviathan, the great sea serpent, that beast of evil (Isaiah 27:1). Even when He walks on the waves, Jesus is trampling down Death by death. For all that He does is connected to His death and resurrection. And so with a word and touch, Jesus takes over and gives the devil his due.
Whether He’s healing a sick woman or casting out a legion of demons, the point is the same. Jesus is Lord of all. He crushes the powers of darkness and death under the weight of His own death on the cross. He raises up a new creation, unshackled from the chains of sin and death in His resurrection.
So, they brought the deaf-mute to Jesus, and his friends proposed their plan. They wanted Jesus to lay His hand on their friend. We’re always doing that, aren’t we? We not only tell Jesus what to do but tell Him how, when, and even where to do it. “O Lord, please heal me today, so I don’t have to go to the doctor tomorrow.” “O Lord, please put your hand on his head, so he’ll be healed.” Name it and claim it. That’s way different than praying in Jesus’ name, which recognizes and asks that His will be done, even if it’s not what you want.
But Jesus heals as He chooses in His own way. He works when, where, and how He pleases. That’s why, even though we pray, we still go to the doctor. Even the Old-Testament Apocrypha book of Sirach tells us, “Honor the doctor according to your need of him” and even, “The Lord created medicines from the earth and a sensible man will not ignore them” (Sirach 38:1, 4).
So, what does Jesus do? He moves the man away from the crowd and visits with him in private. He doesn’t make a circus out of this man’s misfortune, like some of the hucksters and televangelists have done on TV. And what does Jesus do? What He doesn’t do is lay his hand on the man as they had asked Him. Instead, Jesus puts His fingers in the man’s ears and spits and grabs hold of the man’s tongue. What was Jesus doing? He was doing what the exorcists did in His day. Jesus treated this healing like an exorcism. And as with the demons, He spoke a single word of command: Ephphatha! “Be opened.”
Jesus’ words say what they do, and they do what they say. He says, “Let there be light,” and there it is. He says, “Be still,” and the storm is stilled. He says, “Be opened,” and deaf ears hear, the man’s tongue is unchained, and he speaks clearly. And the prophetic words of Isaiah ring in our ears: “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then those who are lame will leap like deer, and the tongue of the mute will sing for joy” (Isaiah 35:5-6). Ephphatha! Be opened.
Jesus gives us a sneak peak, a preview, of what God has in store for us. It’s nothing short of a new creation. He will give us new ears and new tongues. Now, in faith, we can gladly hear God’s Word. Now, in faith, we can speak, chant, and sing our prayers, praise, and thanksgiving. And this time is already here, now, for you, in Jesus.
Now, I imagine that many hard-of-hearing people lived in Israel, just like today. And there were also plenty of people who had speech problems. But Jesus only stuck His fingers into those two ears and grabbed hold of that one tongue.
And then afterward, Jesus didn’t want anyone to tell what had happened. Imagine that! He loosens the man’s tongue, and then says, “Tell no one.” What’s going on? Jesus didn’t want others to see Him as the wonder-working miracle man. For He didn’t come to create a temporary fix for our problems, like duct tape on a leaking air vent. He came to deal with the underlying cause of all our problems: Sin, death, and the devil, and the Law that kills us.
What Jesus did for one man that day in the Decapolis, He did for all of us on another day in another place–one Good Friday on the Hill of the Skull. In His dying, Jesus takes up our deafness, our muteness, and our imprisonment in death. He takes into Himself our disease of sin. And deaf and mute, in the silence of His death, He conquers the enemy.
Your baptism is Jesus’ personal Ephphatha to you. Some of the Church’s early baptismal liturgies had the pastor stick his fingers in the ears and put salt on the tongue of the one being baptized. And while that may strike you as strange, that ritual points us to something real. It shows that, in baptism, God opens our ears to hear His Word, which works faith in the heart and brings confession to the lips. Jesus has spoken to break the spiritual deafness we inherited from Adam. He speaks to make everything right. And so you are right again in Him. Your Baptism tells you so.
But there’s more. With Jesus, there is always more. The same Word that opened the ears of the deaf, that freed the tongue of the speechless, that forgives sinners their sin, will also raise the dead on the Last Day. Then, you will see what you must now believe in faith. Then, every eye will see, and every ear will hear, and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
They said, referring to Jesus: “He does everything well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” And we might say, “Wait! There’s even more!” For by His Word, Jesus also declares and makes you, a poor, miserable sinner, right with God. Through the Spirit’s work in the water and the Word, Jesus has baptized you into His death and life. He feeds you with His own body and blood. He will raise you to eternal life. And, oh yes, He does everything well. And so His salvation for you is also real and right. Jesus wouldn’t have it any other way. Amen.
