Grace,
mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (Mark
7:31-37)
And looking
up to heaven, [Jesus] sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be
opened.”
Prayer: Lord God, our heavenly Father, send us all the Holy Spirit so that I may preach well and we all may hear well, in the name of your dear Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Sometimes you can get a bible which has all the words of Jesus in it written in red. This can be very useful, but we also need to remember that all the words in black are also the eyewitness account of the apostles whom Jesus sent to preach to all nations. On the day of Pentecost, we read that all the newly baptised converts devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. Jesus said to his apostles: He who hears you hears me. St Paul also says that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. So we need to remember all the black writing is just as much the word of God as the red writing.
But there is something special about the particular words of Jesus that the apostles and the evangelists record. In our Gospel reading today, there is only one word that is written in red, only one word spoken by Jesus: Ephphatha. This is a word in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke and learnt from his mother and father. And the word Ephphatha means: be opened.
In our Gospel reading today, we learn first of all about a man who is both deaf and mute. He is unable to hear. He was unable to hear his own mother and father speaking to him as a child, and so was unable to learn how to speak. Isn’t it wonderful, then, that in our Gospel reading today, St Mark lets us in on Jesus’ mother tongue, and writes out the word as this deaf and mute man would have heard it?
It’s strange that the whole New Testament is not written in the language that Jesus spoke. Only every now and then we hear a little snippet of Jesus speaking in Aramaic. You might remember especially how Jesus said on the cross: Eloi eloi, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? We might ask the question: Why wasn’t the whole New Testament written in Aramaic? The New Testament was actually written in Greek, the language of the Roman Empire, not the language that Jesus learnt from Mary and Joseph.
When Jesus rose from the dead, he said: Go and make disciples of all nations. Go and preach the Gospel to the whole creation. If the St Mark, and the apostles and evangelists had written in Aramaic, the only people who would have been able to read it would have been the Jews who lived in the area of Palestine and nearby. But the Gospel was going to have a much wider audience. It was going to go to all nations. At the time of Jesus, the whole of Judea was under occupation by the Romans. Pontius Pilate was a Roman, and he was in charge of the area at that time: he was the man who sentenced Jesus to death. We mention this Roman man every Sunday, and if you say the creed every day, then every day, when we say that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate. The Gospel was to be preached not just to Jews, but to people like Pontius Pilate, to other nations, to foreigners. At the time of the New Testament, the most common language was Greek. And so the apostles and evangelists wrote what they did in Greek. The only way we know about a Jewish family with a Jewish boy, Jesus, is from a Greek text, not an Aramaic one, not a Hebrew one. This is because the Gospel was to go out to everyone, and so they wrote it in a language that the most number of people could understand.
On the day of Pentecost, there were all sorts of people who heard the apostles speaking in their own native language. Eventually, the Gospel would be preached in the English language, and even come to a country like Australia that St Mark and St Paul and St Peter and all the apostles never knew even existed. What a miracle it is that we are even part of that same church today that has been moving into the darkest corners of the earth right from its very beginning!
And today, we even get to hear Jesus speak in his own native language. He says: Ephphatha. Be opened.
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Now, the obvious thing we learn from this text today is about a man who is healed of his deafness and inability to speak. But I would like to focus today particularly on the way in which we are healed spiritually of our spiritual deafness and our spiritual muteness. And this is especially relevant as we baptise some children at Traralgon today.
When it comes to the faith, every single person who has ever lived, except Jesus himself, is deaf to God’s word and we are completely unable to speak God’s word. We have a spiritual deafness—we can’t hear the Gospel. We are deaf to it. It makes absolutely no sense to us. We also have a spiritual muteness—we can’t speak the word of God. We can’t pray. Prayer is completely unnatural to us.
Jesus says: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
Everyone who is born of a mother and father, who is a member of the human race cannot see God’s kingdom or even enter it, unless God gives birth to that person all over again.
Some people think that being born again is a feeling that they get. They think that one day they feel the Holy Spirit come upon them, and they have a wonderful religious experience and then they are born again. They say: I have decided to follow Jesus, and there’s no turning back, and now I’m born again. That’s not what being born again means.
Being born again has nothing to do with your feelings, your experiences, your decisions for Jesus. We have good feelings, good experiences and we make resolutions to be better Christians and follow Jesus all the time! How do you know which was the one where you were actually “born again”? Maybe you’ll have a better religious experience later! Does this mean that the earlier experience wasn’t the real one? People who put their trust in their religious feelings, experiences, and decisions get caught up in all sorts of traps and bad conscience. When the devil wants to get you when your sad and lonely and depressed, he’ll kick over your feelings, experiences and decisions over one by one, and he won’t spare the expense or the shame!
No…. being born again means that God himself will give you a new birth. And he does this by water and the Spirit in holy baptism. Holy Baptism is where we are born again. And in the bible, to be born again means nothing except to be baptised.
When a mother gives birth, she gives birth with lots of tears, lots of pain, lots of blood. But when we are born again into the kingdom of God, when we are born again by water and the Spirit, it’s easy for the mum. It’s easy for a mother to bring her child to the church. The pain and the labour and suffering is done by Jesus – he’s the one who does all the hard work in our new birth, and gives us his death and his resurrection to us when he comes and pours water over us and speaks his words to us: I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. All the work belongs to Jesus.
But Jesus doesn’t baptise us in silence. He uses two ingredients to baptise us: he uses water and he uses his word. The word of God in this water, and used together with this water, is what creates faith in us.
In our Gospel reading today, let’s look at the different things that Jesus does. We read: Taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed.
Do you see all the different gestures? Jesus uses his fingers, his mouth, his hands his eyes, his lungs, his heart. He uses his fingers and puts them into his ears. He uses his mouth and spits. He uses his hands and touches his tongue. He uses his eyes and looks up to heaven. He uses his lungs and sighs from the depths of his heart.
In Baptism, we also have many gestures and actions. The pastor puts his hands on the children to bless them. He uses his finger to make a sign of the cross. He uses water to wash the child on the head.
But what Jesus does in our reading, and what we do in the church, is not done in silence. It is connected to a word. And this word is spoken into our ears and through this word the Holy Spirit creates a living faith in us.
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus says: Ephphatha. Be opened.
This man is closed. He needs to be opened.
We too are closed. St Paul says: You were dead in your trespasses. Not hard of hearing, not a little bit deaf, but dead. There’s no one in this world who’s more deaf that a corpse!
When Jesus comes and speaks his word to us, and sends his Holy Spirit to us so that we believe it, he comes to give life to dead bodies. It’s like the valley of the dry bones in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. God says to the prophet: Son of man, can these bones live? And Ezekiel says: O Lord, you know.
Well, Jesus has promised to make us live. He knows. He speaks a word which is true, loving and powerful. It is a powerful word, so that a living fear of him is created in us. It is a loving word, so that that same love for him is also created in us. It is a true word, so that a living trust in him can be created in us. And so it is the Holy Spirit who opens our ears so that we can hear this word and speak it, and fear, love and trust in our Lord Jesus Christ above all things.
Sometimes we try very hard to convince people to believe the gospel. And many times people don’t listen and they don’t want to listen. Sometimes the people who don’t listen the most are people who call themselves Christians. They want to be like the Pharisee who goes into the temple and wants to be better than the tax collector. No—a person who despises other people, a Pharisee who despises tax-collectors is not a Christian yet. They have not heard the forgiveness of sins. They are still dead in their sins.
No—what we need is for Jesus to come and speak his word to us. Jesus needs to come and speak the word: Ephphatha, be opened, to us, and raise us from the dead. A person who doesn’t know their sin thinks they are alive but is actually dead. But it is the Holy Spirit who makes us aware of our sin, and it is the Holy Spirit who creates the faith in the forgiveness of sins in us, given to us through the water of baptism, so that we believe in it, trust in it, and be saved.
Being saved does not mean that we look down on other people who are saved. The forgiveness of sins is only given to sinners. There are people who believe they are forgiven, but don’t believe that they are sinners. There are people who believe they are sinners, but don’t believe that Jesus died for them and forgives them. Both of these people are not Christians yet.
But the knowledge of our sin and the sure promise of our forgiveness is given to us, purely through the working of the Holy Spirit, who takes the words of Jesus and opens us up to hear these words. Ephphatha. Be opened.
And when our ears are opened to God’s word, then we can listen to our heavenly Father, and learn to speak once again, and learn to speak to him. We have to hear and learn the language of the Scripture one word at a time, before we can mumble our prayers back to him. Prayer always starts with baby talk. And all our prayers are helped along and strengthened by our older brother Jesus who translates our baby-talk prayers to the Father for us! “What this little baby is trying to say is that he wants this!”
And so let’s also be opened up again, afresh, anew, by Jesus through his word. Let Jesus speak his powerful word to you: Ephphatha. Be opened. Open our ears, Lord Jesus! Open our mouths, Lord Jesus!
Amen.
Lord, open Thou my heart to hear,
And by Thy word to me draw near;
Let me Thy Word still pure retain,
Let me Thy child and heir remain. Amen.
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