Again he departed from the borders of Tyre and Sidon, and came to the sea of Galilee, through the middle of the region of Decapolis. They brought to him one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech. They begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside from the multitude, privately, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat, and touched his tongue. Looking up to heaven, he sighed, and said to him, “Ephphatha!” that is, “Be opened!” Immediately his ears were opened, and the impediment of his tongue was released, and he spoke clearly. He commanded them that they should tell no one, but the more he commanded them, so much the more widely they proclaimed it. They were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He makes even the deaf hear, and the mute speak!”
Parallel Translations
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Again he departed from the borders of Tyre and Sidon, and came to the sea of Galilee, through the middle of the region of Decapolis.
They brought to him one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech. They begged him to lay his hand on him.
He took him aside from the multitude, privately, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat, and touched his tongue.
Looking up to heaven, he sighed, and said to him, “Ephphatha!” that is, “Be opened!”
Immediately his ears were opened, and the impediment of his tongue was released, and he spoke clearly.
He commanded them that they should tell no one, but the more he commanded them, so much the more widely they proclaimed it.
They were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He makes even the deaf hear, and the mute speak!”
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And he departed agayne from the coostes of Tyre and Sidon and came vnto the see of Galile thorowe the middes of the coostos of the.x. cities.
And they brought vnto him one that was deffe and stambred in his speche and prayde him to laye his honde apon him.
And he toke him asyde from the people and put his fyngers in his eares and dyd spyt and touched his tounge
and loked vp to heven and sygthed and sayde vnto him: ephatha that is to saye be openned.
And streyght waye his eares were openned and the stringe of his tounge was loosed and he spake playne.
And he commaunded them that they shuld tell no man. But the more he forbad them soo moche the more a greate deale they publesshed it:
and were beyonde measure astonyed sayinge: He hath done all thinges well and hath made booth the deffe to heare and the dome to speake.
Show all 3 translations
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And hee departed againe from the coastes of Tyrus and Sidon, and came vnto the sea of Galile, through the middes of the coastes of Decapolis.
And they brought vnto him one that was deafe and stambered in his speache, and prayed him to put his hand vpon him.
Then hee tooke him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers in his eares, and did spit, and touched his tongue.
And looking vp to heauen, hee sighed, and said vnto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.
And straightway his eares were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and hee spake plaine.
And he commanded them, that they should tell no man: but howe much soeuer hee forbad them, the more a great deale they published it,
And were beyonde measure astonied, saying, Hee hath done all thinges well: he maketh both the deafe to heare, and the domme to speake.
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Cross-references (55)
- Mark 8:23 (v33) He took hold of the blind man by the hand, and brought him out of the village. When he had spat on his eyes, and laid his hands on him, he…
- Mark 6:51 (v37) He got into the boat with them; and the wind ceased, and they were very amazed among themselves, and marveled;
- John 11:41 (v34) So they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, “Father, I thank you that you…
- Exodus 4:10-11 (v37) Moses said to Yahweh, “O Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before now, nor since you have spoken to your servant; for I am slow of speech,…
- Matthew 8:4 (v36) Jesus said to him, “See that you tell nobody, but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony…
Show all 54 cross-references
- Mark 4:41 (v37) They were greatly afraid, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
- Mark 5:42 (v37) Immediately the girl rose up and walked, for she was twelve years old. They were amazed with great amazement.
- Mark 2:12 (vv35, 37) He arose, and immediately took up the mat, and went out in front of them all; so that they were all amazed, and glorified God, saying, “We…
- Genesis 1:31 (v37) God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. There was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.
- Mark 5:20 (v31) He went his way, and began to proclaim in Decapolis how Jesus had done great things for him, and everyone marveled.
- Mark 5:41 (v34) Taking the child by the hand, he said to her, “Talitha cumi!” which means, being interpreted, “Girl, I tell you, get up!”
- Luke 11:14 (v32) He was casting out a demon, and it was mute. When the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke; and the multitudes marveled.
- John 9:6-7 (v33) When he had said this, he spat on the ground, made mud with the saliva, anointed the blind man’s eyes with the mud, and said to him, “Go,…
- Psalms 139:14 (v37) I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. My soul knows that very well.
- Matthew 4:25 (v31) Great multitudes from Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and from beyond the Jordan followed him.
- Matthew 15:29-31 (v31) Jesus departed from there, and came near to the sea of Galilee; and he went up into the mountain, and sat there. Great multitudes came to…
- Mark 5:40 (v33) They ridiculed him. But he, having put them all out, took the father of the child, her mother, and those who were with him, and went in…
- Mark 6:41 (v34) He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he blessed and broke the loaves, and he gave to his disciples to set…
- John 11:33 (v34) When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews weeping who came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled,
- Acts 9:34 (v34) Peter said to him, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed!” Immediately he arose.
- Acts 9:40 (v34) Peter sent them all out, and knelt down and prayed. Turning to the body, he said, “Tabitha, get up!” She opened her eyes, and when she saw…
- Isaiah 35:5-6 (v35) Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Then the lame man will leap like a deer, and the…
- Mark 5:23 (v32) and begged him much, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Please come and lay your hands on her, that she may be made…
- Mark 7:24 (v31) From there he arose, and went away into the borders of Tyre and Sidon. He entered into a house, and didn’t want anyone to know it, but he…
- 1 Kings 17:19-22 (v33) He said to her, “Give me your son.” He took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into the room where he stayed, and laid him on his own…
- Matthew 9:32-33 (v32) As they went out, behold, a mute man who was demon possessed was brought to him. When the demon was cast out, the mute man spoke. The…
- Mark 1:27 (v37) They were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching? For with authority he commands even…
- Mark 3:12 (v36) He sternly warned them that they should not make him known.
- Mark 5:43 (v36) He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and commanded that something should be given to her to eat.
- Mark 8:12 (v34) He sighed deeply in his spirit, and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Most certainly I tell you, no sign will be given to this…
- Luke 23:41 (v37) And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.”
- John 11:43 (v34) When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
- Acts 14:11 (v37) When the multitude saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voice, saying in the language of Lycaonia, “The gods have come down to us…
- 2 Kings 4:33-34 (v33) He went in therefore, and shut the door on them both, and prayed to Yahweh. He went up, and lay on the child, and put his mouth on his…
- Psalms 33:9 (v35) For he spoke, and it was done. He commanded, and it stood firm.
- Isaiah 32:3-4 (v35) The eyes of those who see will not be dim, and the ears of those who hear will listen. The heart of the rash will understand knowledge, and…
- Isaiah 53:3 (v34) He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering and acquainted with disease. He was despised as one from whom men hide their face;…
- Matthew 4:18 (v31) Walking by the sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers: Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea; for…
- Matthew 11:5 (v35) the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news…
- Matthew 11:21 (v31) “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon which were done in you, they would…
- Mark 1:41 (v34) Being moved with compassion, he stretched out his hand, and touched him, and said to him, “I want to. Be made clean.”
- Mark 1:44-45 (v36) and said to him, “See you say nothing to anybody, but go show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing the things which Moses…
- Mark 8:26 (v36) He sent him away to his house, saying, “Don’t enter into the village, nor tell anyone in the village.”
- Luke 7:14 (v34) He came near and touched the coffin, and the bearers stood still. He said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!”
- Luke 18:42 (v34) Jesus said to him, “Receive your sight. Your faith has healed you.”
- John 17:1 (v34) Jesus said these things, then lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, “Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may also…
- 2 Kings 4:4-6 (v33) Go in and shut the door on you and on your sons, and pour oil into all those containers; and set aside those which are full.” So she went…
- Mark 15:34 (v34) At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why…
- John 11:35 (v34) Jesus wept.
- Acts 2:7-12 (v37) They were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, “Behold, aren’t all these who speak Galileans? How do we hear, everyone in our…
- Acts 3:10-13 (v37) They recognized him, that it was he who used to sit begging for gifts for the needy at the Beautiful Gate of the temple. They were filled…
- Luke 19:41 (v34) When he came near, he saw the city and wept over it,
- John 11:38 (v34) Jesus therefore, again groaning in himself, came to the tomb. Now it was a cave, and a stone lay against it.
- Hebrews 4:15 (v34) For we don’t have a high priest who can’t be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who has been in all points tempted like…
54 distinct cross-references across this passage (55 total citations).
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
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Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On v31 As the Father created us to this life in…
As the Father created us to this life in the beginning in his only Son, so doth he also in him alone renew us unto everlasting life.
It was a little country, and so called of ten cities, which the four governments do run between and compass, Pliny, book 3, chap. 8.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv31–37 29 And he said unto her, For this saying…
29 And he said unto her, For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter.
30 And when she was come to her house, she found the devil gone out, and her daughter laid upon the bed.
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31 And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis.
Ver. 31. Of Decapolis] A little country consisting of ten cities. See Plin. lib. iii. cap. 18.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On v31 This history is recorded by Mark only.
This history is recorded by Mark only.
And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. We heard, Mar 7:24, of his going into those coasts; some think that our Saviour did not go out of the Jewish country, though he went to
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the coasts of Tire and Sidon, which were pagan countries.
He came unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis. That Decapolis was a union of ten cities so called, is plain by the name; but what those cities were, and whether they lay on the same side of Jordan that Galilee did, or on the other side of Jordan, is disputed; most think they lay on the Galilean side.
One that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech: some think that he was dumb, but the word signifies one that spake with difficulty, so as it is likely his deafness was not natural; (for all naturally deaf, are also dumb; we learning to speak by hearing); besides that it is said after the cure, that
he spake plain: it was probably an accidental deafness happening to him after that he could speak. Their beseeching Christ to put his hand upon him, proceeded from their observation of him very often to use that rite in his healing sick persons.
And he took him aside from the multitude, not seeking his own glory and ostentation,
and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue. All these things were ex abundanti, not necessary actions, or naturally efficacious for his cure; but our Lord sometimes used no signs or rites, sometimes these, sometimes others, as it pleased him.
And looking up to heaven, he sighed, pitying the condition of human nature, subject to so many miseries, defects, and infirmities, and saith,
Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. By the word of his power he made the world, and by the word of his power he upholds it, and by the same word of his power he restoreth any lapsed or decayed part of it. He speaks, and it is done.
And straightway his ears were opened: nature obeyeth the God of nature. Concerning his charge of them not to publish it, and their disobedience to it, I have had occasion once and again to speak, and must confess I can neither satisfy myself in the reason from my own thoughts, nor from what I read in others. This miracle hath no other effect on the people than astonishment, and confession that what he did was well done; which was the common effect of Christ’s preaching and miracles upon the most.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On v31 See here, 1. The bitter fruits and sad effects…
See here, 1. The bitter fruits and sad effects of sin, which has brought deafness, dumbness, and blindness, upon the human nature. As death, so all diseases entered into the world by sin; sin first brought infirmitities and mortality into our natures, and the wages of sin are diseases and death.
Observe, 2. That the blessing of bodily health and healing is from Christ; who by his divine power, as he was God, miraculously and immediately healed them that were brought unto him.
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Observe, 3. The actions and gestures which our Saviour used in healing this deaf person. He puts his finger into his ears, he spit, and touched his tongue. Not that these were means or natural causes effecting the cures for there was no healing virtue in the spittle; but only outward signs, testimonies, and pledges, of Christ’s divine power and gracious readiness to cure the person in distress.
Observe, 4. How Christ withdrew the person from the multitude, whom he was about to help and heal. Teaching us, In all our good works to avoid all shew and appearance of ostentation and vain-glory: to set God’s glory before our eyes, and not to seek our own praise.
Observe, 5. The effect which this miracle had upon the multitude; it occasioned their astonishment and applause: They were astonished, and said, He hath done all things well. It becomes us both to take notice of the wonderful works of God, and also to magnify and extol the author of them. This is one way of glorifying our Creator.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On v31 Our Lord Jesus seldom staid long in a place,…
Our Lord Jesus seldom staid long in a place, for he knew where his work lay, and attended the changes of it. When he had cured the woman of Canaan's daughter, he had done what he had to do in that place, and therefore presently left those parts, and returned to the sea of Galilee, whereabout his usual residence was; yet he did not come directly thither, but fetched a compass through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis, which lay mostly on the other side Jordan; such long walks did our Lord Jesus take, when he went about doing good.
Now here we have the story of a cure that Christ wrought, which is not recorded by any other of the evangelists; it is of one that was deaf and dumb.
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I. His case was sad, Mar 7:32. There were those that brought to him one that was deaf; some think, born deaf, and then he must be dumb of course; others think that by some distemper or disaster he was become deaf, or, at least, thick of hearing; and he had an impediment in his speech. He was mogilalos; some think that he was quite dumb; others, that he could not speak but with great difficulty to himself, and so as scarcely to be understood by those that heard him. He was tongue-tied, so that he was perfectly unfit for conversation, and deprived both of the pleasure and of the profit of it; he had not the satisfaction either of hearing other people talk, or of telling his own mind. Let us take occasion from hence to give thanks to God for preserving to us the sense of hearing, especially that we may be capable of hearing the word of God; and the faculty of speech, especially that we may be capable of speaking God's praises; and let us look with compassion upon those that are deaf or dumb, and treat them with great tenderness. They that brought this poor man to Christ, besought him that he would put his hand upon him, as the prophets did upon those whom they blessed in the name of the Lord. It is not said, They besought him to cure him, but to put his hand upon him, to take cognizance of his case, and put forth his power to do to him as he pleased.
II. His cure was solemn, and some of the circumstances of it were singular.
1. Christ took him aside from the multitude, Mar 7:33. Ordinarily, he wrought his miracles publicly before all the people, to show that they would bear the strictest scrutiny and inspection; but this he did privately, to show that he did not seek his own glory, and to teach us to avoid every thing that savours of ostentation. Let us learn of Christ to be humble, and to do good where no eye sees, but his that is all eye.
2. He used more significant actions, in the doing of this cure, than usual. (1.) He put his fingers into his ears, as if he would syringe them, and fetch out that which stopped them up. (2.) He spit upon his own finger, and then touched his tongue, as if he would moisten his mouth, and so loosen that with which his tongue was tied; these were no causes that could in the least contribute to his cure, but only signs of the exerting of that power which Christ had in himself to cure him, for the encouraging of his faith, and theirs that brought him. The application was all from himself, it was his own fingers that he put into his ears, and his own spittle that he put upon his tongue; for he alone heals.
3. He looked up to heaven, to give his Father the praise of what he did; for he sought his praise, and did his will, and, as Mediator, acted in dependence on him, and with an eye to him. Thus he signified that it was by a divine power, a power her had as the Lord from heaven, and brought with him thence, that he did this; for the hearing ear and the seeing eye the Lord has made, and can remake even both of them. He also hereby directed his patient who could see, though he could not hear, to look up to heaven for relief. Moses with his stammering tongue is directed to look that way (Exo 4:11); Who hath made man's mouth? Or who maketh the dumb or deaf, or the seeing or the blind? Have not I the Lord?
4. He sighed; not as if he found any difficulty in working this miracle, or obtaining power to do it from his father; but thus he expressed his pity for the miseries of human life, and his sympathy with the afflicted in their afflictions, as one that was himself touched with the feeling of their infirmities. And as to this man, he sighed, not because he was loth to do him this kindness, or did it with reluctancy; but because of the many temptations which he would be exposed to, and the sins he would be in danger of, the tongue-sins, after the restoring of his speech to him, which before he was free from. He had better be tongue-tied still, unless he have grace to keep his mouth as with a bridle, Psa 39:1.
5. He said, Ephphatha; that is, Be opened. This was nothing that looked like spell or charm, such as they used, who had familiar spirits, who peeped and muttered, Isa 8:19. Christ speaks as one having authority, and power went along with the word. Be opened, served both parts of the cure; "Let the ears be opened, let the lips be opened, let him hear and speak freely, and let the restraint be taken off;" and the effect was answerable (Mar 7:35); Straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and all was well: and happy he who, as soon as he had his hearing and speech, had the blessed Jesus so near him to converse with.
Now this cure was, (1.) A proof of Christ's being the Messiah; for it was foretold that by his power the ears of the deaf should be unstopped, and the tongue of the dumb should be made to sing, Isa 35:5, Isa 35:6. (2.) It was a specimen of the operations of his gospel upon the minds of men. The great command of the gospel, and grace of Christ to poor sinners, is Ephphatha - Be opened. Grotius applies it thus, that the internal impediments of the mind are removed by the Spirit of Christ, as those bodily impediments were by the word of his power. He opens the heart, as he did Lydia's, and thereby opens the ear to receive the word of God, and opens the mouth in prayer and praises.
6. He ordered it to be kept very private, but it was made very public (1.) It was his humility, that he charged them they should tell no man, Mar 7:36. Most men will proclaim their own goodness, or, at least, desire that others should proclaim it; but Christ, though he was himself in no danger of being puffed up with it, knowing that we are, would thus set us an example of self-denial, as in other things, so especially in praise and applause. We should take pleasure in doing good, but not in its being known. (2.) It was their zeal, that, though he charged them to say nothing of it, yet they published it, before Christ would have had it published. But they meant honestly, and therefore it is to be reckoned rather an act of indiscretion than an act of disobedience, Mar 7:36. But they that told it, and they that heard it, were beyond measure astonished, huperperissōs - more than above measure; they were exceedingly affected with it, and this was said by every body, it was the common verdict, He hath done all things well (Mar 7:37); whereas there were those that hated and persecuted him as an evil-doer, they are ready to witness for him, not only that he has done no evil, but that he has done a great deal of good, and has done it well, modestly and humbly, and very devoutly, and all gratis, without money and without price, which added much to the lustre of his good works. He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak; and that is well, it is well for them, it is well for their relations, to whom they had been a burthen; and therefore they are inexcusable who speak ill of him.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv31–36 And they bring unto him one that was deaf,....…
And they bring unto him one that was deaf,.... There were two sorts of persons that were called deaf among the Jews; one that could neither hear nor speak; such were they who were born deaf; and so having never heard any thing, it was impossible they should ever speak: the other sort were they that could speak, but not hear; who lost their hearing by some disaster or another, but retained their speech (c): of this sort seems to be this man, who though he had some difficulty in speaking, yet could speak a little,
and had an impediment in his speech; or could "scarcely speak", as the word signifies; though it is sometimes used by the Septuagint, for one that was entirely dumb, as in Isa 35:6 and so it is here rendered "dumb", by the Vulgate Latin, and other versions; yet it seems to design one that stammered, and could not speak plainly, and without great difficulty: he was tongue tied, as it should seem from Mar 7:35. This man, the inhabitants of the parts where Christ now was, his relations or friends, bring to him, having heard of his fame, and perhaps they had seen miracles performed by him:
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and they beseech him to put his hand upon him; firmly believing, that upon his so doing, the man's hearing would come to him, and he would speak without difficulty: very likely they had seen cures performed by Christ in this way, or at least heard, that by laying his hands on persons disordered, they had been restored to the right use of their senses, or limbs; wherefore they most earnestly entreated, he would be pleased to do the same favour to this poor man. The case of this man much resembles that of a sinner in a state of nature, who is deaf to the voice, both of law and Gospel: he does not hearken to the commanding voice of the law, or attend to its precepts, nor can he be subject to it; nor does he hear its menaces and curses, nor is he at all affected and disturbed with these things; and, like the deaf adder, he stops his ear to the charming voice of the Gospel; he despises it, and has it in the utmost abhorrence: he is deaf to all the instructions, directions, cautions, and exhortations, of the ministers of the word; and even of his best friends, relations, and acquaintance nor can he speak the language of Canaan; it is a strange language to him; he can neither talk it himself, nor understand it in others; for as he has no experience of the grace of God in him, he must be dumb, and cannot speak of what he has no knowledge: and indeed, it may be observed of such who are under the first workings of the spirit of God upon the soul, that they are often as it were tongue tied, and through fear or bashfulness, or the temptations of Satan, care not to speak; or with great difficulty are brought to speak of what God has done for them; and at first, it is but in a lisping, stammering way, they do speak of these things and as the friends and relations of this man, having a great opinion of Christ, and a persuasion of his ability to relieve and cure him, bring him unto him, that he might put his hands upon him; so do such who know Christ themselves, and have felt the power of his grace upon their own souls, bring their deaf and dumb, their relations in a state of nature, under the means of grace; being very desirous that Christ would make bare, and put forth his mighty arm of grace, and lay hold upon them, and work a good work in them, and give them ears to hear his voice, and a tongue to speak his praise.
(c) Mish. Trumot, c. 1. sect. 2. & Maimon. & Bartenora in ib.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv31, 33, 34, 36 Matt. xv, 29.
Matt. xv, 29.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv32–37 Verse 32. They bring unto him one that was…
Verse 32. They bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech] Though from the letter of the text, it does not appear that this man was absolutely deprived of speech; for μογιλαλος literally signifies, one that cannot speak plainly - a stammerer; yet it is certain also that the word means a dumb person; and it is likely that the person in question was dumb, because he was deaf; and it is generally found that he who is totally deaf is dumb also. Almost all the versions understand the word thus: and the concluding words seem to confirm this - He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the DUMB, κωφους, to speak.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv31, 37 Mar 7:31-36. He came unto the sea of Galilee,…
Mar 7:31-36. He came unto the sea of Galilee, &c. — See note on Mat 15:29-31. They bring unto him one that was deaf and had an impediment, &c. — Greek, Μογιλαλον: “He was not absolutely dumb, but stammered to such a degree, that few understood his speech, Mar 7:35. However, the circumstance of his being able to speak in any manner, shows that his deafness was not natural, but accidental. He had heard formerly, and had learned to speak, but was now deprived of hearing, perhaps, through some fault of his own, which might be the reason that Jesus sighed for grief when he cured him. And they beseech him to put his hand upon him — His friends interceded for him, because he was not able to speak for himself, so as that any one could understand him. His desire of a cure, however, may have prompted him to do his utmost in speaking, whereby all present were made sensible of the greatness of the infirmity under which he laboured. Our Lord’s exuberant goodness easily prompted him to give this person the relief which his friends begged for him. Yet he would not do it publicly, lest the admiration of the spectators should have been raised so high as to produce bad effects; for the whole country was now following him, in expectation that he would soon set up his kingdom. Or, as Gadara, where his miracle upon the demoniacs had been so ill received, was part of this region, (see on Luk 8:26,) he might shun performing the miracle publicly, because it would have no effect upon so stupid a people. Whatever was the reason, he took the man with his relations aside from the crowd; and, because the deaf are supposed to have their ears shut, and the dumb their tongues so tied, or fastened to the under part of their mouth, as not to be able to move it, (see Mar 7:35,) he put his fingers into the man’s ears, and then touched or moistened his tongue with his spittle, to make him understand that he intended to open his ears, and loose his tongue.” — Macknight. This, perhaps, was the only reason for these symbolical actions, or our Lord might have other reasons for doing them, of which we are ignorant. “If any should ask,” says Dr. Doddridge, “why our Lord used these actions, when a word alone would have been sufficient; and such means (if they may be called means) could in themselves do nothing at all to answer the end, I frankly confess I cannot tell, nor am I at all concerned to know. Yet I am ready to imagine it might be intended to intimate, in a very lively manner, that we are not to pretend to enter into the reasons of all his actions; and that where we are sure that any observance whatever is appointed by him, we are humbly to submit to it, though we cannot see why it was preferred to others, which our imagination might suggest. Had Christ’s patients, like Naaman, (2Ki 5:11-12,) been too nice in their exceptions on these occasions, I fear they would have lost their cure; and the indulgence of a curious or a petulant mind would have been but a poor equivalent for such a loss.” And looking up to heaven — That the deaf man whom he could not instruct by words might consider from whence all benefits proceed; he sighed — Probably the circumstances above mentioned, or some others, to us unknown, made this dumb person a peculiar object of pity. Or by this example of bodily deafness and dumbness, our Lord might be led to reflect on the spiritual deafness and dumbness of men. But whatever was the cause, Christ’s sighing on this occasion evidently displayed the tender love he bore to our kind. For certainly it could be nothing less which moved him to condole our miseries, whether general or particular, in so affectionate a manner. And saith unto him, Ephphatha — This was a word of SOVEREIGN AUTHORITY, not an address to God for power to heal. Such an address was needless, for Christ had a perpetual fund of power residing in himself, to work all miracles whenever he pleased, even to the raising of the dead, Joh 5:21; Joh 5:26. And straightway his ears were opened — The word had an immediate effect, and all obstructions to his hearing distinctly, and speaking articulately and plainly, were instantly removed. And, as those bodily impediments vanished before the word of Christ’s power, the impediments of the mind to spiritual acts and duties are removed by the Spirit of Christ. He opens the internal ear, the heart, as he did Lydia’s, to understand and receive the word of God; and opens the mouth in prayer and praise. And he charged them that they should tell no man — When Jesus formerly cured the demoniac in this country, he ordered him to return to his own house, and show, namely, to his relations and friends, how great things God had done for him. But, at this miracle, the deaf and dumb man’s relations seem to have been present. Wherefore, as they had no need to be informed of the miracle, he required it to be concealed, probably for the reasons assigned in the note on Mar 5:43. Neither the man, however, nor his friends, obeyed Jesus in this; but the more he charged them — To conceal it; so much the more they published it — So greatly were they struck with the miracle, and so charmed with the modesty and humility which Christ manifested, especially the man, who, having the use of his speech given him, was very forward to exercise it in praise of so great a benefactor.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv31–37 Departing from the coasts - The country or regions…
Departing from the coasts - The country or regions of Tyre.
Came unto the sea of Galilee - The Sea of Tiberias. See the notes at Mat 4:18.
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Decapolis - See the notes at Mat 4:25. He did not go immediately into Capernaum, or any city where he was known, but into the retired regions around the Sea of Galilee. This was done to avoid the designs of the Pharisees, who sought his life.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv32, 34 Dumb.[2] The Greek signifies one that speaks little, or…
Dumb.[2] The Greek signifies one that speaks little, or with difficulty. (Witham) --- The besought him. In the Greek it is, they beseech him, which agrees so well with they bring, that we have every reason to believe that this was the original reading.
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[BIBLIOGRAPHY]
Mutum, dumb; Greek, mogilalon, qui parum loquitur.
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George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v32 4. The Healing of the Deaf and Dumb Man.…
4. The Healing of the Deaf and Dumb Man. Mar_7:32-37
(Parallel: Mat_15:29-31)
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32And they bring unto him one that was deaf,14 and had an impediment in his speech 33[a stammerer]; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him. And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his 34tongue: And, looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that Isaiah , 35 Be opened. And straightway15 his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. 36And he charged them that they should tell no man: but the more he16 charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it; 37And were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
See on Matthew.—The healing of the deaf and dumb man on the east side of the Jordan is a narrative peculiar to Mark. In regard to time it is closely connected with the two foregoing events: occurring at the termination of the Lord’s travels towards Phœnicia and through Decapolis back to the eastern border of the Sea of Galilee (Gaulonitis). Mark shows, in his account of the miracles, a preference for those healings in which the gradual process of the cure, as connected with the instrument and the development of it, is vividly presented. Thus, in his account, the daughter of the Syrophenician woman lies exhausted upon her bed after her deliverance. Thus, he represents Jesus as commanding them to give the daughter of Jairus something to eat. And he alone records the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida—a process which was gradual, and performed in two stages. And here he alone communicates a narrative in which the miraculous act of the Lord is closely connected with the application of the saliva.
Mar_7:32. A deaf man, who could not well speak.—Meyer opposes this translation: “κωφὸν μογιλάλον is wrongly translated, a deaf man difficult of speech (see Beza, Maldonatus, De Wette).—Μογιλάλος, although it seems in its formation to be hard of speech, corresponds in the Septuagint to the Hebrew אִלֵּם, dumb. See Isa_35:5, &c. Hence it is a deaf and dumb man (Vulgate, Luther, Calovius, Ewald), which is also confirmed by ἀλάλους.” Since μογιλάλος does literally mean one who speaks with difficulty,—and it is said of this one, that after his cure he spoke ὀρθῶς (not simply he spoke),—the meaning of the words is sufficiently established. With deafness there is connected a disturbance of the organs of speech, or a general perversion of speech.
Mar_7:33. Aside from the multitude.—Wherefore? 1. He would make no display (Theophylact); He would not nourish superstition (Reinhard); He would have an undisturbed relation between Himself and the sick man (Meyer). This last is the weakest reason; for we might for the same reason except the same thing elsewhere. Rather we may assume that the district of Decapolis was something like the region of Tyre and Sidon: it was not a purely Jewish land. Here it was necessary, especially in this time of crisis, that He should avoid a publicity which might bring together the Gentiles in crowds, excite superstition as much as faith, and create in the minds of the Jews a prejudice against Him. In an analogous manner the Lord acted in the case of the blind man of eastern Bethsaida: He led him altogether out of the village. In both cases, however, we must remember that it was a susceptibility of faith which was to be gradually awakened. See the Doctrinal Reflections.—And put His fingers.—A similar circumstantial procedure we have in the healing of the blind man, Mark 8. “But we are not to assume that Jesus desired in any sense to conceal the miraculous element in the cures (Lange, Leben Jesu, ii. 1, p. 282), which would amount to untruth.” Meyer. But, upon this principle, the disguise thrown over the evangelical truths of the Gospel through the employment of parables, would amount to untruthfulness.
And He spit.—Spitting, He touched His tongue. Meyer thinks that the touching was the direct spitting upon the tongue. But as the touching (ἅπτεσθαι) is elsewhere an application of the hand, it may be assumed that He moistened His finger and touched therewith the man’s tongue. Saliva used in healing: here; Mar_8:23; Joh_9:6. De Wette: Saliva was in antiquity a remedy for the eyes (Plin. H. N. 28, 7; Tacit. Hist. 4, 21; Sueton. Vesp. Cp. 7; Tanchuma, f. 10, 2; Sanhed., f. 101, 1; Hieros. Sotah, f. 16, 4; Vajikra Rabba, f. 175, 2. Comp. Wetstein and Lightfoot, ad Joh. ix. 6). Meyer: “The saliva is, like the oil (Mar_6:13), to be regarded as a conductor of the miraculous power.” Yet it was not applied in the cure of the ear, but only in the healing of the tongue here, as Mark 8 in the healing of the eyes. Wherefore then was this distinction? Probably because the saliva was better suited to be a symbolical medium for the awakening of faith, and it was never wont to be applied to the ear.
Mar_7:34. Looking up to heaven, He sighed.—Manifestly the sighing of prayer. How much more easily He seemed to accomplish His healing on other occasions! Or was deafness, in its spiritual significance, much worse than blindness and possession; and did the Lord intend to signify that? We assume, 1. that in this half-heathen district, more imperfect and disturbed forms of faith presented themselves to Him, which made the healing on His part more of a conflict; and 2. that in this half-heathen district, where they generally believed in demigods and magic, He desired to make more definitely prominent His own dependence on God the Father. For the like reason—that is, because the Pharisees had blasphemed the source of His miraculous power—He accomplished the raising of Lazarus before the Jews from Jerusalem in connection with a loud prayer to the Father; and in healing the man born blind, John 9, He joined with Himself in the work the temple-fountain Siloam, the holy spring of the priests. 3. Since the Lord could not influence the deaf man by word, it was necessary that He should influence Him by a strongly speaking sign.—Mark everywhere sets a special mark on the sighing of the Lord, as also upon His manner of looking: comp. Mar_8:12. Meyer remarks, and rightly, that this sigh was at the same time a sigh of painful sympathy.—Ephphatha.—An Aramæan word, in the Imperative: Be thou opened. Related, though not identical, is the Hebrew פָּתַח, in the Imper. Niphal.
Mar_7:35. And the string of His tongue was loosed.—Thus he did not merely speak with difficulty on account of his being dumb, as Olshausen supposes.
Mar_7:36. But the more He charged them.—The stronger His prohibition was, the more it enkindled a desire to spread the report of the miracle.
Ver: 37. He hath done all things well; that is, in the healing.—Thence they draw the conclusion: As well the deaf, He hath, &c.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. Nothing is more instructive and full of significance than the prudence of our Lord in respect to the publication of His miracles, as soon as He had entered the borders of the land where there were closer relations with heathenism, and the people were more infected by heathen views:—the history of the woman of Canaan, the present narrative, and the healing of the blind man in eastern Bethsaida, all illustrate this. The reason was, that Christ would have a monotheistic faith, which traces all up to God the Father as the final source, and that He would not suffer His divine power of healing to be mingled and debased with superstitious and magical notions. This holy prudence will explain many and great restraints upon the full influence of Christianity in the heathen or heathen-Christian world, down to the present day.
2. We may compare the doxology of this people, Mar_7:37, with the doxologies of Mar_1:27; Mar_2:12; Mar_3:11, &c. Matthew explains: They glorified the God of Israel.
3. It must be particularly observed here also, that Jesus could affect this deaf and dumb man only through His glance, His immediate revelation, His signs, and manner of action. So far this instance stands alone; for the youth who was deaf and dumb through possession, Mar_9:25, suffered not through the sealing up of his organs, but through the perversion and violence done to his soul. So also the possessed who was dumb, Mat_9:32; and the demoniac who was blind and dumb, Mat_12:22.
4. Our Christian institutions for the deaf and dumb are an abiding monument of that miraculous healing in the mountains: the natural development of the miraculous act of our Lord. The healing of the deaf and dumb by signs, was a type of the instruction of the deaf and dumb.
5. The Romish rite of baptism relies especially on this miraculous history, because it exhibits the use of several symbolical elements: 1. Separation from the multitude: dedication of Christ in baptism. 2. The baptizing priest touches, with an Ephphatha, the ears of the infant; 3. moistens its nostrils with saliva; 4. lays salt in its mouth. The Christian Church should do all this in a real manner, and not in a symbolical. As the symbol for it, and at the same time the reality of it, Christ instituted simple baptism.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
Sufferers to be brought to Jesus.—The healing of the deaf and dumb; or, the double disease and the double cure in their reciprocal connection. 1. The connection between deafness and the inability to speak: a. in physical things; b. in spiritual. 2. Right speaking conditioned by right hearing: in natural life, in spiritual things.—He who does not persevere to the end in hearing aright will surely cease by degrees to speak aright.—The true obedience is of eminently quick and sure hearing.—The education of the deaf and dumb man in faith: 1. He must yield himself up to be led by the strange Wonder-worker, who can only speak to him by looks, into the wilderness; 2. he must see His signs, especially the signs of His prayer and His sighing; 3. he must hear his word of power, that he may have his hearing and be able also to speak.—The holy care of the Lord in all His wonderful works, aiming ever at the glory of God’s name.—How the wonder-working majesty of Jesus is concealed in His humility.—Christ, as He went on His way, opposed and avoided with the same decided earnestness the heathenism which deified men and the world, and the Judaism which deified the letter and ceremonial observances.—Christ had to struggle as well with superstition as with unbelief, to exalt both into faith.—All Christ’s miracles were to the honor of God: 1. All His miracles were miracles of prayer, dependence on God, and strict union with His Father; 2. all His miracles were distinguished, not only in their reason and their end, but also in their form and manner, from the magical works of the heathen world.—Christ ever conceals the thousands of His miracles by the disguise of an unpretending medium.—Christ in His whole being full of saving power.—The sighing of Christ and of His Spirit (Rom_8:26) over the sin and the misery of humanity and the creature.—The sympathy of Christ.—Guilt and innocence in the popular proclamation of Christ’s works.—The words of His astonished people: He hath done all things well: 1. In its human limitation; 2. in its higher significance.—Concerning redemption as concerning the creation, the word holds good, The Lord hath done all things well (Gen_1:31): 1. in the whole, 2. in the details.
Starke:—Where Jesus goes in and out, there is nought but blessing.—Canstein:—When we look at the deaf and dumb, it should make us reverence all the more the glorious gifts of hearing and speech, and determine to use both prudently to the glory of God.—Zeisius:—Most people can both hear and speak; but how great and how common is spiritual deafness and dumbness!—Luther:—Christ begins His cure with the ears, and acts in accordance with nature; since from hearing speaking comes: ἀκοή begets ὑπακοήν.—Lange:—Let us seek silence.—A Christian should often sigh over spiritual and bodily misery.—The ears should be open for God, but shut to the devil and the world.—It is a sign that the tongue has been loosened by Christ, when the words become holy, and the new song is sung to His glory out of a new heart.—Quesnel:—The humility of the benefactor, and the thankfulness of him who has received the benefit, may contend without damaging peace in the heart.—Wondering at God’s works is well; but it should never end there.—Nova Bibl. Tub.:—God doeth all things well, not only in healing and binding up, but also in smiting and wounding.—Zeisius:—As Satan damages and ruins everything, so, on the contrary, Christ repairs all things.—Braune:—The Lord guides all His own in various ways, every one in his own; but the goal for all is the great salvation longed for.—Jesus speaks the right language of signs to the deaf and dumb.—Gerlach:—The words, “He hath done all things well,” seem to express an anticipation of the new creation.—Jesus finds His glory in the deaf ears of hardened sinners, and in the speechless or restrained tongues of unthankful, earthly-minded unbelievers. Even from among them He takes many into solitude with Him: His creating hand touches the sealed ear and the idle tongue, His high-priestly intercession groans to the Father for them, and often His Ephphatha opens the ear and looses the bonds of their tongue, so that they may speak plainly.—Lisco:—The turning of the eyes of Jesus towards heaven should teach us to expect our help from thence, and thither to direct our thanksgivings.—Schleiermacher:—That love which could manifest itself so mightily in the Redeemer is among us in our benevolent institutions. But if we ask what has driven men to think upon this, we can say no more than that it is the selfsame Spirit of love who is for ever striving to meet and overcome all the woes and sufferings of humanity.—What a great and wonderful word is this “Be opened,” which the Redeemer was ever speaking throughout His whole manifestation, and the influences of which have never ceased, but will go on until the whole race of mankind have come to the hearing and knowledge of His salvation, and their tongues shall be loosed to the praise of the Most High!—Heubner:—The significance of the healing of the deaf and dumb (in its spiritual application): 1. The person of the wretched one; 2. the leading him to Jesus; 3. the action of our Lord; 4. His looking up to heaven and sighing; 5. His work; 6. His prohibition (the conversion of a sinner should not be boastfully trumpeted to the world; it should exert its influence silently).—Christ the only Physician who can repair the mischiefs in God’s creation.—How much knowledge of God may come through the senses.—Bauer:—How many are still deaf and dumb towards the kingdom of God!
Klefeker:—Even in the sufferings of His creature man, God finds His glory.—Reinhard:—How we, as Christians, should sanctify to our own good the defects, infirmities, and sicknesses of our bodies.—Huffell:—The Christian’s look to heaven.—Reinhard:—The quiet unostentatious zeal with which Christians should do good.—Thiess:—The deaf and dumb man is a type of us.—Couard:—He took him out of the crowd apart.—Bomhard:—The Ephphatha of our Redeemer: 1. A word of omnipotence and grace; 2. great and glorious in its effect; 3. it is uttered to all of us; 4. it is vain for many; 5. it proves its virtue on believers, ever more beautifully and abundantly; 6. it will one day abolish for ever all our fetters.—Rautenberg:—He hath done all things well: 1. Praise of His perfection—wonder; 2. praise of His benevolence—thanksgiving; 3. praise of His glory—adoration.
Footnotes:
[14][Mar_7:32.—After κωφόν, Lachmann and Tischendorf, after B., D., Δ., Versions, have καί.—Ed.]
[15]Mar_7:35.—Εὐθέως is wanting here in B., D., L., Δ., Versions, Lachmann, Tischendorf. Instead of διηνοίχθησαν, Lachmann and Tischendorf, after B., D., Δ., read ἠνοίγησαν.
[16][Mar_7:36.—Αὐτός is wanting in A., B., L., Δ., Vulgate, Laehmann, Tischendorf.—Ed.)
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv32–37 § 68. — HEALING DEAFNESS AND IMPEDIMENT, Mar_7:31-37.
§ 68. — HEALING DEAFNESS AND IMPEDIMENT, Mar_7:31-37.
32. One that was deaf — That had become so since his birth and learning to speak. An impediment in his speech — A defect of utterance, as some think, which had grown upon him from not hearing his own voice, as is often the case. It was more probably a tongue tie in addition to his deafness, as appears by the description of the cure in Mar_7:35.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv31, 32, 33, 34, 36 31–37. The Healing of one Deaf and Dumb
31–37. The Healing of one Deaf and Dumb
31. the coasts] A misleading archaism is this word for “border” or “region.” No allusion is made, in the original word to the sea-board. Thus we are told that Herod “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof,” though Bethlehem was not near the sea; and again we read of “the coasts” (=borders) of Judæa in Mat_19:1; comp. Mar_10:1, where there is no sea-coast at all; of the coasts (=borders) of Gadara in Mar_5:17; “the coasts of Decapolis” in this verse; of “the coasts” (=regions) of Antioch in Pisidia (Act_13:50). Comp. 1Sa_5:6. The word comes from the Latin costa, “a rib,” “side,” through Fr. “coste.” Hence it = “a border” generally, though now applied to the sea-coast only. Wyclif translates it here “bitwix be Endis (or coostis) of Tire, be myddil endis of Decapoleos.”
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and Sidon] The preferable reading here, supported by several MSS. and found in several ancient versions, is, And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre, He came through Sidon unto the Sea of Galilee. This visit of the Redeemer of mankind to the city of Baal and Astarte is full of significance.
he came unto the sea of Galilee] The direction of the journey appears to have been (1) northward towards Lebanon, then (2) from the foot of Lebanon through the deep gorge of the Leontes to the sources of the Jordan, and thence (3) along its eastern bank into the regions of Decapolis, which extended as far north as Damascus, and as far south as the river Jabbok.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37 (31) Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.—The…
(31) Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.—The better MSS. give “from the coasts of Tyre through Sidon.” The latter city lay about twenty miles to the north. Accepting this reading, it marks the extreme limit of our Lord’s journeyings—we can hardly say of His ministry, for there is no indication that He went there as a preacher of the Kingdom. We may however, perhaps, trace the feeling which prompted the visit in the words, “It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon,” in Luk_10:14, and in the “Other sheep, not of this fold,” in Joh_10:16.
Decapolis.—Another instance of St. Mark’s use of a Roman nomenclature. St. Matthew says simply, “He departed thence, and came by the Sea of Galilee.” For Decapolis, see Note on Mat_4:25.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv31, 32, 33, 34, 36 According to the most approved authorities this verse should…
According to the most approved authorities this verse should be read thus: And again he went out from the borders of Tyre, and came through Sidon unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the borders of Decapolis. St. Matthew (Mat_15:29) simply says that he "departed thence, and came nigh unto the sea of Galilee." But from the more full statement of St. Mark we learn that he made a circuit, going first northwards through Phoenicia, with Galilee on his right, as far as Sidon; and thence probably over the spurs of Libanus to Damascus, mentioned by Pliny as one of the cities of the Decapolis. This would bring him probably through Caesarea Philippi to the eastern coast of the Sea of Galilee. Here, according to St. Matthew, he remained for a time in the mountainous district above the plain; choosing this position apparently for the sake of quiet and retirement, as also that, being conspicuous to all from the mountain, he might there await the multitude coming to him, whether for instruction or for healing.
Vers. 31-37. The deaf hears; the dumb speaks.
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In this incident is much of the dramatic. It could not well be otherwise. Our Lord"s teaching was usually by speech, but this was a case in which oral language was needless and useless. Christ accordingly employed the language of gesture and action. He thus adapted himself and his ministry to the necessities of this poor man, who was doubly afflicted with privation of hearing and of speech. The condition of the sufferer and the conduct of the Healer are alike symbolical of spiritual facts and suggestive of spiritual lessons.
I A PICTURE OF THE SINNER"S STATE.
1. Here is an insight into the nature of human depravity. It is a distortion of, a departure from, the proper, the higher, and original nature. Man, in his true bodily constitution, possesses hearing and speech, and in his true spiritual constitution he has faculties which bring him into communion with the Divine. The privation of such capacity by sin is pictured by the state of this sufferer.
2. Here is insensibility to Divine realities. Voices, music, thunder, are all to the deaf as though they were not. So with the sinner; he hears not the tones of the Divine voice; the Word of God is nothing to him has neither authority nor charm. The dumb cannot speak or sing; whatever the occasion for utterance, the occasion appeals to him in vain. So with the sinner; he has no witness to offer to the God of creation, providence, and grace.
3. Here is deprivation of the highest joys. H ow much of happiness is inaccessible to those who are afflicted with deafness! Nature, art, and friendly voices have no message for their ears. And, similarly, sin closes the approaches of highest spiritual joys to the spiritual nature of the children of sinful men.
4. Here is helplessness and hopelessness. It is not a pleasant or a flattering picture; but is it net true?
II A VIEW OF THE SAVIOUR AND OF THE PROCESS OF SALVATION. Remark:
1. The individual character of salvation. As Jesus took this deaf man apart from the crowd, that he might deal with him privately and by himself, so the Lord ever singles out each individual whom he saves. Sometimes he lays such a one aside by affliction, quietly to converse with him and work upon his nature.
2. Salvation is through Christs personal contact with the soul. When Jesus put his fingers into the man"s ears and anointed his tongue with spittle, this was a striking and effective lesson to one who could not be reached by the usual channel of articulate speech. It was the touch of Christ, and the communication of his virtue, that healed. A lesson to us flint restoration to spiritual capacity and health is the effect of an immediate contact of the soul with Christ, the soul"s Saviour.
3. A profoundly compassionate Saviour. "He sighed;" not simply because of this instance which he encountered of human misery and need, but doubtless also because of all the world"s sin and misery. His was a heart moved at the spectacle of the wretchedness of this fallen race. His work of redemption was inspired by pity and by love.
4. An authoritative Saviour. The word of Jesus, Be opened!" reminds us of the original and authoritative utterance of the Creator, "Let there be light!" It is thus that the Lord of light and vision ever speaks: he utters his royal command as one who is certain to be obeyed.
III A REPRESENTATION OF THE RESULTS OF SALVATION. Simple as is the record of the mandate and summons of Immanuel, equally simple is the record of the success which attended his word. The response to the command was immediate. Similarly with the release which it is the prerogative of our Redeemer to effect for the soul of man. The nature which Christ renews becomes sensitive to those heavenly voices to which it has so long been deaf, and finds delight in holy and grateful utterances to which it has before been utterly strange.
IV AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE IMPRESSION PRODUCED BY THE EXERCISE OF CHRIST"S POWER.
1. Astonishment; for who but he can work such marvels?
2. Publication; for the healed, and the beholders of the spiritual change, are unable to restrain them-selves are impelled to tell the story of redemption and deliverance.
3. Witness and praise; for such must needs be offered to him of whom it is said, "He hath done all things well.
Vers. 31-37. "Ephphatha.
A rest, then a fresh journey ("again"). How long the interval we cannot determine. To free him from embarrassment, perhaps danger, and allow time for spiritual meditation. "Tyre and Sidon." The best manuscripts have through Sidon," which was north of Tyre. "Decapolis:" ten cities, east and southeast of Sea of Galilee; named by the Romans B.C. 65. A favourite scene of our Lord"s labours. (cf. Mat_4:25) In Mat_15:29-31 a multitude of cases is mentioned. Here one is singled out as an illustration.
I THE CASE. Familiar and ordinary; comparatively helpless; difficult to educate, mentally and spiritually.
II THE CURE.
1. The manner of the great Physician. "They beseech him to lay his hand upon him" a grand expression.
(1) With respect to the people. He does not like the publicity, etc., and so he withdraws the poor man from the excited crowd.
(2) With respect to the patient. This step was full of consideration and delicacy. He sought to gain the confidence of the man. How deliberate and thoughtful was his mercy!
2. The means employed.
(1) Of what kinds. Physical touch, saliva. Devotional a heavenward look, a heavenward sigh. Authoritative a word, "Ephphatha!" Not used as a charm, but plainly intended to be otherwise understood; a word of the vernacular.
(2) He spoke to the man through signs, as he could not understand words. The means were only morally necessary; that the man might have some basis for confidence, intelligence, and faith. He ever desired to be understood.
III THAT WHICH IS SYMBOLIZED. The shut heart of the world, dead to spiritual things. Which is worse? Only the compassion of Christ can save us. M.
Vers. 31-37. The deaf and dumb.
I THE GREAT PRIVATION OF SUCH A SUFFERER. Deafness cuts the person off from society more than blindness. He is not blessed by that music which expresses the soul of things. He cannot hear that sound of the human voice, which is the most delicious of all music. One sense needs the sisterly help of another. Sight tantalizes without hearing. To be full of thought and feeling, yet not to be able to speak, than this sense of restraint upon the noblest part of our nature, nothing may seem more hard.
II THE CURE IS SYMBOLIC OF THE NATURE OF CHRIST"S MISSION.
1. The mode of the cure. The symbolic action was appropriate. Ordinary language could not be understood by the sufferer. Jesus employs gesture instead. There are special institutions for teaching the deaf and dumb. Consider how holy a work it is, and how consecrated by his example. The up-looking denoted internal prayer. So let prayer be the soul of all our action on others and for others. (Mar_6:41Jo 11:41 17:1)
2. The cure itself as symbolic. Christ"s love entering the heart enlarges the intelligence, opens the world of music and harmony. As love opens the gate into a sphere of unearthly beauty to the lover, so to the soul captivated by the love of God all things have become new. There is a "sacred silence, offspring of the deeper heart;" and dumbness has its sanctity, for here is "the finger of God." But sacred is the eloquence of the tongue, set free by the larger life of mind and heart. God made us for utterance, as he made the streams to flow. J.
Vers. 31-37. The healing of the deaf and dumb man.
Another case of healing, the record of which is peculiar to St. Mark, throws into prominence both the pitifulness of men and the power of the Lord. It is that of one unable to speak for himself, and unable to hear of the many wonderful works which are being done around. "They bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to lay his hand upon him." Ah, they have gained faith in the power of that hand. Jesus "took him aside from the multitude privately." Thus the man, at least, would know the work was the work of Jesus only. Then, for reasons that are not assigned, possibly as signs to him who could not hear, he "put his fingers into his ears,... spat,... touched his tongue," and looked "up to heaven," and sighed" and spake, and "saith saith "to him" the first word he should hear, "Ephphatha!" Then "his ears were opened, and the bond of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain." Thus is presented to us a typical example of the redemption of the disorganized life.
I One of the disorganizing effects of evil is that it closes the ear. It stops the avenues to the soul by which the word of truth and love may enter. The wicked man is deaf to the appeals of righteousness. Its gentle, winning tones fall unheeded on the inattentive, unmoved heart, which is as insensible to them as is a stone. How great is the injury thus inflicted! The man is shut out from the elevating, ennobling, the satisfying, sanctifying influence of truth. The words which minister grace to the hearers can convey none of their treasures to his heart; the way is not open. The human or Divine voice, so rich in its ministries to the ignorant, to the inquirer, to the hungry, is powerless here. The corrections of wisdom, the lofty motive, the noble aim, the calming, comforting voice of truth, guiding and blessing wherever it is heard, has no power here. All is lost. Not more is he to be pitied who, by physical infirmity, hears not the voice of friends, the songs of birds, the harmonies of sweet sounds. Sin robs the life of its truest, its highest enrichment. Christ"s greatest ministries to the world were by his lips. Though the words were of earth, they were vessels holding heavenly treasure. But the deaf hear them not. So truly is a state of sinfulness typified in deafness.
II But sin equally impedes the free and profitable service of the life of its victim. It closes his mouth. The mouth, which may be a fountain of wisdom, if unsealed. The life, which might be a spring of blessing to many, is as a dry and parched land, or as a well having no water. That beneficent ordination by which one life even every life is designed to be a source of blessing to every other, is, by evil, frustrated; and it becomes, instead, a cause of injury.
III It is here Christ appears to bless the race by opening the eyes of the blind, by unstopping the ears of the deaf, by loosing the tongue of the dumb. His holy work stands over against the evil of sin. He unstops the deaf ear. Awaking the attention of the sleeper, he gives to the receiving soul the words of eternal life. His heavenly teaching renews, exalts, ennobles. The ignorant one becomes wise in his school. His truth raises the beggar from the dunghill. Righteousness puts the soul en rapport with all that is good, and beautiful, and wise, and holy. It makes a man to be at one with all the kingdom of God, with all truth and all life.
IV But the redeemed life becomes a source of blessing to others a fountain of living waters. The unsealed lips speak forth the heavenly wisdom. The psalm of praise, the song of thanksgiving, the word of truth, of peace, and of blessing, and the activities of the good life, are all serviceable. The life now becomes an active power for good. Each, when he has "turned again," is able to strengthen his brethren. The first effect of the eviction of evil from the life is that the eyes are opened, that all that surrounds may enter to enrich the life. The second effect is, the lips are opened, the life becomes a center of useful influence. It is a new acquisition to the world, a new joy. So from without flows into the redeemed life all that is calculated to minister to it, to nourish, to purify, to exalt, to gladden and perfect it; while back again from the nourished, purified, and gladdened life, new sentiments, new emotions, new aims, and new efforts proceed. The effect of which reciprocal influence is that each becomes a point of light, a form of loveliness; each a stream of holy, useful influence, refreshing this weary desert and making it glad. Truly, of him who" maketh even the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak," it may be said, "He hath done all things well." It is no less well said, "And they glorified the God of Israel. G.
Vers. 31-37. A miracle of restoration.
I THE DEAF MUTE HEALED.
1. A difference of reading. According to the common text we learn that our Lord, "departing from the coasts borders of Tyre and Sidon, came unto the Sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts borders of Decapolis; but according to the best critical authorities "through Sidon" must be substituted for "and Sidon;" and then the sentence reads as it stands in the Revised Version: "Again he went out from the borders of Type, and came through Sidon unto the Sea of Galilee, through the midst of the borders of Decapolis." This reading is unquestionably the more difficult, but exceedingly interesting, as it shows the extent of our Lord"s tour through those Gentile lands. Proceeding twenty miles northward from Tyre, he came to Sidon, the great seat of Phoenician worship and of the idols Baal and Astarte; and then passing along the foot of Lebanon, and crossing the Leontes or Litany, the largest river of Syria, he came to the sources of the Jordan, whence he descended along the eastern bank into the region of Decapolis. The probable object of this detour was to gain privacy, instruct more thoroughly his disciples, escape his enemies, and visit the many towns and villages dotting this rotate.
2. An interesting though practically unimportant question. Was the subject of this miracle deaf, with an impediment in his speech, or both deaf and dumb; in other words, a deaf mute? If he was deaf and had
(1) only an impediment in his speech, he had not been born deaf, for in that case he would have been destitute of speech altogether. He may have become deaf in early childhood, before the organs of speech attained their full development; or he may have been deaf for such a length of time that, through long disuse, his tongue had lost its power; or disease may have supervened, and inflammation or ulceration tied the lingual nerve. Whatever the cause of this impediment was whether it was occasioned by rigidity of the membrane arising from long desuetude, or whether it was produced by the diseased state of the muscles, or whether it was the result of early deafness the impediment was so great that it differed little from the entire absence of the power of articulation. This poor man was thus little, if at all, better than a deaf mute. But
(2) several reasons induce the belief that this man was actually dumb as well as deaf. Among these we may mention the statement at ver. 37, where the Jews, who witnessed this miracle, said, "He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb (alalouv) to speak;" and the word mofilalov is used in the LXX Version of Isa_35:6 in the signification of dumb; also, in a reference by St. Matthew to this same journey of our Lord, and to the miracles performed at that time, the evangelist mentions the dumb speaking, (kwfou). It may be observed that, while kwfov , meaning" dull" or "blunt," may be applied to either hearing or speech, the meaning of the word in St. Mark is always "deaf," though the usual meaning of it is "dumb," being synonymous with afwnov in the classics.
3. Nature of this privation. This affliction was twofold. Two Organs were virtually wanting, two senses were sealed, two channels of communication with the external world were closed. The case of this person, if not actually identical with that of a man deaf and dumb, is illustrative of it. And oh, how great this double privation! How difficult for those, whom God has blessed with the free use of all their bodily organs, to appreciate the privation of one who is deaf and dumb! These twin calamities are, it is true, physiologically reducible to one. They stand related as cause and effect. Deafness at birth, or loss of hearing soon after, usually involves dumbness. Deafness is the radical defect, dumbness is its natural result. This man is said to be kwfov , which expresses the primitive want; while mogilalov (the root is mog equivalent to meg as in mocyov , labour, equivalent to something great laid (ye) on one) expresses the natural and necessary consequence the great obstacle to speech. This latter word, therefore, is wrongly rendered "stammering," and rather denotes one unable to utter articulate words. Heari ng, like sight, and as much as sight, is an inborn faculty; but speaking is a learnt art. Man of himself can utter sounds, and that is all, but not speak words. The latter he learns by hearing; but how can he learn without hearing, and how can he hear if he is born deaf? Further, in deafness the organ is wanting or defective; in dumbness the organ is present, but it might as well be absent, as it is disabled and incapable of use. When the ear is stopped, silence seals the tongue. But, though the cause may thus be one, the calamity affects two senses, and debars the use of both.
4. Extent of this privation. On due consideration, it will be found that these "children of silence," as they have been called, are doomed to as severe deprivations as any to be found in the whole catalogue of human woes. By nature they are excluded from all those pleasures which the ear drinks in and the tongue gives out. Nor do we refer merely or mainly to the melody of sweet sounds to the thrilling tones of harmony, to the witching spell of minstrelsy, to the rapturous delights of music, as it is heard from the birds that make the woodland vocal with their notes, or from the itinerant musicians that stay for a few moments" space the step of the man of business, or cheer the spirit of the downcast; or as it swells in the concert, or sweeps so grandly in the oratorio, or is wafted aloft from a thousand voices on the open air of heaven. The deaf are excluded from other joys more homely, but not less hearty. They are shut out from the pleasant voice of childish prattle, from domestic or friendly converse, from intellectual interchange of thought, from literary amusement, scientific research, or political intelligence. From all these sources of information, instruction, and enjoyment they are by nature shut out. And here we come to the worst phase of their condition the blank it leaves the mind. When sound is shut cut, a chief entrance of knowledge is barred. The exclusion of sound is the exclusion of all that knowledge and of all that multitude of ideas that sounds convey or suggest to the mind.
5. Contrast between the respective privations of the deaf and blind. We deeply commiserate the condition of the blind, from whom the fair face of nature is shrouded in darkness, whose eyes are never gladdened by the light of the sun by day or of the moon and stars by night, from whom the beauty of the human countenance and the loveliness of the landscape scenery are alike hidden, while "the shadow of death" rests "upon their eyelids." And yet the deaf mute is in a worse condition than even they. You can talk with that blind man, and tell him many things. He has an ear to hear, and learns much from your lips. You can read to him, and he listens, to the lessons of heavenly, wisdom, or human philosophy, or every-day experience, which you thus communicate. He is entertained at the same time that he lays up a store of useful knowledge. Not so the deaf mute; he is unimproved by all you say or read. Your speech does not instruct him, for he cannot hear. Books are useless to him, for he cannot read because he is ignorant of sounds made visible. He learns not, for thus the key of knowledge is taken away. Deaf mutes are, therefore, shrouded in deeper than midnight gloom; they grope in a "darkness that may be felt." Thus one of the great inlets of knowledge is taken away; one of the main sources of enjoyment is hermetically sealed; one of the chief links that bind men in social intercourse is snapped; one of the silken bands that unite men in intercommunion is severed. Thus the deaf mute stands apart, and in lonely isolation from his fellow-men; thus one of the sweetest streams of human-happiness is frozen up. We have thus looked at the condition of the deaf mute of our own day, as closely resembling, if not quite the same with, that of the man that was brought to our Lord, as it is here written, "They bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech.
II THE SIGNS WHICH THE SAVIOUR USED.
1. What these signs were. After taking him aside, he "put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue." These signs which he employed did in no way contribute to the cure he effected, and yet they were significant of what he was about to do. They were far from meaningless manoeuvres or purposeless displays of power. They were no empty make-believes. Our Lord meant to arrest the man"s attention and excite his expectations. He did so with the impotent man when he said, "Wilt thou be made whole?" He did so with the blind men when he asked them, "What will ye that I should do unto you?" and when he added, "Believe ye that I am able to do this?" He does the same in the case before us. But as this man knew nothing of the language of sounds, our Lord addressed him in the language of signs. He touched the parts affected to apprise him of his intention to reach the seats of the infirmities and remove the maladies. He put his fingers into the ears to signify that he would take away the obstructions that were therein, and open up the way for sound to enter that he would penetrate every opposing barrier, and bestow a new acoustic power. He touched the tongue with moisture from his own mouth to lubricate the stiffened member, to loosen whatever impediment confined its and restore its agility of motion. Thus by signs he gave the man some indication of what he meant to do. But by these signs he taught him another lesson. The second lesson was one of faith in our Lord himself as the Author of his recovery, as the Source from which healing power flowed, and as able to do all and accomplish all fully and perfectly which he had signified. A third thing, perhaps, he meant to convey was that he sanctions the use of those means which he himself appoints. Here the means are all his own. His own fingers he inserted into the deaf man"s ears; with his own saliva he moistened his tongue. The power of healing is all his own. He can work without means, or against means, or by means; he here directs to the use of means, but only such means as he himself devises. These he sanctions, these he consecrates, sanctifies, and crowns with success. Further, our Lord adapts his sirens to the source of the ailment, and accomplishes a perfect cure. It might seem sufficient to insert his finger into the deaf ear without touching the tongue with saliva; and likewise, in the account of the cure, it might be thought enough to say "his ears were opened," without adding that "the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain." The touching and consequent opening of the ear would undoubtedly have reached the origin of the ailment, and cured the defect at its source; but there would not have been a complete cure. The sufferer would only have been put into the condition of one learning to speak; but the cure, in the very mode of it, was meant to save him this trouble, and to secure to him the ability to speak at once. Hence it is not only said of him elalei , "he spake," that is, had now the power of speaking, but the term orywv is subjoined, from which we learn that, without any loss of time, and without any process of educating the ear, he spake correctly and normally, as if he had been accustomed to do so from his youth, and not as one exercising a power just bestowed. The distinction between the sense of hearing and the organ of heating in this passage is noticeable: the former is akoh , and the latter wta .
2. Symbolic actions. Another and a different symbolic action follows the signs we have been considering. The Saviour turned his eyes to heaven. By this time the Saviour had familiarized the sufferer to the use of signs, and accustomed him to the language which they conveyed. He guards him against any misinterpretation of the fore-mentioned signs. He turns his mind from those signs, as though by themselves they were in any way conducive to his cure. He raises his thoughts to heaven, to remind him that all relief was to be looked for from thence; that the blessing which made the means effectual came from above; that every good gift and every perfect boon is from above, coming down from the Father of lights;" that the power to cure in this case was Divine; and that, as the Lord from heaven, he himself had brought that power down to earth. While, on the one hand, he showed that the power emanated from himself, he, on the other hand, acknowledged the Father who had sent him to put forth such power. While he was manifesting by certain signs or one kind of symbolic action that power proceeded from his own person, he was proving by another kind that in that person divinity was shrined; that "it pleased the Father that in him the Son all fullness dwell; "that "all power in heaven and on earth" was entrusted to his hands. He was indicating, moreover, the unity of purpose and of plan that subsisted between the Father and the Son; that he was doing the will of the Father, and accomplishing the work with which he had been commissioned. "The Father," he said, "worketh hitherto, and I work;" "It is my meat and my drink to do the will of him that sent me." He sought thereby the Father"s glory, as he himself said, "Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him;" and again he says, "I have glorified thee on earth: I have finished the work that thou gavest me to do." Thus here and now, as always) he sets forth his mediatorial dependence on the Father, and the eye he had to his praise: "My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me;" "He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory; but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.
3. Duty of imitating the Master. As it was with the Master, so in measure is it with the disciple still. Ever and anon we must turn our eyes to heaven. While our hands are duly employed in the daily occupations of our calling upon earth, our hearts must mount upward on the wings of faith, in praise for mercies received and in prayer for the blessing to be bestowed: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth." Otherwise our most strenuous efforts will be frustrated, our most fondly cherished hopes blasted, and our highest aspirations doomed to disappointment; for "except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain." While we thus lean on an Almighty arm, and depend for everything on God, we must have a single eye to his praise, ever keeping his glory as our chief end in view, and ever seeking from himself grace and strength and steady purpose to do his will. "To do thy will! take delight, O thou my God that art; Yea, that most holy Law of thine I have within my heart.
4. The significance of the Saviour"s sigh. "He sighed;" and no wonder, when he thought of the ruin that sin had wrought, and of the wreck which man had in consequence become. The Saviour sighed when he looked abroad on suffering humanity, when he reflected on the miseries of a fallen race, and when especially he contemplated the living example of that misery that then stood before him. He sighed in sympathy with our sufferings, "for we have not a High Priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities." Blessed be God for such "a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God." He sighed in sorrow for our sins. In them he saw the cause of all; in them he saw the bad and bitter fountainhead; in them he saw the fruitful source of so much woe; in them he saw that fearful thing that darkened heaven above us, opened hell beneath us, and cursed the earth on which we tread; in them he saw that fell infection that has disordered, in a certain sense and to a certain extent, all the members of the body and all the faculties of the soul, so that "the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint;" in them he saw the prolific germ of all those "ills that flesh is heir to," and of all those pangs that make the heart of humanity ache: for "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin," and not only death, but with it all our woe; in them he saw, too, the grievous load he was himself one day to bear, when he" bare our sins in his own body on the tree," so that it has been truly as tersely said"With pitying eyes, the Prince of peace Beheld our helpless grief; He saw, and oh! amazing love! He came to our relief.
He sighed when he thought of the works of the devil and his malice against man, and how human weakness had given him power to deform the body by disease, and deface the image of the Creator in the soul of his creature. Perhaps, too, he sighed when, as has been shrewdly suggested by an old divine, he saw the new temptation to sin that the man"s renewed powers would expose him to the evil things the ear would hear, the idle things the tongue would speak, the wicked things in which both organs might be made instrumental. "Therefore," said the psalmist, "I Will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue: I will keep my mouth with a bridle, while the wicked are before me." The explanation of the Saviour"s sigh by a German writer on the miracles, though ingenious, is not sufficiently comprehensive, when he traces its cause to" the closed ear of the world" of which the deaf man was the symbol," which does not perceive his Word, and therefore does not receive it;" and thinks his view commended, if not confirmed, by St. Mark"s numerous exhortations to spiritual hearing by maxim, parable, and symbol. The maxim is, "If any man have ears to hear, let him hear;" and connected with it is the parable of the earth"s producing fruit after the reception of the seed, or salvation attained by right hearing of the word, while the present symbol corroborates the same truth. "The deaf may hear the Saviour"s voice, The fettered tongue its chain may break; But the deaf heart, the dumb by choice, The laggard soul, that will not wake, The guilt that scorns to be forgiven These baffle e"en the spells of Heaven: In thought of these, his brows benign Not e"en in healing cloudless shine.
The correct explanation, while not exclusive of this view, is inclusive of much more.
5. The single word spoken by the Saviour. "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened," was the single utterance after the heavenward look and inward sigh. The root of this word is the Hebrew pathach, to open; from a similar Syriae root comes ethpatach, the imperative of the passive conjugation Ethpael; then, by assimilation of theta and aspiration, we get ephphatha. And no sooner had he spoken that word than its omnific power appeared. The dull ear was endowed with a power it had never known before, or to which it had been long a stranger. The hindrance that prevented the free passage of the air, or deadened its undulations, was removed; the defect in its organism was remedied. The pleasure of drinking in sweet sounds and of listening to the music of human speech came with all the freshness of a new faculty. The man felt as though he had found himself in a new world, or had entered on a new and improved existence, or had risen many steps higher in the scale of being. And so, in truth, he had. But this was not all; the tongue was freed completely and at once from whatever it was that had fettered it, the impediment was quite gone, and the articulation was, notwithstanding the long disease, immediately perfect. He could now tell to all around the happy change he had undergone the perfect nature of the cure, the pleasure that filled his soul, the gratitude that glowed in his heart and which then flowed from his lips.
6. The cure a cause of adoring wonder. Here we must admire, and, while we admire, adore, the power of Christ, for it is the power of God. Nothing short of Almighty power could have accomplished this wonder-work of mercy, for "Who hath made man"s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord?" And none, surely, save the Lord could thus unmake what sin and Satan had marred, removing all deficiencies, and renewing the afflicted with more than original powers. Here, too, we trace distinct proofs of his Messiahship. Blind as the multitude so frequently were, they could not shut their eyes on this fact.; they were so astonished that they could not help admitting it. They said, "He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak;" they evidently had an eye to the words of the prophet, and the works he predicted the Messiah would do, when he said, "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.
III PRACTICAL INSTRUCTION.
1. Inferences. This miracle, like others of our Lord"s miracles, warrants three inferences:
(1) his superhuman power, and by consequence his Divine commission;
(2) a glorious coming day foreshadowed, when all physical disabilities shall be finally and for ever removed; and
(3) what is of personal and practical importance, the inference of the Saviour"s ability to do for the soul what he so often and so effectually did for the body. The impediments of the body are but dim shadows of the worse impediments of the soul. By nature the ear is deaf to the Divine commands, the tongue dumb when it should celebrate his praise; while the heart is hard, the affections frozen, the mind shrouded in darkness the man in a state of isolation, without fellowship with God or communion with the saints. Christ says, "Ephphatha," and oh, what a change ensues! The ear is opened to hear God"s Word, the heart, like Lydia"s, to receive his grace, the tongue untied to praise his name and call upon him in prayer.
2. His due need of praise. In view of all this we must join with the multitude and say," He hath done all things well." It was well for the man that was healed, because in his case it was next to life from the dead; it was well for his relations, for their trouble was all but over; it was well for his friends, because their enjoyment of him and pleasure with him were unspeakably increased; it was well for mankind, that the Son of man had authority to exercise such power upon earth; it was well for each of us, because herein we have an earnest of what he will do for the soul, a pledge of the renovation of soul and body, an assurance of the future and final perfection of both. He did all things well, for he "did no iniquity, neither was guile found in his mouth;" he did all things well, for he went about continually, doing good. More particularly, he did all things well, for whatever he did he did largely and liberally, modestly and humbly, generously, graciously, gratuitously, and yet gloriously. Like the first creation, when God saw everything that he had made, "behold, it was very good;" so, when the works of Christ are contemplated, the concurrent testimony of heaven and earth will be, that "he hath done all things well." Saints on earth will say it, for they are the trophies of his mercy, the triumphs of his grace, the memorials of his goodness, and the monuments of his power; saints in heaven will say it, adding, He opened our ears by his power, our hearts by his spirit, our tongues by his grace; he washed us from our sins in his blood, making us kings and priests unto God. Multitudes when he was on earth said it; multitudes yet unborn will say it. We ourselves are entitled to say it, for his healing power has reached us; he has removed our maladies, renewed our souls, made us to delight in his Word and rejoice in his love. "He speaks, and, listening to his voice, New life the dead receive; The mournful, broken hearts rejoice, The humble peer believe. "Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb, Your loosened tongues employ; Ye blind, behold your Saviour come; And leap, ye lame, for joy. J.J.G.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv31, 37 And they bring unto Him one that was deaf,…
Mar_7:31-37
And they bring unto Him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech.
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The pattern of service
The missionary spirit is but one aspect of the Christian life. We shall only strengthen the former as we invigorate the latter. Harm has been done, both to ourselves and to this great cause, by seeking to stimulate compassion and efforts for heathen lands by the use of other excitements, which have tended to vitiate even the emotions they have aroused, and are apt to fail us when we need them most. It may therefore be profitable if we turn to Christs own manner of working, and His own emotions in His merciful deeds, as here set forth for our example. We have here set forth-
I. The foundation and condition of all true work for God, in the Lords heavenward look. That wistful gaze to heaven means, and may be taken to symbolize, our Lords conscious direction of thought and spirit to God as He wrought His work of mercy. Such intercourse is necessary for us too. It is the condition of all our power, and the measure of all our success. Without it we may seem to realize the externals of prosperity, but it will be an illusion. With it we may perchance seem to spend our strength for naught; but heaven has its surprises; and those who toiled, nor left their hold of their Lord in all their work, will have to say at last with wonder, as they see the results of their poor efforts, Who hath begotten me these? behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been? The heavenward look is-
1. The renewal of our own vision of the calm verities in which we trust.
2. It will guard us from the temptations which surround all our service, and the distractions which lay waste our lives.
II. Pity for the evils we would remove, by the Lords sigh. It is a sharp shock to turn from the free sweep of the heavens; starry and radiant, to the sights that meet us on earth. Thus habitual communion with God is the root of the truest and purest compassion. He has looked into the heavens to little purpose who has not learned how bad and how sad the world now is, and how God bends over it in pitying love. And pity is meant to impel to help. Let us not be content with painting sad and true pictures of mens woes, but remember that every time our compassion is stirred and no action ensues, our hearts are in some measure indurated, and the sincerity of our religion in some measure impaired.
III. Loving contact with those whom we would help, in the Lords touch. The would-be helper must come down to the level of those whom he desires to aid. We must seek to make ourselves one with those whom we would gather into Christ, by actual familiarity with their condition, and by identification of ourselves in feeling with them. Such contact with men will win their hearts, as well as soften ours. It will lift us out of the enchanted circle which selfishness draws around us. It will silently proclaim the Lord from Whom we have learnt it. The clasp of the band will be precious, even apart from the virtue that may flow from it, and may be to many a soul burdened with a consciousness of corruption the dawning of belief in a love that does not shrink even from its foulness.
IV. The true healing power and the consciousness of wielding it, in the Lords authoritative word. That word is almighty, whether spoken by Him, or of Him (Joh_14:12). We have everything to assure us that we cannot fail. The work is done before we begin it. The word entrusted to us is the Word of God, and we know that it liveth and abideth forever. Nothing can prevail against it. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Ephphatha
I. Teaching for those who would follow the Lord in doing good.
1. Be considerate. Deal with each case according to its need.
2. Look up to heaven. It is the privilege of serving God to create correspondence with God. He who does good, enters into alliante with heaven.
3. Sigh. Shall the heirs of sinful blood, seek joy unmixed in charity? Doing good is lessening evils; contact with evils makes us serious-sad. Therefore many avoid it all they can-avert eyes from realities around them, attend only to what will please and amuse. Selfish creatures, children of world, who have not the Spirit of Christ. Those who have will, in this, share His experience. Sadness in sympathy: pain in disappointment.
II. Admonition to all to whom the Word of God comes. Their case was before Christs mind. The deepest cause of His sigh and sorrow was that they were spiritually deaf, and therefore spiritually dead. Hear, and your soul shall live. (T. D. Bernard.)
Deaf mutes
I. Many cannot speak because they are deaf, so some souls are silent because they are dull of hearing.
II. Christ sighs over faculties misused or destroyed.
III. We need this miracle in our souls-the opening of the ear, and the loosening of the tongue.
IV. When one was healed many sought healing (Mat_15:30), and found it, till the half-heathen people summed up their experience in a word which describes all Christs action in miracles, providence, and grace-He hath done all things well. (R. Glover.)
He took him aside
Thus it is that Gods greatest works are performed. Crowds may admire the full-blown rose, but in silence and secrecy its leaflets have been folded in the bud. The broad river bears navies on its bosom, but amid the mosses and ferns of the lonely mountain it takes its rise. In this instance, when the man and his Saviour were alone together, there was as much care bestowed on him as if there were none else in the world.
I. The greatness of Gods universe. How difficult to conceive that one individual can be of importance to its Ruler that we see each soul standing in His sight aside from all the rest;
1. Aside for responsibility;
2. Aside for affection.
II. In the work of spiritual healing, Christ deals in the same way still.
1. In childhood, by a mothers voice.
2. In after years, by books, sermons, friends, trials. The conscience is touched; we stand face to face with God.
III. The healed in body might go back to the multitude. The healed in soul must stay aside. In the world, but not of it. His objects of life, tastes, aspirations, are different from those of the multitude. He must be much alone with Christ in prayer, communion, and study. Alone, but not lonely.
IV. The final taxing aside. Death. Aside from the earthly multitude, its toil, bustle, and sorrow: united with the great multitude whom no man can number. (F. R. Wynne, M. A.)
Healing the deaf and dumb man
Jesus speaks to him in signs.
(1) Takes him aside from the multitude-alone with Jesus;
(2) puts His fingers into his ears-these are to be opened;
(3) touches his tongue with His saliva-Christs tongue is to heal his;
(4) looks up to heaven and sighs-Gods help in mans sorrow;
(5) speaks the word Ephphatha-and the man speaks plain. (T. M. Lindsay, D. D.)
He took him aside
Teaching us by this act-
1. To avoid vain glory in all our works of mercy to others.
2. That the penitent must separate himself from the crowd of worldly cares, tumultuous thoughts, and inordinate affections, if he would find rest for his soul in God.
3. That he must tear himself from the company of evil and frivolous companions, and from the bustle of incessant occupation.
4. That Christ alone can heal the soul. He took from the deaf and dumb man any trust that he might have had in those who stood by.
5. He leaves also this lesson to His ministers, that if they would heal the sinner by their reproof, they should do this when he is alone. (W. Denton, M. A.)
The successive steps in the conversion of the sinner
1. The departure from the multitude, i.e., from evil companions, sinful desires, corrupt practices.
2. The favour which comes from Christ, who gives us both the sight of our sins, and the knowledge of Gods will; and then strengthens us to obey His commands.
3. The confession of our sins which is given us when Christ touches our tongue with the wisdom which is from above, and gives us grace to acknowledge God by word and deed. (W. Denton, M. A.)
Meaning of Christs action
The whole action would seem to have been symbolical, and accurately suited to the circumstances of the case. Translate the action into words, and what have we but sayings such as these? I have taken thee aside from the multitude, that thou mightest observe and remember Who it is to Whom thou hast been brought. Thine organs are imperfect: here are members of thy body, which are useless to the ends for which they were given, and I am about to set on them with a power which shall supply all defects. Yet I would have thee know that this power is but a credential of My having come forth from God, and should produce in thee belief of My prophetical character. Behold, therefore: I lift My eyes unto heaven, whilst I utter the word which shall give thee hearing and speech. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
The abuses and uses of speech
I. Why did Christ sigh? For us Christians, as well as for that poor Jew; because, when He looked up to heaven, He looked up to His home as God, and as God He had before His omniscience all the sins which, through ear and tongue, had brought, were bringing, and would bring, misery to man.
II. Is there not still a cause why Christians should sigh with Christ?
1. For blasphemous words.
2. Unbelieving, sneering words, and flippant, irreverent words.
3. False words; the lies of society, of vanity, of business, of expediency, of ignorance.
4. Obscene, lascivious, wanton words.
5. Bitter, slanderous, and railing words.
Of what does our conversation too often consist? First, there are self-evident platitudes about the weather (very often murmurings of discontent with that which comes so plainly and directly from God); then, the old Athenian craving either to tell or to hear some new thing, and that new thing, how commonly! an evil report about our neighbour. Thou safest at thine ease, deliberately, in your home, at the table of your friend, in the railway carriage, in the newsroom, in the office, thou satest and spakest against thy brother. Instead of every man shall give an account of himself, it might have been written, every man shall give account of his neighbour unto God, so eager are we to detect and remember his infirmities, to ignore and forget our own. It never seems to strike us that, while we are so busy in spying and pointing out to others the thistles in our neighbours fields, the tares are choking our own wheat. Our neighbours idleness, lust, drunkenness, profanity, debt,-these are our theme; and we forget that there is such a thing as a judgment to come for our own misdeeds.
III. The cure of the disease.
1. Not mere secular education: that is only the pioneer, who saps and mines, not the artillery which destroys the citadel. If the fountain is poisonous, the filter may remove the dirt which discolours, but it will not make the water wholesome. No mental, no moral education, can directly act upon the soul. You may teach men to speak more correctly and politely, to think more cleverly, and to reason more closely; but this will not purify the heart. Lust and dishonesty are all the more dangerous, when they quote poetry, and converse agreeably.
2. Education is but a means to an end. It is the ambulance on which we may convey the wounded man to the surgeon-the couch on which we bring the sick man to Jesus. Regarded thus, education is a most useful handmaid to religion. Christ is the sole physician; to Him, and to none else, the sin-sick soul must come.
IV. Faith in him, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, leads us to consecrate our power of speech to His glory and the good of His creatures.
V. The final issue. The use we make of the tongue will decide our future (Mat_12:37). It is said that one who had not long been converted to Christianity, once came to an aged teacher of the faith, and asked instruction. The old man opened his Psalter, and began to read the Psalm which first met his eye, the thirty-ninth; but when he had finished the first verse, I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not in my tongue, his hearer stopped him, saying, That is enough; let me go home and try to learn that lesson. Some time after, finding that he came no more, the elder sent to enquire the reason, and the answer was, I have not yet learned the lesson; and even when many years had passed, and the pupil became a teacher as full of grace as years, he confessed that, though he had been studying it all his life, he had not mastered it yet. (Canon S. R. Hole.)
Christs sigh
What did that sigh mean?
1. Sympathy for the afflicted. The incarnation brings the heart of Jesus close to our own, and we know that He feels for our sorrows.
2. Grief at the effects of sin. Man, made in Gods image, had become through sin the poor dumb creature on which Christ looked. The thought of Eden with its sinless inhabitants, and the sad contrast presented by the sight before Him, made Jesus sigh.
3. Apprehension for the future. What use would the man make of his restored faculties? Hitherto he had been unable to let any corrupt communication proceed out of his mouth, and his ears had been sealed to the cruel, false, impure words of the world. What evil he might now do with his tongue; what poisonous words might now enter into his ears. (H. J. Wilmot Buxton, M. A.)
Sighs
It is by prayer, and the secret sighs of the heart, that Christ applies His merits, and that the Church does it after His example. If the conversion of a sinner cost Jesus Christ so many desires, prayers, and sighs; is it unreasonable that it should likewise cost the sinner himself some? Is it not necessary that His servants, called and separated to this work, should be men of desires, prayers, and sighs? That which Christ does here is the pattern which a minister of the Church ought to follow, who, in the exercise of his ministry, ought to lift up his heart toward heaven, to groan and sigh in behalf of those under his hand, and to expect everything from Him who is the sovereign Master of all hearts. (Quesnel.)
The sigh of disappointed desire
We may readily understand how, on the instant of working a miracle, a glance towards heaven might cause Christ to sigh. Wherefore had He descended from that bright abode if not to achieve its being opened to the lost race of man? And wherefore did He work miracles, if not to fix attention on Himself as the promised seed of the woman who, through obedience and death, was to reinstate our lineage in the paradise from which they had been exiled for sin? There was a sufficiency in the satisfaction which He was about to make, to remove the curse from every human being, and to place all the children of Adam in a more glorious position than their common parent had forfeited. But He knew too well that, in regard of multitudes, His endurances would be fruitless; fruitless, at least, in the sense of obtaining their salvation, though they cannot be in that of vindicating the attributes of God, and leaving the impenitent self-condemned at the judgment. Therefore, it may be, did Christ sigh; and that, too, immediately after looking up to heaven. I can read the sigh; it is full of most pathetic speech. Yonder, the Redeemer seems to say, is the home of My Father, of the cherubim and seraphim. I would fain conduct to that home the race which I have made one with Myself, by so assuming their nature as to join it with the Divine. I am about to work another miracle-to make, that is, another effort to induce the rebellious to take Me as their leader to yon glorious domain. But it will be fruitless; I foresee, but too certainly, that I shall still be despised and rejected of men. Then who can wonder that a sigh was interposed between the looking up to heaven and the uttering the healing word? The eye of the Redeemer saw further than our own. It pierced the vault which bounds our vision, and beheld the radiant thrones which His agony would purchase for the children of men. And that men-men whom He loved with a love of which that agony alone gives the measure-should refuse these thrones, and thereby not only put from them happiness, but incur wretchedness without limit or end-must not this have been always a crushing thing to the Saviour? and more especially when, by glancing at the glories which might have been theirs, He had heightened His thought of their madness and misery? I am sure that were we striving to prevail on some wretched being to enter an asylum where he would not only be sheltered from imminent danger, but surrounded with all the material of happiness, a look at that asylum, with its securities and comforts, would cause us to feel sorer than ever at heart, as we turned to make one more endeavour, likely to be useless as every preceding one, to overcome the obduracy which must end in destruction. Therefore ought we readily to understand why the Redeemer, bent only on raising to glory a race, of which He foresaw that myriads would voluntarily sink down to shame, gave token of a distressed and disquieted spirit, between looking towards heaven and working a miracle-as though the look had almost made Him reluctant for the work. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
Christ the opener of locked doors
The Ephphatha of Christ was not spoken in Decapolis alone. It is heard also in history. He sighed Ephphatha, and the conflict of His Church was revealed to His evangelist. He sighed Ephphatha, and the tongue of Galileo and Kepler told of the wondrous order of the heavens. He sighed Ephphatha, and buried monuments gave up their records of the past, and threw side lights on higher truths. He spoke Ephphatha, and Caxton gave new powers to the world. Knowledge stepped forth from her dust-covered shrine, and carried her rich bounties into every city and house. History unlocked her long-hidden lore. Science painted in noble colours the half-veiled face of Nature. The tongue of Europe was loosed. But well might a sigh have been heaved as the Ephphatha was spoken. It is not truth alone, or holiness alone, which has been unlocked. It is not Chaucers well of English undefiled, the pure song of Spenser, the heart-rousing vision of Dante, the chivalrous epic of Tasso, the stately and magnanimous verse of Milton alone which have been given to the world. A fouler current mingles with the bright, pure stream, and darkens the flood of knowledge-the unredeemed filth of Boccaccio, the unbridled licentiousness of Scarron, the stupid sensuality of Dancourt, the open indecency of Wycherley, the more fatal suggestiveness of Sterne. The press became indeed the voice of nations; but when it was loosed a sigh drawn from the pure heart of Christ, wounded by the misuse of a glorious opportunity, might have been heard by the Church of God. Yet Christ did not withhold the boon. Freely, ungrudgingly, were His miracles of love performed. To deny powers or privileges, or the free exercise of rights and faculties, on the ground that they may be abused, is to act according to the dictates of expediency, not of right. But there is a remedy for the evils which accompany this freedom. It is by conferring an additional and guiding gift. There is another Ephphatha. He speaks, Be opened, and the tongue is loosed; but the ear is unstopped also. While He bestows the faculty of speech, He bestows also the opportunity of hearing those glad and soul-elevating principles of righteousness, and forgiveness, and love, which will fill the loosened tongue with joy, and put a new song of praise in that long-silent mouth. (Bishop Boyd Carpenter.)
His ears were opened
Christ first opened the mans ears, then untied his tongue; because we must hear well, before we can speak well. (Pontanus.)
The heavy ear and speech of faith
There are diseases of the soul as well as the body, and a mans spiritual nature often needs, in order to its perfection, as great and almost as miraculous a change as the gifts of speech and hearing to the dumb and deaf. What shall we say of those who have no ears to hear what our Father in heaven is always revealing to the hearts of those who love Him? There are sounds in nature which often arrest our attention in spite of ourselves; there are messages of grace which often touch the conscience in the midst of an ungodly course. Can the discontented churl walk abroad, on a fine morning in the early summer, and not find the joyous singing of the birds around him in some sort a condemnation and a solace of his unthankful spirit? Can the moments of solemn thought (though they be but moments) which are awakened by the heavy roll of thunder, pass away without our remembering how small and insignificant we ourselves are in the hands of Him who made all created nature? Is it possible that the old, old story of Jesus Christ, our Brother and our God, can be repeated without stirring up some desire to be with Him? Or is it possible for us, who have our organs of speech perfect, to use that speech for every worldly object of profit or interest, and yet to have no voice, because we have no heart, to join in earnest prayer, or utter our songs of praise? Is it possible, in short, for a professing Christian to harden his heart, and to be deaf to the spiritual invitations which he listens to in Gods Word, in Gods providence, and in Gods whispers to his soul? Alas, we know such things are possible; but we know also that He who imparted the gift of speech and hearing to the afflicted one near the lake of Galilee is waiting, by His Spirit, to impart a greater gift to every one of us, however careless and unfaithful and earthly has been our life. The Lord our Master is ready to bestow the hearing ear and the speech of faith. (Dean Bramston.)
The sigh of Jesus
In all our Saviours sorrows-I do not enter now into the mysteries of Gethsemane and Calvary-but in all the sorrows of our Saviours life among men, there are two features characteristic, beautiful, and instructive. Our Saviours recorded sadnesses were all for others. They were either, as at Bethany, sympathy with others griefs; or as when He wept over Jerusalem, or when He encountered the opposition of the Sadducees, for our sins; the selfish element was unknown. Again, His sorrow was never an idle sentiment. There is a great deal of useless, impassioned feeling in the world. Thousands are pained by the wickedness and misery they see around; they descant upon it; they can even weep when they speak of it-but it leads to no action. There is no effort; there is no self-sacrifice. It is almost poetry. It is but little more than the luxury of a tragedy. How different His! We never read of a sigh or tear of Jesus, but it immediately clothes itself into a benevolent word, or a benevolent work. I question whether, if we were in a right state, there would ever be a sorrow which did not throw itself into an action. Some receive affliction passively and meditatively. They go into seclusion. But others at once go forth the more. They see in their trial a call to energy. The sigh of Jesus, as He healed the deaf and dumb man in Decapolis, has been made to speak many languages, according to the varied habits of mind of those who have interpreted it. I will arrange them under four heads, and we may call them:-the Sigh of Earnestness; the Sigh of Beneficence; the Sigh of Brotherhood; and the Sigh of Holiness. Let us note each: lest, by omitting one, we should miss our lesson.
1. Because it says that looking up to heaven, He sighed, some connect the two words, and account that the sigh is a part of the prayer-an expression of the intensity of the workings of our Lords heart when He was supplicating to the Father. And if, brethren, if the Son of God sighed when He prayed, surely they have most of the spirit of adoption-such a sense of what communion with God is-who, in their very eagerness, exhaust themselves; till every tone and gesture speak of the struggle and ardour they feel within.
2. But it has been said again, that He who never gave us anything but what was bought by His own suffering-so that every pleasure is a spoil purchased by His blood-did now by the sigh, and under the feeling that He sighed, indicate that He purchased the privilege to restore to that poor man the senses he had lost.
3. But furthermore, as I conceive of this, that sigh was the Sigh of Fellowship-the Sigh of Brotherhood.
4. But fourthly. All this still lay on the surface. Do you suppose that our Saviours mind could think of all the physical evil, and not go on to the deeper moral causes from which it sprang? But, after all, what is worth sighing for, but sin? And observe, He only sighed. He was not angry. He sighed. That is the way in which perfect holiness looked on the sins of the universe. (J. Vaughan, M. A.)
The sigh of apprehension
Who among us has not sighed to look on his speechless child in its cradle, thinking what words those innocent lips might one day form? Who has not sighed when he first sent his boy to school, remembering what other lessons must enter into his ears besides those of the classroom? Jesus looked up to heaven as He performed the miracle of healing. Surely this was to teach the dumb man to look up also, and to learn that every gift comes from above. (H. J. Wilmot Buxton, M. A.)
Why Jesus sighed
1. This is not the only record of the sighs, and tears, and troubled heart of Jesus (Heb_5:7; Mar_8:12; Joh_11:33). Truly He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. So, to some extent, have all His saints and children been. You must not suppose that our blessed Saviour had no bright and joyous hours on earth. This joy of Jesus-deep joy, though noble and subdued-is not our subject today, but I touch on it for one moment only, lest any of you should take a false view of the life of man, or fatally imagine that in this world the children of the devil have a monopoly of happiness. Happiness?-they have none. Guilty happiness? there is no such thing! Guilty pleasure for a moment there is;-the sweetness of the cup whose draught is poison, the glitter of the serpent whose bite is death. Guilty mirth there is-the laughter of fools, which is as the crackling of thorns under a pot. But guilty happiness there never has been in any life, nor ever can there be. True happiness, happiness in the midst of even scorn and persecution, happiness even in the felons prison and in the martyrs flame, is the high prerogative of Gods saints alone-of Gods saints, and therefore assuredly, even in His earthly life, of Him the King of Saints; since there is in misery but one intolerable sting, the sting of iniquity, and He had none.
2. But you will not have failed to notice that on two of the occasions on which we are told that Jesus sighed and wept, He was immediately about to dispel the cause of the misery. He was about to heal the deaf. Why then should He have sighed? He was about to raise the dead. Why then did the silent tears stream down His face? The doing of good is not a work of unmixed happiness, for good men can never do all the good that they desire. They have wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as for themselves; and this sort of happiness brings much pain.
3. My friends, there was in truth cause enough, and more than enough, why the Lord should sigh. In that poor afflicted man He saw but one more sign of that vast crack and flaw which sin causes in everything which God has made. When God had finished His work, He saw that it was very good; but since then tares have been sown amid His harvest; an alien element intruded into His world; a jangling discord clashed into His music. Earth is no longer Eden.
4. And alas, it is not only the unintelligent creation which groans and travails. We ourselves, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we ourselves also groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit the redemption of the body. We are apt to be very proud of ourselves and of our marvellous discoveries and scientific achievements; but, after all, what a feeble creature is man! what a little breed his race! what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue! We fade as the grass, and are crushed before the moth. If we knew no more than Nature can tell us, and had no help but what Science can give to us, what sigh would be too deep for beings born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward? (Canon F. W. Farrar, D. D.)
I. The nature of the miracle. One of the most wonderful ever wrought. It was both a physical and mental miracle, reaching the mind as well as the organs of the body. It not only conferred the wanting faculties of hearing and pronouncing words, but also supplied an acquaintance with the meaning and use of words. Long and laborious discipline of the tongue, and inward effects of memory, and association of ideas with particular inflections of sound, are still necessary to enable us to employ that language as a medium of communication. Here, however, was the impartation at once of both hearing, and understanding of what was heard. It has been compared to the work of creation; it had in it all the elements of creativeness, beneficence, and Divine power, from which we may see the majesty of our Saviour.
II. The attendant circumstances of this miracle.
III. The spiritual significance of this miracle. There are disabilities upon every soul by nature akin to the deficiences of him whose ears were deaf, and whose tongue was tied. The Great Healer is now among us He can help anywhere, on the highway. This Ephphatha is prophetic. It tells of the ultimate consummation of Christs mediatorial work. (J. A. Seiss, D. D.)
Impediment in speech
Notice, too, that those who are spiritually deaf have also an impediment in their speech. This is shown in many different ways. When I find persons who will not speak out boldly for the honour of Jesus Christ, who will not confess Him before the world, I know they have an impediment in their speech. When I find persons in church silent throughout the service, making no responses, singing no psalm, or chant, or hymn, I know they have an impediment in their speech: they will not put their tongue to its right use, which is to praise God with the best member that we have. If I find a man saying what is false, hesitating to give a plain, straightforward answer, I know that he has an impediment in his speech, his stammering tongue cannot utter the truth. If I hear a man wild with passion, using bad language, I know that he has an impediment, he cannot shape good words with his tongue. And so with those who tell impure stories, or retail cruel gossip about their neighbours character, they are all alike afflicted people, deaf to the voice of God, and with an impediment in their speech. And now let us look at the means of cure. (H. J. Wilmot Buxton, M. A.)
Bringing men to Jesus
They brought the afflicted man to Jesus. That is the first step. If we would find pardon and healing, we must be brought to Jesus. The Holy Spirit leads the sinner back in many different ways. It was the reading of one text of Scripture which turned Augustine from his evil life. It was the single word Eternity printed in the tract which a man had torn scoffingly in two, and which lay in a scrap of paper on his arm, that led him to repent. Sometimes it is a word in a sermon, or a verse in a hymn; sometimes it is the question of a little child, or the sight of a dead face in a coffin; but whatever it is which brings us back to Jesus, that must be the first step to finding pardon and healing. (H. J. Wilmot Buxton, M. A.)
Love and Sorrow
I. That sigh, then, was a prayer. Probably Jesus, when on earth, never did any great work without prayer. And how much of the real force of prayer was concentrated in this one sigh? Let us not measure the power of prayer by the time it occupies, or by the noise it makes.
II. But while the sigh was a prayer, the prayer was a sigh. But what does the sigh suggest to us?
1. Not that He felt Himself incompetent to perform the task sought at His hands.
2. Not that He felt any reluctance to bestow the requested boon. Jesus was no miser in mercy.
3. Not that He felt that the performance of this miracle would be in any respect inconsistent with the principles and purposes of His mission to our world.
I. It reveals to us the reality and intensity of the Saviours love to individual sufferers.
II. It shows the keenness with which the Saviour felt the evil of sin.
III. May not that sigh suggest that the Saviour felt that the boon He was about to bestow was a comparatively trivial one? He is only one of millions of men, all of whom are victims of some misery, and all of whose miseries spring from the one cause-sin. What have I done towards the accomplishment of My work when I have cured this man?
IV. That sigh reminds us of the essential central principle of the philosophy of salvation. Christ never relieves a man of any curse the misery of which He does not appropriate to Himself. In all our afflictions He is afflicted. This sigh was the price He paid for an opened ear and a loosened tongue. What spiritual blessing have you and I which He has not paid for in the sorrow of His own experience?
V. That sigh may well suggest to us the holy sadness of doing good. (J. P. Barnett.)
The Saviours Sigh
He sighed when about to unstop deaf ears. Sighed when on the verge of opening the door by which the music of nature and the welcome sounds of the human voice would enter the hitherto silent regions within. Sighed when He was prepared to give power to the mute organ of speech. Why, we should rather have expected that He would have smiled, and, looking up to heaven, rejoiced. We do not sigh when engaged in a mission of mercy. Far from it. When we take loaves to the famishing, or money to the wretched bankrupt, we feel a throb of sacred delight. As we mark the pallid invalid get stronger and better, or as we visit asylums for the deaf and dumb in order to witness the compensations offered by us for the defects of nature, we are filled with grateful happiness. Why did the Master sigh?
I. The answer brings before us the most impressive and tragic feature in the Saviours experience. His whole life was a sigh. So utterly was this the case that we find Him mournful even when about to perform a miracle of great mercy! Just as there are dark spots on the bright sun, so even when suffused with celestial glory on the Mount of Transfiguration the awful cross made its appearance, for they spake of His decease. Hardly had the cheerful hosannahs of the multitude died away when He beheld the city and wept over it. To quote from Jeremy Taylor, This Jesus was like a rainbow; half made of the glories of light, and half of the moisture of a cloud. We speak often of Christs sacrifice in a one-sided style. Too often we mean by His sufferings the death He endured. We think of Calvary. The accursed tree rises before our imaginations. All these were dreadful indeed, albeit they were not the sum but the consummation of His trials. They were the closing pages of a volume filled with like details. He looked up to heaven, and what saw He there? Crowns prepared for men who would not seek them; thrones made ready for such as cared not to occupy them.
II. What ought we to learn from the Saviours sigh?
1. A lesson of consolation. Intense trouble seeks solitude. In great affliction men often wish to be alone. Even in inferior creatures something of this kind appears. The wounded deer retreats from the herd into the dark recesses of the forest. The whale, smitten by the harpoon, dives into the lowest depths of the sea. Human beings frequently prefer isolation when in trial. Peter went out, when he saw the truth of his Masters prediction, and wept bitterly. Of Mary, bereaved so heavily, the friends near her said, She went forth unto the grave to weep there. Was there anything akin to this in our Lord? There was. Even in minor matters of such an order He was made in all points like unto His brethren. Where did He sigh? In company? In a crowd? No. We are distinctly informed He took him aside from the multitude. No one heard Him sigh, not even the afflicted man, for he was unable to do so. The sigh was between the Son and the Father. Looking to heaven, not to earth, He sighed. Let us be comforted in sorrow. These incidents clearly show how qualified the Great High Priest is to sympathize with His disciples. He was once as we are.
2. Is there not a lesson of stimulus? Jesus did more than sigh. He said, Ephphatha, and thus restored sound and speech to the sufferer before Him. We must act as well as feel. Sighing will never reform the world, regenerate humanity. We must work. Our effort should be to bring men to Him who can still heal and restore.
3. There is also a lesson of caution. Possibly there were special reasons for sorrow on the part of Christ in reference to the man whom He healed. Perhaps the Redeemer foresaw that the bodily restoration would not lead to spiritual restoration, etc. Do we never sin with the ear? with the tongue? Alas, none is innocent herein. The golden rule has not yet brought our words into subjection to it. Keep the door of my lips. The grand thing is to have our hearts right, then all will be well. (T. R. Stevenson.)
The sigh of Jesus
I. The general study of the story would furnish several very excellent and edifying lessons suggested by our Lords action in working this miracle upon the shore of Decapolis.
1. We might note, earliest, the wide reach of the Masters zeal: And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, He came unto the Sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis. Jesus had just come from Tyre and Sidon, clear across in a heathen land; He was now in the midst of some Greek settlements on the eastern shore of the Sea of Tiberias. We see how He appears thus going upon a foreign mission.
2. Then, next, we might dwell upon the need of friendly offices in apparently hopeless cases. And they bring unto Him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech Him to put His hand upon him.
3. We might also mention, just here, the manipulations of our Saviour as illustrating the ingenuity of real sympathy. And He took him aside from the multitude, and put His fingers into his ears, and He spit, and touched his tongue.
4. Even better still is our next lesson: we observe our Lords respect for everyones private reserves of experience. And He took him aside from the multitude privately. We shall surely do better always, when we bring souls to the Saviour, if we respect the delicacy of their organization, and take them aside.
5. Now we notice the naturalness of all great services of good. And looking up to heaven, He sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. At the supremely majestic moments of His life our Lord became simpler in utterance and behaviour than at any other time. He fell back on the sweet and pathetic speech of His mother tongue.
6. Again: we learn here the risks of every high and new attainment. And his ears were opened, and the bond of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. And He charged them that they should tell no man: but the more He charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it. And they were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well; He maketh even the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak. What will the restored man do with his gifts?
II. The singular peculiarity of this story, however, is what might be made the subject of more extended remark in a homiletic treatment. Three things meet us in their turn.
1. A question stands at the beginning: Why did our Lord sigh when He was looking up to heaven?
2. We are left in this case to conjecture. And, in a general way, perhaps it would be enough to say that there was something like an ejaculatory prayer in this sigh of Jesus soul; but more likely there was in it the outbreaking of sad and weary sympathy with the suffering of a fallen race like ours. It may be He sighed because there was so much trouble in the world everywhere. It may be He sighed because there were many who made such poor work in dealing with their trouble. It may be He sighed because He could not altogether alleviate the trouble He found. Some worries were quite beyond the reach of His power. He did not come to change the course of human affairs. Men are free agents; Jesus could not keep drunkards from killing themselves with strong drink if they would do it. It was not His errand on earth to crush in order to constrain. It may be He sighed because the trouble He met always had its origin and its aggravation in sin. This was the one thing which His adorable Father hated, and against which He was a consuming fire. It may be He sighed because so few persons were willing to forsake the sins which made the trouble. It may be He sighed because the spectacle of a ruined and rebellious world saddened Him. When the old preacher came back from captivity and found Jerusalem in fragments; when Marius returned and sat down among the broken stones of Carthage, we are not surprised to be told that they wept, though both were brave men. But these give but feeble illustration of the passionate mourning of soul which must have swept over the mind and heart of Jesus. Who knew what this earth had been when it came forth pure from the creating hand of His Father. No wonder He walked heavily depressed and mournful all through His career.
3. It is time to end conjecture, and come at once now to the admonition we find here in the story. Christians need more sighs. Christians must follow sighs with more looking up to heaven. Christians may cheer themselves with the prospect of a new life in which sighing shall be neither needed nor known. The Saviour shall then have seen of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. (C. S. Robinson, D. D.)
Sorrow in healing
He sighed, and said, Be opened. The sigh therefore arose from no feeling of helplessness to remove the malady. The cure followed, as ever, that word of power. And yet He sighed as He said, Be opened.
1. He sighed, we cannot doubt, at the thought of that destructive agency of which He had before Him one example. Here was one whom Satan had bound. Here was an illustration of that reign of sin unto death to which the whole world bears witness. This deaf and dumb man reminded Christ of the corruption that had passed over Gods pure creation: and therefore, looking up to heaven, He sighed. And it will be no light gain, my brethren, if this thought should teach you to see with your Saviours eye even those bodily infirmities which you perhaps are tempted to regard almost with ridicule, but which are making life a burden and a weariness to so many of our fellow creatures. Remember whence these things come; from the power of him who has entered into Gods creation to torture and to ruin Gods handiwork.
2. But there was more than this, as we all feel at once, in that sigh. That outward bondage was but the token of an inward thraldom. Whether healed or not in this life, no bodily infirmity can have more than a temporary duration. Death must end it. But not so that spiritual corruption of which the other was but a sign. That inward ear which is stopped against Gods summons; that voice of the heart, which refuses to utter His praise; these things are of eternal consequence. And while bodily infirmities and disorders are occasional and partial in their occurrence, spiritual disease is universal. It overspreads every heart. And, as a mere matter of doctrine, I suppose we all assent to this. Without Gods grace, we all admit, we can know nothing and do nothing. But oh, how different our view of all this and Christs! First of all, we shut out from our anxiety every case but our own. No one by nature feels the value of his brothers soul: it is well if he bestows a thought upon his own. But how differently did Christ view these things, when He sighed as He opened the deaf mans ears! Christ sees sin as it is; sees it in its nature, as a defiance of God; sees it in its effects, as leaving behind it in each heart that it enters defilement, and weakness, and hardness, and misery; sees it in its consequences, as bringing forth fruit unto death-a death not of annihilation, not of blank unconsciousness, but a death of unspeakable and interminable wretchedness.
3. He sighed therefore, we may say further, from a sense of the disproportion in actual extent between the ruin and the redemption. The ruin universal. All the world guilty before God. And yet the great multitude refusing to be redeemed. (C. J. Vaughan, D. D.)
The deaf man cured
I. Consider first the mans introduction to Jesus. Now, in contemplating a fellow creature in such sad case, the thought may well occur how little are we affected by our common mercies! How little think we of such blessings as preserved senses, unshattered reason, the links unbroken which connect us with the outer world, and all the faculties unimpaired which fit us for the activities of life. And, though of all such privations, the gift of sight is perhaps the one we should least like to have taken away, yet blindness even may be less to be deplored than loss of hearing and speech. For this calamity, unalleviated, and existing from birth, shuts up the soul of the sufferer in a perpetual prison house. He has no outlet for communion with his kind; he has no medium for the interchange of sentiment or emotion, until wearied with treading forever the same cycle of never-extending and never-wearied thought, he sinks into a condition of utter mindlessness-Gods image on a dark cloud, a sad wreck of humbled and defaced humanity. It has been among the glorious achievements of a scientific philanthropy in our own day to have discovered means for abating somewhat the deep misery of this infliction; but any such alleviation was unknown then. So they bring him to Jesus. Brethren, is there not some light thrown by this fact on the purl which our friends are permitted to perform for us in reference to the more helpless and hopeless forms of spiritual malady? What does thin prove but that there are no men whose case is so bad and hopeless as that we must not try to convert them, but rather in exact proportion to the hopelessness of a mans moral condition, is the obligation to do all we can for him. We are to pray for none so earnestly as for those who through the inveteracy of their souls malady cannot pray for themselves.
II. But I pass to our second portion, to observe some peculiarities connected with the method of this afflicted mans cure. And He took him aside from the multitude, and put His fingers into his ears, and He spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, He sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. Why were the methods used by our Lord in working his miracles so diverse one from another? The only account to be given of these variations is, that they had reference either to something in the moral circumstances of the sufferer, or to some effect to be produced in the mind of the bystanders, or it might he, to some lesson of practical instruction which through these typical healings might be conveyed to believers to the end of time. Especially are we to suppose that in each case of the wrought miracle there was in the method chosen some express adaptation to the circumstances of the person benefitted-the state of his affections towards God, and his susceptibility to become a subject of the spiritual kingdom. For to this end we are sure our Divine Lord worked always. Indeed, the benefit had been no benefit otherwise. To what purpose had been the recovery of sight to a man only to look on the face of this outer world, while his soul was left to grope its way through mists of an everlasting blindness? The instances seem to suggest that there are some persons, who, in order to their learning holy lessons must be withdrawn from the world for a season. They cannot have their ears effectually opened in a crowd-not even in a crowded church. They must be forced into retirement. Anything Jesus might say to them while the bustle and stir of life was upon them, whilst its feverish excitements were drawing them hither and thither, would make no impression. On coming to some retired place, however, our Lord proceeds to the miracle, but still, observe, by a gradual process. He puts His fingers into the mans ears, then spits, and with the moistened finger touches his tongue. As to the reasons for the choice of these means, in preference to any other, it does not seem necessary to go further than the circumstances of the man himself. Questions he could not answer; verbal directions he could not understand; it was only by visible and sensible applications to the organs affected, that he could be made to perceive what was going on, or could connect Jesus with the authorship of his cure. All that we gather is, that the case was one in which it would not be well that the blessing to be bestowed should be instantaneous-that it was needful that time should be given for consideration of what all those processes were to lead to-that faith should be exercised, disciplined, taught to look up, expecting to receive something, and that the soul before coming into that which would be to it as a new world, should know who that Being was to whom it must dedicate all its restored faculties and powers. And it is certain, brethren, that the Great Healer has recourse to like protracted methods now. The ears of the deaf must be unstopped before the tongue of the dumb can sing. The heart must believe unto righteousness, before with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. But, then, how shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard, and how shall they hear who are born deaf? Deaf to the calls of mercy; deaf to the alarms of danger; deaf to the warning of conscience; deaf to the voice of the Son of God. Must there not, I say, be an opening of the ears first? Must not the finger of Jesus be put into them, making a passage through, so that His word may reach the heart. Brethren, let us all pray for unstopped ears. It is for our life the prophet tells us-Hear, and your souls shall live. Oh, how far is he on the way heavenward who has an ear ever open to the whisperings of the Divine Spirit! And looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. He looked up to heaven: so at the grave of Lazarus He lifted up His eyes. On the deep mystery of our Lords prayers. They were as much prayers as yours or mine are prayers-and in connection with His miracles were petitions, not for Himself, that He might be able to work them, but for the people that they might be able to receive them, that the benefit might not be lost to them through the want of those moral dispositions, faith and love, without which He could not, according to the stipulations of the everlasting covenant, have performed any wonderful work. The same view gives a reality to His continued intercession for us at the throne of God. Christ does not pray for anything relating to His own work-for His blood that it may cleanse, for His righteousness that it may justify, for His pardons and acquittals, that they may be endorsed and owned of God-these are among heavens immutable things. What he does pray for is the removal of those hindrances in our hearts which prevent the free flowing of His mercy towards us, for the triumphs of His grace over all our unbelief and worldliness, far the unclosed ear that the voice of the charmer may pierce through, for the loosened tongue that it may magnify the grace of God. And He sighed. Again our thoughts revert to Bethany, where, just before working the miracle it is said, He groaned in spirit and was troubled. We may see many reasons for the distress of soul on the part of the Holy Saviour. He sighed over the spectacle before Him as evidence of the suffering and sorrow of our race; He sighed over it as a mournful defacement and distortion of Gods moral image; bat He sighed most of all over the stubborn unbelief, that miserable infidelity of tee heart, the one solitary obstacle in the whole universe of God, to the instantaneous wiping of all tears from off all faces, and the saving of every soul of man. Yes, brethren, this last it was that wrung these bitter sorrows from the Saviours heart. He could bear the scourge, disregard the mockery, endure the cross, despise the shame; that which next to the hidden face of God, rent His soul most was, to be obliged to say continually, Ye will not come unto Me, that ye might have life. Ephphatha, Be opened. Here the Almighty power of God speaks. The taking him aside, the touching of the ear, the spitting and moistening of the tongue, the eye raised heavenwards, and the deep sigh, were all the human preparations; the mans heart was getting ready, the grace of Jesus making way for the demonstration of His power, the Spirit of God was moving upon the face of a dark soul before the irresistible word should go forth, Let there be light; and as irresistible was the word of Jesus to this poor sufferer, for it was the same word; so that it was no sooner uttered than straightway the mans ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. Our profit in the incidents we have been considering will be found in seeing how entirely our souls health and life are in the hands of Christ. (D. Moore, M. A.)
Alone with Jesus
It is a great thing to be alone with nature; to be alone with a man of a noble heart; a greater thing by far to be alone with Jesus, Aside from the multitude.
I. That He might quicken his sense of individuality. God has made us persons; we lose ourselves in the crowd; trials depress, we lose hope and become more like things. But Jesus awakens us.
II. That He might awaken him to a truer consciousness of his spiritual needs. Touched him. Where? Ears and tongue. There was the evil, there the cure. Some are touched through their fears, others through their hopes.
III. That he might concentrate all his hopes on Christ.
IV. That He might bind him forever to Himself. (W. Forsyth, M. A.)
Glimpses of Jesus
I. The upward look.
1. Devout faith in heaven.
2. Conscious harmony with heaven.
3. Undoubting confidence in heaven.
II. The sigh.
1. Holy grief.
2. Brotherly sympathy.
3. Anxious solicitude.
III. The word.
1. A word of love.
2. A word of power.
3. A word of prophetic meaning.
An earnest of greater victories. Some sigh, but nothing more. Idle sentiment. Others sigh, but do not look up. No faith in God. (W. Forsyth, M. A.)
Words not necessary to prayer
It is impossible fully to enter into the profound depths of the sigh which Jesus uttered on this occasion. We may learn from it, at least, two things:-It teaches us that words are not absolutely indispensable to the offering of prayer. This sigh doubtless contained a prayer, for in all things the Redeemer acknowledged the Father, saying: I can of Mine own self do nothing. The sigh of Jesus, like some of the mightiest forces of nature that are silent, was charged with the power of God. Some of the sincerest, deepest, and most agonizing supplications that have ascended to the ear of God, have gone up with no more audible sound than that of a sigh. (G. Hunt Jackson.)
The touch of Christ
How exquisitely delicate is the touch of those highly-gifted musicians who can sweep the keys or chords of their instrument and make it speak as with living voice, now melting the audience to tears, now stirring their souls with lofty thoughts or martial enthusiasm! With equally magic power does the master painter evoke life from the canvas, and impart to his creations those inimitable touches of form and colour that delight the eye and captivate the imagination. The tender manipulation of a wise and skilful surgeon or experienced nurse has almost a healing influence, as it soothes the overstrung nerves and infuses confidence into the sufferer. A friends gentle pressure of the hand and touch of sympathy will often calm sorrowful hearts more than the most kindly and fitly chosen words of condolence. If it he thus with merely human beings, we might reasonably expect to find far more wonderful effects connected with the touch of Him, in Whom, while a partaker of flesh and blood, dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Such we know from the Gospels to have been actually the case: His touch does hold an important place in our Lords miracles, as well as in His ordinary ministry. He touched, and was touched, and through this medium there went forth blessings of various kinds. His touch was healing, creative, life-giving, enlightening, comforting. The fact that it was so during His life on earth will suggest the inquiry how far it may be so still. (The Quiver.)
Leading our friends to Jesus
I. In view of the great misery in which man finds himself without Christ (Mar_7:32). Miserable condition of the dumb and deaf man.
II. In view of the great blessedness into which he enters through the Lord. Especially since we thereby enter upon the greatest happiness of earth (Mar_7:33). The treatment of this deaf man is apt illustration of how Jesus treats those who are led to Him by friend or acquaintance. (Dr. Arndt.)
Leading our friends to Jesus
During the exhibition of 1867 in Paris, a minister met with an instance of direct labour for souls which he states he can never forget. In conversation with an engineer employed on one of the pleasure boats which ply on the Seine, the discovery was made that the man was a Christian, and on the inquiry being put, by what means he was converted, he replied: My mate is a Christian, and continually he told me of the great love of Jesus Christ, and His readiness to save, and he never rested until I was a changed man. For it is a rule in our church that when a brother is converted, he must go and bring another brother; and when a sister is converted, she must go and bring another sister; and so more than a hundred of us have been recovered from Popery to the simplicity which is in Christ Jesus. This is the way in which the gospel is to spread through the whole world. (Anon.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v31 CHAPTER 7:31-37 (Mar_7:31-37)
CHAPTER 7:31-37 (Mar_7:31-37)
THE DEAF AND DUMB MAN
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"And again He went out from the borders of Tyre, and came through Sidon unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the borders of Decapolis. And they bring unto Him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech Him to lay His hand upon him. And He took him aside from the multitude privately, and put His fingers into his ears, and He spat, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, He sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And his ears were opened, and the bond of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. And He charged them that they should tell no man: but the more He charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it. And they were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: He maketh even the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak." Mar_7:31-37 (R.V.)
THERE are curious and significant varieties in the methods by which our Savior healed. We have seen Him, when watched on the sabbath by eager and expectant foes, baffling all their malice by a miracle without a deed, by refusing to cross the line of the most rigid and ceremonial orthodoxy, by only commanding an innocent gesture, Stretch forth thine hand. In sharp contrast with such a miracle is the one which we have now reached. There is brought to Him a man who is deaf, and whose speech therefore could not have been more than a babble, since it is by hearing that we learn to articulate; but of whom we are plainly told that he suffered from organic inability to utter as well as to hear, for he had an impediment in his speech, the string of his tongue needed to be loosed, and Jesus touched his tongue as well as his ears, to heal him.
It should be observed that no unbelieving theory can explain the change in our Lord's method. Some pretend that all the stories of His miracles grew up afterward, from the sense of awe with which He was regarded. How does that agree with effort, sighing, and even gradation in the stages of recovery, following after the most easy, astonishing and instantaneous cures? Others believe that the enthusiasm of His teaching and the charm of His presence conveyed healing efficacy to the impressible and the nervous. How does this account for the fact that His earliest miracles were the prompt and effortless ones, and as time passes on, He secludes the patient and uses agencies, as if the resistance to His power were more appreciable? Enthusiasm would gather force with every new success.
All becomes clear when we accept the Christian doctrine. Jesus came in the fullness of the love of God, with both hands filled with gifts. On His part there is no hesitation and no limit. But on the part of man there is doubt, misconception, and at last open hostility. A real chasm is opened between man and the grace He gives, so that, although not straitened in Him, they are straitened in their own affections. Even while they believe in Him as a healer, they no longer accept Him as their Lord.
And Jesus makes it plain to them that the gift is no longer easy, spontaneous and of public right as formerly. In His own country He could not do many mighty works. And now, returning by indirect routes, and privately, from the heathen shores whither Jewish enmity had driven Him, He will make the multitude feel a kind of exclusion, taking the patient from among them, as He does again presently in Bethsaida (Mar_8:23). There is also, in the deliberate act of seclusion and in the means employed, a stimulus for the faith of the sufferer, which would scarcely have been needed a little while before.
The people were unconscious of any reason why this cure should differ from former ones. And so they besought Jesus to lay His hand on him, the usual and natural expression for a conveyance of invisible power. But even if no other objection had existed, this action would have meant little to the deaf and dumb man, living in a silent world, and needing to have his faith aroused by some yet plainer sign. Jesus therefore removes him from the crowd whose curiosity would distract his attention -- even as by affliction and pain He still isolates each of us at times from the world, shutting us up with God.
He speaks the only language intelligible to such a man, the language of signs, putting His fingers into his ears as if to bread a seal, conveying the moisture of His own lip to the silent tongue, as if to impart its faculty, and then, at what should have been the exultant moment of conscious and triumphant power, He sighed deeply.
What an unexpected revelation of the man rather than the wonder worker. How unlike anything that theological myth or heroic legend would have invented. Perhaps, as Keble sings, He thought of those moral defects for which, in a responsible universe, no miracle may be wrought, of "the deaf heart, the dumb by choice." Perhaps, according to Stier's ingenious guess, He sighed because, in our sinful world, the gift of hearing is so doubtful a blessing, and the faculty of speech so apt to be perverted. One can almost imagine that no human endowment is ever given by Him Who knows all, without a touch of sadness. But it is more natural to suppose that He Who is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and Who bare our sickness, thought upon the countless miseries of which this was but a specimen, and sighed for the perverseness by which the fullness of His compassion was being restrained. We are reminded by that sigh, however we explain it, that the only triumphs which made Him rejoice in Spirit were very different from displays of His physical ascendancy.
It is interesting to observe that St. Mark, informed by the most ardent and impressible of the apostles, by him who reverted, long afterwards, to the voice which he heard in the holy mount, has recorded several of the Aramaic words which Jesus uttered at memorable junctures. "Ephphatha, Be opened," He said, and the bond of his tongue was loosed, and his speech, hitherto incoherent, became plain. But the Gospel which tells us the first word he heard is silent about what he said. Only we read, and this is suggestive enough, that the command was at once given to him, as well as to the bystanders, to keep silent. Not copious speech, but wise restraint, is what the tongue needs most to learn. To him, as to so many whom Christ had healed, the injunction came, not to preach without a commission, not to suppose that great blessing required loud announcement, or unfit men for lowly and quiet places. Legend would surely have endowed with special eloquence the lips which Jesus unsealed. He charged them that they should tell no man.
It was a double miracle, and the latent unbelief became clear of the very men who had hoped for some measure of blessing. For they were beyond measure astonished, saying He doeth all things well, celebrating the power which restored the hearing and the speech together. Do we blame their previous incredulity? Perhaps we also expect some blessing from our Lord, yet fail to bring Him all we have and all we are for blessing. Perhaps we should be astonished beyond measure if we received at the hands of Jesus a sanctification that extended to all our powers.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37 31. He came … through the midst of the…
31. He came … through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis. A district east of the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan, so called because it contained ten cities. Only Mark gives the account of the following miracle.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On v31 Mar_7:31. For true reading see R. V. Through Sidon—not…
CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Mar_7:31. For true reading see R. V. Through Sidon—not necessarily the city. The object of this long détour was to obtain much-needed retirement and rest.
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Mar_7:32. This man’s deafness had rendered him hard-of-speech, scarcely able to articulate intelligibly.
Mar_7:34. Ephphatha.—The actual Aramaic word used. “Be thou opened—it is the man who is addressed; it was he who needed to be corporeally opened to the ingress of sounds, and to the ready egress of words.”
Mar_7:35. String.—The bond holding his tongue and impeding his speech.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Mar_7:31-37
The deaf-mute healed.—
I. The journey of Christ, and the place where the miracle was performed (Mar_7:31).—From His short and necessary excursion unto a foreign territory Christ speedily returned to the land of Judea, the proper scene of the ministry of Him who was sent unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. With a view, probably, both of allowing time for the resentment of His enemies to be moderated, and of instructing numbers whom He had not visited in the regular course of His journeys, He makes a circuit through the rich and fertile district of Decapolis, or “the Ten Cities,” the most populous part of the well-inhabited province of Galilee. His stay seems to have been short, for none of the Evangelists mention any remarkable event to have taken place there. He hastens to the shores of the Sea of Galilee, the birthplace and residence of many of His disciples—the country of a numerous people who listened to Him with more attention and respect than the proud and bigoted inhabitants of the capital and its neighbourhood.
II. The nature of the disease to be cured (Mar_7:32).—This man had not power in those organs which are necessary for the reciprocal communication of ideas and sentiments. We are little accustomed to consider the vast importance of the gift of speech—a gift, I believe, in the strictest sense of the term, from our Supreme Benefactor; for articulate language, an art so complicated and yet so necessary in the earliest infancy of society, can scarcely be considered as a matter of human invention. No theory has proved satisfactory, or thrown light on the subject, but that one which ascribes it to “the Father of lights, from whom cometh every good and perfect gift.” It is indeed a good gift, on which all the other improvements of society depend. Without it man must be still almost a solitary individual. In the midst of society he were alone—guided in his difficulties by no kind instruction, soothed in his calamities by no soft voice of sympathy, gladdened in the day of strength by no cheering note of joy, comforted in the hour of darkness and sorrow by no kindred spirit to tell him of another and a better life, of the high destiny of man, and of the grace of a merciful God.
III. The request of the people (Mar_7:32).—There is a modesty in the request which gives a favourable idea of the character of the petitioners. They were evidently humane; for they bring their distressed neighbour for a cure. They were humble; they present the opportunity of working a miracle to Him whom they believed to be possessed of the power; but they did not demand nor even solicit the exertion of His Divine energy. They believed in the compassion of Christ; and they present to Him an object of pity, and pray that He will bless him. To lay the hand on one is the natural and significant action of goodwill, of a benevolent wish and friendly inclination. The people expected that by this action Christ would communicate the particular blessing which the case required. They did not suppose that He was to use any vain arts, like the false pretenders to miraculous power; but that by His own inherent energy He would effect the cure of which the laying on of His hand marked, according to the usual significant form, the wish and the accomplishment. The people knew that Christ was raised far above all vainglory, and that by a simple indication of His will He could produce a miraculous cure.
IV. The manner in which our Lord proceeded in performing this miracle (Mar_7:33-34).—He would not expose the man, while He is communicating with him by the necessary signs, to the idle gaze of the indifferent, or the impertinent observations of those wicked companions who followed Him everywhere, and might now be mixed among the friendly observers, and who might alarm the patient, who could not hear nor understand their words, but might comprehend their gestures so far as to produce in him uneasiness and fear. Retiring a little from the crowd, “He put His fingers into his ears, and He spit, and touched his tongue.” You are aware that from the situation of this man, precluded from all conversation with his neighbours, from all the means of knowledge which depend on spoken language, he must therefore have had a very imperfect notion of our Lord’s character and power. There was no way by which Christ could excite his attention or communicate His own views or purpose but by appropriate signs, to the use of which he was probably accustomed. As the ears of the deaf seem to be closed, He puts His fingers on them; and as the tongue is supposed to be fastened, He touched it with a wet finger, to intimate, perhaps, to the wondering patient and his friends the nature of the relief He was about to convey. Then observe our Lord’s sympathy—“He sighed.” He felt for the degraded situation of the man before Him, excluded from society, whose converse cheers us amid the calamities of life—from that moral instruction which elevates us above them, from the knowledge of God and that religious truth which prepares us for the enjoyment of Him; and by a sigh, the frequent attendant of inward and silent prayer, especially when the mind is oppressed by grief, He shewed how much His heart was affected, and how ardent His wish to grant relief. It might be that there were some circumstances unknown to us which made this man a peculiar object of pity. But whether general or particular, it was evidently His sympathy with human wretchedness which agitated His bosom, that tender feeling for all our sorrows which renders Him so fit a High Priest for men compassed about with infirmity. Observe our Lord’s piety in this action: “Looking up to heaven.” Through all His life, from His earliest years till it was finished on the Cross, His reverence for His Heavenly Father is conspicuous. His will was the guide of His actions, His honour the end and aim of them. From Him He asked for power, and to Him ascribed the glory. In this case He raised His eyes to the heavens and to Him who made them, as a mark of His own trust in the Divine blessing on this work of kindness, as an intimation to the person to be cured, who could see, though he could not speak nor hear, that from thence was to come his aid, and as a warning to all the witnesses of the transaction that they should glorify the God of their fathers for His wondrous works. In this action observe the power and authority of Christ; He saith, “Ephphatha, that is, Be thou opened.” He speaks in the Syriac, the common language of the country, that the audience might all know what was passing. Assured of His power, He commands, and it is done. The authority of Heaven accompanying His words, sanctions the high claims of the Carpenter of Nazareth to the office and character of the Messiah.
V. The account of the miracle (Mar_7:35).—The miracle was accomplished “straightway,” instantly, on the command—not gradually, as if it were the effect of external application. Although Christ, as the Messiah, “was not to cry nor lift up nor cause His voice to be heard in the streets” as a vain boaster or a deceiver of the people, yet He possessed within Him a mighty energy which gave its proper effect to every word which He spake, which made the deaf to hear His voice, and gave to the tongue of the dumb a power unknown and unconceived before. He spake with the voice of power; but as it broke on the delighted ear of the patient, it sounded soft as the voice of mercy speaking in its sweetest tones; gentle and kind, it diffused joy over his frame, mixed with that astonishment which he could not help feeling when all the knowledge of manhood was at once bestowed on such a weak and imperfect being.
VI. The charge of concealment (Mar_7:36).—Without waiting to receive the expressions of astonishment, joy, and gratitude which were ready to break forth from every tongue, and which would have been so pleasant to an ordinary mind, He enjoins silence and secrecy with regard to this humane action. He laid the foundation for a complete proof of His Divinity, but He was not anxious to receive the direct testimony or honour of men. He formed the strongest claims to the gratitude of mankind, but He declined, with the genuine modesty of a superior mind, the applause which they were ready to bestow. It has been often observed, that true greatness is always adorned with this lovely quality, and that the highest attainments have ever been accompanied with humility. Possessing qualities far above those of humanity, the humility of Christ reflects a peculiar beauty on His character, and renders His virtues and His works most engaging and attractive. We are astonished at the Divine power in this miracle. We admire the Divine goodness and condescension. We adore and love the lowly spirit which shrank from the noisy praises of the wondering multitude, and avoided the ostentation of a public testimony to His merits.
VII. The effect on the beholders (Mar_7:36-37).—In His journey through life Christ was much oftener harassed by envy and malice than consoled by the soft voice of sympathy or cheered by the sweet notes of praise. The people among whom. He now was felt and spake of His good deeds as it became them. There is often a zeal without knowledge which appears in the writings of pious men. Hence these Galileans have been blamed because they published this miracle “so much the more” that the Worker of it charged them to conceal it. Christ, they say, was a Lawgiver entitled to the obedience of all whom He had addressed, and had peculiar reasons, involving His comfort and His safety, for wishing that this command should be carefully observed. All this is certainly true. But it was not yet known to these men of Galilee: they viewed Him merely as an illustrious prophet, whose modesty would keep secret what tended to His great honour, and, moved by wonder and gratitude, they feel themselves bound to proclaim the virtue which they admired, and the good deeds which they experienced. Far from entertaining any enmity to Christ, or a malicious disregard of His request, they are anxious to promote His credit among men, and use only the language of commendation.—L. Adamson.
Mar_7:34. Ephphatha.—A serious and philosophical mind, contemplating the innumerable evils, physical and moral, to which men are exposed during their short continuance in this world, would very naturally conclude that the present state could not be that for which the Almighty originally intended them. Divine revelation alone can carry us back to the origin of things, and give us the true information with respect to their present appearances. By this we learn, that the beautiful order and harmony of creation were marred by the creature’s transgression, who, turning his will from the source of infinite goodness, lost that first state in which his Maker had placed him, and wherein all was light and joy, and found himself in subjection to an evil nature within and a world of darkness and distress without. By this too we are informed, that nothing less than a return to his original source could reinstate him in his original bliss; that this return could be rendered possible in no other way than by a ray, a spark, a seed, an earnest, a taste, or a touch of his first life, imparted or inspoken into his fallen nature by the God of love, to be gradually opened and unfolded by such a redeeming process as, with the co-operation of his own will, would effectually restore him to his primeval felicity; and that this was undertaken, and only could be undertaken and accomplished, by that Eternal Son of the Father in and by whom man was originally created, and in and by whom alone he could be redeemed.
I. The looking up to heaven was beautifully expressive of the real situation in which this Great Restorer of human nature stood before His Heavenly Father. It was intended, no doubt, to communicate to every attentive observer this great lesson of instruction: that all the powers and virtues of which He was possessed came down from above; that they were communicated to Him “without measure”; and that He could have no authority over the evils of human life, so as either to mitigate or remove them, but by standing continually in the heavenly world, inspiring its air, receiving its beams of light and love, and sending them forth into every human heart that was truly desirous of receiving them; and that it was by such a communication alone that He should be enabled to restore hearing and speech to the unhappy patient they had brought before Him.
II. This look was accompanied with a sigh.—A sigh seems to indicate distress. An anxious, oppressed, and afflicted heart is sometimes so full as to deprive the tongue of the power of utterance; it vents itself, therefore, in a sigh. But what could oppress or afflict the heart of the meek and innocent Jesus? As the Second Adam, the Father and Regenerator of our whole lapsed race, He voluntarily assumed our nature, and became as intimately united to it as the head to the members of the body. His sympathetic heart is sensible of every want and distress of every son and daughter of Adam. He is persecuted with the Church that Saul persecuteth; and “whoso toucheth His children, toucheth the apple of His eye.” Yea, He feels for those who feel not for themselves, and sighs over the sad estate of those who are blind to their true happiness—“who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”
III. “And He saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.”—Whatever salutary efficacy there may be in medicine, it must proceed from that heavenly virtue which rises from the reunion of divided properties. This reunion is the source of health, and the restoration of aught that may be impaired in any of our outward organs or inward faculties. To Him who had all nature under His control, who knew how to bring together and unite in an instant those properties which have been separated, a single word, the mere motion of His will, was sufficient to produce the desired effect.
IV. The same supernatural powers which Jesus displayed upon this occasion He still continues to exercise in the hearts of His redeemed offspring.—Deaf and dumb with respect to our inward and spiritual senses we all are by nature. We can hear and speak, indeed, of worldly things with a quickness and facility which manifests in innumerable instances the strong attraction by which they hold our attention and affections: the calls of business and of pleasure we are ever ready to answer. Our earthly senses are continually open; but our heavenly faculties are closed by a thousand obstructions which we suffer the devil, the world, and the flesh to form in our hearts. The Great Shepherd of Israel, who is perpetually employed in “seeking and saving that which was lost,” makes use of a variety of means and methods to bring the soul to a conviction of its loss. The efficacy of these depends, indeed, upon the concurrence of the human will, because nothing can come into the soul but what itself wills or desires. The different dispensations of Providence are wisely and affectionately adapted to the different circumstances of individuals: the end and design of them all is one and the same, viz. to bring the wandering creature to a sense of his deviations, and “to guide his feet into the way of peace.” By whatever means this conviction is wrought, the soul soon becomes sensible of its mistaken choice, and soon determines to withhold its attention from the calls of earthly objects. In vain does the siren sing her delusive song—it ceases now to charm; for the finger of God stops the outward ear, that the inward ear may be opened to a sweeter note. The sigh of a contrite sinner brings down heaven into his heart. Jesus often sighed. He loves a sigh—it invites Him into His own temple; and “Ephphatha, Be opened,” is the blessed voice that precedes His salutary entrance. Be opened! Opened to what? To the harmony of heaven, to the symphonies of angels, to “the voice of the Bridegroom.” “The marriage of the Lamb” is come; the bride is prepared; the silver cord is tied; the blessed union is completed! The soul is now all eye, all ear, all heart, all tongue; and eye, and ear, and heart, and tongue are all employed in receiving the gifts and graces and celebrating the beauties and perfections of Him who is “fairest among ten thousand, who is altogether lovely.”—J. Duché, M.A.
Mar_7:37. “He hath done all things well.”—
I. The people’s testimony or verdict concerning our Saviour.—“He hath done all things well.”
1. No doubt but the scribes and Pharisees had been witnesses of Christ’s miracles as well as the people; but vainglory, envy, and other by-respects had jostled out the belief of them, so that by means of them they were rather hardened than converted. We owe the growth of Christian religion to plain, honest men, who received the gospel with free and unprejudiced affections, and closed with it when they saw it consonant to right reason. Oh, how blessed would this nation be if it had people of the like temper, who, without prejudice and prepossession, without siding and faction, would embrace sound doctrine, and bear testimony to it by their peaceable and holy lives!
2. From the persons testifying I proceed to the Person of whom they testify—He, a mere man, for so they express Him, and not as believers in after-times did, who never mentioned Him as mere man, but either as God or as the Eternal Son of God. However, this denomination of the people was at present accepted and registered as a proof of their ingenuity, that they gave Christ the glory of His actions, though their appellation of Him was not sufficiently honourable. God opens the eyes of men’s understanding and cures the infirmities of their souls by degrees. ’Twas enough, at our Lord’s first entrance upon His prophetic office and preaching to the world, that the people received His doctrine and conceived rightly of His miracles, though not of His Divine nature; that they acknowledged Him to be a good man, though not the Son of God Incarnate, which at that time was not understood by the apostles themselves. This their ignorance God then winked at; but how injurious, how derogatory to His honour would it now be so far to debase Him as to strip Him of His Divine nature and to degrade Him to mere humanity! ’Tis necessary to believe not only all that is delivered by Him, but also all that is delivered of Him, and to acknowledge Him to be our God as well as our Saviour. To say in these days, with the Jewish multitude, He, or this man, were no less than sacrilege, when our style ought to be, the Eternal Son, God blessed for evermore.
3. I pass to the third particular—the people’s verdict or approbation of Him, “He hath done well.” This testimony was rightly grounded: they concluded, with good reason, that He who had made “both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak” was no deceiver, but a man approved of God; that He whose works were so mighty must Himself be holy and His words true. Miracles, says St. Austin, have a tongue, and speak; they are not only works, but arguments. To give speech to a man that was from his birth without it is even of itself a kind of speech, the speech no less than of the Almighty; for God not appearing personally to converse with men, such as these are the expressions of Himself to the world. Neither did the voices which broke from the clouds at the baptism and transfiguration of our Lord, saying, “This is My Beloved Son,” more plainly and intelligibly declare to hearers who Christ was, than the voice of God in every miracle that Christ wrought pronounced the same thing: on all His works were these Divine words engraved, in bright and shining characters, “This is My Beloved Son; hear Him.”
4. I told you before that when the people gave Him this approbation, they did not understand Him to be that great prophet that was to come into the world, the Messias, and Son of God; though a true prophet they apprehended Him to be, for this He had made apparent to the most scrupulous. But how then could they give Him so large a testimony as they did, when even true prophets sent by God did not do all things well, but had all of them their infirmities, and were not without sin? I confess, indeed, that, acknowledging Him no more than a man, their approbation of Him was not without exception; for though they pronounced a right sentence, ’twas not with a right knowledge; they overshot themselves in their testimony (though true) when they said, “He hath done all things well.” This is no trifling or insignificant observation; for we may build on it this important truth, that we may not from a few instances of goodness conclude a universal probity, nor from a few specious or astonishing actions allow a Divine approbation: for thus a Theudas or a Judas Gaulonites may pass for the Messiah, and Simon Magus might pretend to the Godhead that was given him at Rome for his skill in magic; and the heathen demons, who were all deified for some uncommon and extraordinary performances, might challenge their deities.
II. The application of this testimony to the present miracle.—“He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.”
1. He touched him with His fingers—
(1) That the standers-by might see and testify that the cure came from Him, not from any confederacy with spirits, nor from any other external power; and this could not but oblige them to have a greater veneration both for His person and doctrine; it could not but persuade them that what proceeded from His mouth must needs be true, when they saw that the operations of His hands were supernatural and Divine.
(2) That the miracle might make a deeper impression, and be longer remembered both by the beholders and by the person recovered. For the like reason our Saviour instituted the two great sacraments. He could have conveyed to us the pardon of our sins and the grace of His Holy Spirit without the ceremonies of washing and breaking of bread; but He thought fit to add these outward actions not only to make spiritual things more plain and conceivable, but to make transient things more permanent, that His benefits might be more remarkable and better fixed in our minds.
2. By casting up His eyes to heaven and sighing, He made intercession with God, from whom cometh salvation, in such strains as cannot be uttered or distinctly expressed; not that the Father did not hear Him readily and at all times, but that the people might see that the miracle which He wrought was the return of His prayer—that as His finger touched the tongue and ear of the man, so His request touched the throne of God.
3. The last circumstance which Christ used was the word “Ephphatha, Be opened”—a word like that which God spoke at creation (Gen_1:3). The poets tell us of a famous enchantress whose spells were so prevalent that the celestial orbs yielded obedience to her. This was either a fiction or a juggle. But it is certain that all creatures, without any demur, speedily obeyed the commands of our Lord, without expecting a second fiat.—E. Lake, D.D.
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Mar_7:31. Why did Christ now leave Tyre and Sidon and go again to Galilee?—
1. Because He was called and appointed by God to be the minister of the circumcision.
2. That by His departure, depriving them of all further benefit of His presence and ministry, He might punish the unthankfulness of the people of those coasts, who apparently did not esteem and make use of His presence and ministry while He was with them.—G. Petter.
Mar_7:34. Christ’s look, sigh, and word.—
1. The upward look. Not so much an appeal as a testimony (Joh_11:41-42), indicating—
(1) Devout faith in Heaven.
(2) Conscious harmony with Heaven.
(3) Undoubting confidence in Heaven.
2. The sigh.
(1) Holy grief.
(2) Brotherly sympathy.
(3) Anxious solicitude. Says Henry: “He had better be tongue-tied still, unless he have grace to keep his mouth as with a bridle.”
3. The word.
(1) Love.
(2) Power.
(3) Prophetic meaning. Learn:
1. Adoring gratitude (Exo_4:1).
2. Humble patience. What use are we making of speech? (Jer_8:6; Isa_6:5).
3. Practical brotherly-kindness. Some sigh, but nothing more. Idle sentiment. Others sigh, but do not look up. No faith in God. If they pity and strive to help, it is only of themselves. They give not God the glory. Let us seek the Spirit of Christ.—W. Forsyth.
A compassionate Saviour.—
1. See how great hardness of heart possesses us by nature in that we are not touched with feelings of our own sins and miseries, which caused Christ to grieve and sigh, etc.
2. Comfort to God’s children in all miseries and afflictions. Christ is a merciful and compassionate Saviour.
3. Learn by Christ’s example to be affected with grief and compassion for others’ miseries.—G. Petter.
The heavenward look.—Let us be like our Lord, lifting up our eyes and “looking up to heaven”; sighing, too, as He did, because of the many sadnesses of this world—its blindness, deafness, dumbness; but looking up to that heaven where none will be blind, but all shall see God—none deaf, but all shall hear His voice, and, hearing, understand—none dumb, but all shall praise God in the home of “hallelujah” for ever.—Jas. Lonsdale.
Mar_7:35. Ears opened before the tongue untied.—It has been well observed that Christ first opened the man’s ears, and then untied his tongue, because we must hear well before we can speak well.
Mar_7:36. Ostentation to be avoided by ministers.—
1. In doing good duties of our callings, we must be far from the very shew of ambition and vainglory.
2. Ministers must be very wise and careful to prevent all occasions and impediments that may any way hinder or interrupt them in their ministerial duties.
3. In that Christ forbade this miracle to be made known, because the time was not yet come in which the glory of His Godhead proved by His miracles should be clearly and fully manifested, hereby He teaches us to be far from desiring or seeking any honour or glory to ourselves which does not belong to us, or which does not as yet belong to us, or is not meet and fit for us at this or that time.—G. Petter.
Mar_7:37. God has done all things well.—This is one of the most momentous principles of all wisdom and religion, one of the main pillars of human virtue and happiness—a principle essentially inherent in Christianity, and which should be always present to our thoughts, the soul and guide of all our judgments, dispositions, actions, hopes, and views.
1. “God has done all things well” is applicable to the arrangements and institutions which God has established in nature, to the laws which He has prescribed to the innumerable host of His inanimate and animate creatures. All is one immense, close-compacted whole, the several parts whereof in various ways insinuate together, confine each other, advance, retard, impel, uphold, produce, enliven one another: a whole, where no power extrudes another, no part militates with another, no aim defeats another, no cause is disproportionate to its effect, no effect without cause; where is neither want nor superfluity, nor chasm; where nothing is indeterminate, nothing casual, nothing detached and separate from the rest; where absolute, exquisite connexion and order and harmony exist.
2. “God has done all things well” holds in regard to the arrangements and provisions which He has made in the moral world and for promoting moral ends. Is it expedient that thou, O man, from a sensual, animal creature, shouldst be formed and educated into a rational, wise, good, happy intelligent agent; is it expedient that thy faculties should be exerted, drawn forth, exercised, strengthened, perfected; is it expedient that thou shouldst act not from blind instinct, but by just perceptions and freely; is it expedient for thee to shun the deceitful paths of folly and vice, and pursue the career of virtue with courage and resolution; is it expedient for thee to know, to seek, to enjoy substantial, lasting happiness, and learn to look rather at the unseen than at the visible, at the future than at the present; is it expedient that thou shouldst prepare and fit thyself for a superior life,—then all these institutions and arrangements could be no other than they are; they are the properest means for promoting thy perfection and forwarding thee to thy appointment.
3. “God has done all things well” holds in regard to the particular laws which He has prescribed to us as moral creatures. They are all just and expedient, so many means and methods to perfection and happiness, how numerous soever the restraints they put upon us, however hostile they are to our lusts and passions, whatever attention, care, self-denial, exertion of our faculties it may cost us, whenever they deprive us of some present advantage, some transient pleasure. Never without danger can we exceed the bounds which He has set us, never without detriment neglect the duties which He has enjoined us, never without injury omit the exercises which He has prescribed us.
4. “God has done and does all things well” is applicable to the providence and government which He extends over all. Let the ways of His providence seem ever so dark and intricate to us, before Him all is unclouded light, all perfect order. The association of means and ends may appear to us ever so incomprehensible, ever so incongruous; the coherence and combination of the whole and its parts ever so embarrassed: His ends will be infallibly attained, the means He employs are always the surest and best, and all evolve and disentangle themselves agreeably to the laws of sovereign perfection.
5. “God has done and does all things well” applies to all the dispensations which He is pleased to vouchsafe to each of us in particular. Riches and poverty, health and sickness, majesty and meanness, prosperity and adversity, thraldom and liberty, life and death, are equally in His hand, and are severally by Him distributed, ascertained, decreed, balanced, and combined together in such manner as may best consist with the greatest possible welfare of all living beings in general, and of each in particular. No one is postponed or preferred to another from partial or self-interested views; no one needs suffer on account of another, without being indemnified for it; no one will for ever forego or bear what at present by means of the combination of things he is obliged to forego or to bear; no one will fail of his appointment to happiness; but one sooner, another later, one in this, the other in another method will arrive at it.
6. “God has done and does all things well” is applied by the worshipper of God to all the vicissitudes, accidents, events, little or great, that betide him, and thereby keeps his mind in continual serenity, even though in every other respect he is surrounded by darkness. He considers everything in its dependence on the will of the Sovereign Ruler of the world, and finds all that is agreeable to His will to be just and expedient. This idea gives a totally different aspect to all that we see and hear and learn, sheds light and joy on all, preserves us from a thousand fallacies of sophistry and artifices of imposture along the dubious journey of life, enucleates and unravels to us many things both in the natural and the moral world, pacifies us concerning all that we cannot comprehend and explain, and is inexhaustible in power and consolation.—G. J. Zollikofer.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 7
Mar_7:32. Incapacity removed in heaven.—At a deaf-and-dumb institution for children a boy was once dying, and, when his teacher signified to him that there was no hope of recovery, his face lighted up, and in his own language he said, “Oh, sir, I shall soon be singing God’s praises, and won’t you be surprised and delighted to hear me when you come?” The boy had so grieved over his incapacity for thus honouring God on earth, that the prospect of death was one of unqualified joy, as setting him free to use the best member that he had in the glorification of God.
Mar_7:33. “Aside from the multitude.”—There is too much noise around us, and we cannot hear the voice of God as long as all is well with us and we have the enjoyment of life. Every affliction is a wilderness in which a man is in solitude and stillness, so that he understands better the Word of God When human voices are silent, the voice of God begins to speak.—Dr. Tholuck.
Mar_7:34. Christ saddened by the sight of human misery.—How it must have saddened the heart of Jesus to walk through this world and see so much human misery! There is a story of a sculptor who wept as he saw at his feet the shattered fragments of his breathing marble, on which he had spent years of patient, loving toil. Jesus walked through this world amid the ruin of the noblest work of His own hands. Everywhere He saw the destruction wrought by sin. So His grief was twofold—tender sympathy with human suffering, and sorrow over the ruinous work of sin.
Ephphatha.—The Ephphatha of Christ is heard also in history. He sighed “Ephphatha,” and the conflict of His Church was revealed to His Evangelist. He sighed “Ephphatha,” and the tongue of Galileo and Kepler told of the wondrous order of the heavens. He sighed “Ephphatha,” and buried monuments gave up their records of the past, and threw sidelights on higher truths. He spoke “Ephphatha,” and Caxton gave new powers to the world; knowledge stepped forth from her dust-covered shrine, and carried her rich bounties into every city and house; history unlocked her long-hidden lore; science painted in noble colours the half-veiled face of nature; the tongue of Europe was loosed. But well might a sigh have been heaved as the Ephphatha was spoken. It is not truth alone, or holiness alone, which has been unlocked. It is not Chaucer’s “well of English undefiled,” the pure song of Spenser, the heart-rousing vision of Dante, the chivalrous epic of Tasso, the stately and magnanimous verse of Milton, alone which have been given to the world. A fouler current mingles with the pure, bright stream, and darkens the flood of knowledge—the unredeemed filth of Boccaccio, the unbridled licentiousness of Scarron, the stupid sensuality of Dancourt, the open indecency of Wycherley, the more fatal suggestiveness of Sterne. The press became indeed the voice of nations; but when it was loosed a sigh drawn from the pure heart of Christ, wounded by the misuse of a glorious opportunity, might have been heard by the Church of God. Yet Christ did not withhold the boon. Freely, ungrudgingly, were His miracles of love performed. To deny powers or privileges, or the free exercise of rights and faculties, on the ground that they may be abused, is to act according to the dictates of expediency, not of right. But there is a remedy for the evils which accompany this freedom. It is by conferring an additional and guiding gift. There is another “Ephphatha,” He speaks, “Be opened,” and the tongue is loosed; but the ear is unstopped also. While He bestows the faculty of speech, He bestows also the opportunity of hearing those glad and soul-elevating principles of righteousness and forgiveness and love which will fill the loosened tongue with joy and put a new song of praise in that long-silent mouth.—Bishop Boyd Carpenter.
Mar_7:35. Tongue loosed.—Dr. Carey found a man in Calcutta who had not spoken a loud word for four years, under a vow of perpetual silence. Nothing could open his mouth, till happening to meet with a religious tract, he read it, and his tongue was loosed. He soon threw away his paras and other badges of superstition, and became a partaker of the grace of God. Many a professing Christian, who is as dumb in religious subjects as if under a vow of silence, would find a tongue to speak if religion were really to touch and warm his heart.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On v31 Mat 15:29-31; Mar 7:31-37. “And again having gone out…
DEAF & DUMB HEALED
Mat 15:29-31; Mar 7:31-37. “And again having gone out from the coast of Tyre and Sidon, He came to the Sea of Galilee, in the midst of the coasts of Decapolis;” this word is from deka, “ten,” and polis, “city.” There is no city by the name of Decapolis, as the word literally means “ten cities,” and is the name of a region southeast of the Galilean Sea, in which there were ten prominent cities. I saw it in my recent visit. When our Savior left His retirement up in Phoenicia, He journeyed southward, leaving the Sea of Galilee on His left, preaching along through Galilee, and entering Decapolis. “They bring Him a dummy, stammering a little, and entreat Him that He may put His hand on him. And taking him from the crowd into privacy, He put His fingers into his ears, and spitting, touched his tongue, and looking up to heaven, groaned, and says to him, Ephphatha, which is, Be thou opened. And immediately his ears were opened, and the bridle of his tongue was loosed, and he continued to speak correctly. And He commanded them that they must tell no one; but the more He charged them, the more abundantly they proclaimed it abroad. And they are astonished exceedingly, saying, Truly, He hath done all things well; He both maketh the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak.” Matthew: “Many multitudes came to Him, having with them the lame, the blind, the dumb, the maimed, and many others, and threw them down at the feet of Jesus, and He healed them, so that the multitudes were astonished, seeing the dumb speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking round, and the blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel.” When the news of His presence flies on the wings of the wind to the ten prominent cities representing that great east country, known in history as Perea, constituting a part of King Herod’s dominion, the multitudes come pouring from every point of the compass, bringing with them the lame, that their feet and limbs might be restored; the maimed — i.e., the people whose hands and arms were crippled, so they could not use them; the deaf, the dumb, the blind. O what sensations sweep the multitude, like cyclones, as they see the clubfooted, withered-limbed, reel-footed, broken-legged, all running foot-races, leaping, and jumping, their old crutches all stacked up in a pile, as I saw in Brother Simpson’s Berachah Home in New York; the people who hadn’t been able to use their hands and arms in a score of years, piling rocks, climbing trees, and performing a diversity of gymnastic, dumb-bell exercises, demonstrating to the multitude the perfect restoration of their hands and arms; the dumb singing the good old songs of Zion, shouting the praises of God, and testifying like apostles; and the deaf so delighted with the musical voices ringing in their ears on all sides! In vain does Jesus charge them not to publish His mighty works, lest they arouse the multitude to come and crown Him King, as they were about to do but a month ago, when he fed the hungry multitudes in Galilee. The news is too good to keep. These hundreds and thousands of beneficiaries are bound to tell His wonderful benefactions, miraculously healing them, to the unutterable surprise of all their friends, who now rejoice with them, making many homes vocal with the praises of Israel’s God, who has sent among them a Mighty Prophet, having power over all physical ailments and spiritual derangements, everywhere healing diseases and ejecting demons.
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This Hebrew word ephphatha, which means “be thou opened,” has a beautiful application throughout the gracious economy. You will never hear the Word of the Lord to spiritual edification unless Jesus touches the ear of your soul and says, Ephphatha. It is equally true that you will never see the deep things of God, and the Bible, and the beauty of holiness in His kingdom, unless He touch your spiritual eye, and say, Ephphatha.
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v33 Mar 7:33 - Mar 7:34.
Mark
THE PATTERN OF SERVICE
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Mar 7:33 - Mar 7:34.
For what reason was there this unwonted slowness in Christ’s healing works? For what reason was there this unusual emotion ere He spoke the word which cleansed? As to the former question, a partial answer may perhaps be that our Lord is here on half-heathen ground, where aids to faith were much needed, and His power had to be veiled that it might be beheld. Hence the miracle is a process rather than an act; and, advancing as it does by distinct stages, is conformed in appearance to men’s works of mercy, which have to adapt means to ends, and creep to their goal by persevering toil. As to the latter, we know not why the sight of this one poor sufferer should have struck so strongly on the ever-tremulous chords of Christ’s pitying heart; but we do know that it was the vision brought before His spirit by this single instance of the world’s griefs and sicknesses-in which mass, however, the special case before Him was by no means lost-that raised His eyes to heaven in mute appeal, and forced the groan from His breast.
The ‘missionary spirit’ is but one aspect of the Christian spirit. We shall only strengthen the former as we invigorate the latter. Harm has been done, both to ourselves and to that great cause, by seeking to stimulate compassion and efforts for heathen lands by the use of other excitements, which have tended to vitiate even the emotions they have aroused, and are apt to fail as when we need them most. It may therefore be profitable if we turn to Christ’s own manner of working, and His own emotions in His merciful deeds, set forth in this remarkable narrative, as containing lessons for us in our missionary and evangelistic work. I must necessarily omit more than a passing reference to the slow process of healing which this miracle exhibits. But that, too, has its teaching for us, who are so often tempted to think ourselves badly used, unless the fruit of our toil grows up, like Jonah’s gourd, before our eyes. If our Lord was content to reach His end of blessing step by step, we may well accept ‘patient continuance in well-doing’ as the condition indispensable to reaping in due season.
But there are other thoughts still more needful which suggest themselves. Those minute details which this Evangelist ever delights to give of our Lord’s gestures, words, looks, and emotions, not only add graphic force to the narrative but are precious glimpses into the very heart of Christ. That fixed gaze into heaven, that groan which neither the glories seen above nor the conscious power to heal could stifle, that most gentle touch, as if removing material obstacles from the deaf ears, and moistening the stiff tongue that it might move more freely in the parched mouth, that word of authority which could not be wanting even when His working seemed likest a servant’s, do surely carry large lessons for us. The condition of all service, the cost of feeling at which our work must be done, the need that the helpers should identify themselves with the sufferers, and the victorious power of Christ’s word over all deaf ears-these are the thoughts which I desire to connect with our text and to commend to your meditation now.
I. We have here set forth, in the Lord’s heavenward look, the foundation and condition of all true work for God.
The profound questions which are involved in the fact that, as man, Christ held communion with God in the exercise of faith and aspiration, the same in kind as ours, do not concern us here. I speak to those who believe that Jesus is for us the perfect example of complete manhood, and who therefore believe that He is ‘the leader of faith,’ the head of the long processions of those who in every age have trusted in God and been ‘lightened.’ But, perhaps, though that conviction holds its place in our creeds, it has not been as completely incorporated with our thoughts as it should have been. There has, no doubt, been a tendency, operating in much of our evangelical teaching, and in the common stream of orthodox opinion, to except, half unconsciously, the exercises of the religious life from the sphere of Christ’s example, and we need to be reminded that Scripture presents His vow, ‘I will put my trust in Him,’ as the crowning proof of His brotherhood, and that the prints of His kneeling limbs have left their impressions where we kneel before the throne. True, the relation of the Son to the Father involves more than communion-namely, unity. But if we follow the teaching of the Bible, we shall not presume that the latter excludes the former, but understand that the unity is the foundation of perfect communion, and the communion the manifestation, so far as it can be manifested, of the unspeakable unity. The solemn words which shine like stars-starlike in that their height above us shrinks their magnitude and dims their brightness, and in that they are points of radiance partially disclosing, and separated by, abysses of unlighted infinitude-tell us that in the order of eternity, before creatures were, there was communion, for ‘the Word was with God,’ and there was unity, for ‘the Word was God.’ And in the records of the life manifested on earth the consciousness of unity loftily utters itself in the unfathomable declaration, ‘I and my Father are one’; whilst the consciousness of communion, dependent like ours on harmony of will and true obedience, breathes peacefully in the witness which He leaves to Himself: ‘The Father has not left Me alone, for I do always the things that please Him.’
We are fully warranted, then, in supposing that that wistful gaze to heaven means, and may be taken to symbolise, our Lord’s conscious direction of thought and spirit to God as He wrought His work of mercy. There are two distinctions to be noted between His communion with God and ours before we can apply the lesson to ourselves. His heavenward look was not the renewal of interrupted fellowship, but rather, as a man standing firmly on firm rock may yet lift his foot to plant it again where it was before, and settle himself in his attitude before he strikes with all his might; so we may say Christ fixes Himself where He always stood, and grasps anew the hand that He always held, before He does the deed of power. The communion that had never been broken was renewed; how much more the need that in our work for God the renewal of the-alas! too sadly sundered-fellowship should ever precede and always accompany our efforts! And again, Christ’s fellowship was with the Father, while ours must be with the Father through the Son. The communion to which we are called is with Jesus Christ, in whom we find God.
The manner of that intercourse, and the various discipline of ourselves with a view to its perfecting which Christian prudence prescribes, need not concern us here. As for the latter, let us not forget that a wholesome and wide-reaching self-denial cannot be dispensed with. Hands that are full of gilded toys and glass beads cannot grasp durable riches, and eyes that have been accustomed to glaring lights see only darkness when they look up to the violet heaven with all its stars. As to the former, every part of our nature above the simply animal is capable of God, and the communion ought to include our whole being. Christ is truth for the understanding, authority for the will, love for the heart, certainty for the hope, fruition for all the desires, and for the conscience at once cleansing and law. Fellowship with Him is no indolent passiveness, nor the luxurious exercise of certain emotions, but the contact of the whole nature with its sole adequate object and rightful Lord.
Such intercourse, brethren, lies at the foundation of all work for God. It is the condition of all our power. It is the measure of all our success. Without it we may seem to realise the externals of prosperity, but it will be all illusion. With it we may perchance seem to ‘spend our strength for nought’; but heaven has its surprises; and those who toiled, nor left their hold of their Lord in all their work, will have to say at last with wonder, as they see the results of their poor efforts, ‘Who hath begotten me these? behold, I was left alone; these, where had they been?’
Consider in few words the manifold ways in which the indispensable prerequisite of all right effort for Christ may be shown to be communion with Christ.
The heavenward look is the renewal of our own vision of the calm verities in which we trust, the recourse for ourselves to the realities which we desire that others should see. And what is equal in persuasive power to the simple utterance of one’s own intense conviction? He only will infuse his own religion into other minds, whose religion is not a set of hard dogmas, but is fused by the heat of personal experience into a river of living fire. It will flow then, not otherwise. The only claim which the hearts of men will listen to, in those who would win them to spiritual beliefs, is that ancient one: ‘That which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, declare we unto you.’ Mightier than all arguments, than all ‘proofs of the truth of the Christian religion,’ and penetrating into a sphere deeper than that of the understanding, is the simple proclamation, ‘We have found the Messias.’ If we would give sight to the blind, we must ourselves be gazing into heaven. Only when we testify of that which we see, as one might who, standing in a beleaguered city, discerned on the horizon the filmy dust-cloud through which the spearheads of the deliverers flashed at intervals, shall we win any to gaze with us till they too behold and know themselves set free.
The heavenward look draws new strength from the source of all our might. In our work, dear brethren, contemplating as it ought to do exclusively spiritual results, what we do depends largely on what we are, and what we are depends on what we receive, and what we receive depends on the depth and constancy of our communion with God. ‘The help which is done upon earth He doeth it all Himself.’ We and our organisations are but the channels through which this might is poured; and if we choke the bed with turbid masses of drift and heavy rocks of earthly thoughts, or build from bank to bank thick dams of worldliness compact with slime of sin, how shall the full tide flow through us for the healing of the salt and barren places? Will it not leave its former course silted up with sand, and cut for itself new outlets, while the useless quays that once rang with busy life stand silent, and ‘the cities are solitary that were full of people’? We are
‘The trumpet at Thy lips, the clarion
Full of Thy cry, sonorous with Thy breath.’
Let us see to it that by fellowship with Christ we keep the passage clear, and become recipients of the inspiration which shall thrill our else-silent spirits into the blast of loud alarum and the ringing proclamation of the true King.
The heavenward look will guard us from the temptations which surround all our service, and the distractions which lay waste our lives. It is habitual communion with Christ that alone will give the persistency that makes systematic, continuous efforts for Him possible, and yet will keep systematic work from degenerating, as it ever tends to do, into mechanical work. There is no greater virtue in irregular desultory service than in systematised labour. The one is not freer from besetting temptations than the other, only the temptations are of different sorts. Machinery saves manual toil, and multiplies force. But we may have too heavy machinery for what engineers call the boiler power,-too many wheels and shafts for the steam we have to drive them with. What we want is not less organisation, or other sorts of it, but more force. Any organisation will do if we have God’s Spirit breathing through it. None will be better than so much old iron if we have not.
We are ever apt to trust to our work, to do it without a distinct recurrence at each moment to the principles on which it rests, and the motives by which it should be actuated,-to become so absorbed in details that we forget the purpose which alone gives them meaning, to over-estimate the external aspects of it, to lose sight of the solemn truths which make it so grand, and to think of it as commonplace because it is common, as ordinary because it is familiar. And from these most real dangers, which beset us all, there is no refuge but the frequent, the habitual, gaze into the open heavens, which will show us again the realities of things, and bring to our spirits, dwarfed even by habits of goodness, the renewal of former motives by the vision of Jesus Christ.
Such constant communion will further surround us with an atmosphere through which none of the many influences which threaten our Christian life and our Christian work can penetrate. As the diver in his bell sits dry at the bottom of the sea, and draws a pure air from the free heavens far above him, and is parted from that murderous waste of green death that clings so closely round the translucent crystal walls which keep him safe; so we, enclosed in God, shall repel from ourselves all that would overflow to destroy us and our work, and may by His grace lay deeper than the waters some courses in the great building that shall one day rise, stately and many-mansioned, from out of the conquered waves. For ourselves, and for all that we do for Him, living communion with God is the means of power and peace, of security and success.
It was never more needful than now. Feverish activity rules in all spheres of life. The iron wheels of the car which bears the modern idol of material progress whirl fast, and crush remorselessly all who cannot keep up the pace. Christian effort is multiplied and systematised beyond all precedent. And all these facts make calm fellowship with God hard to compass. The measure of the difficulty is the measure of the need. I, for my part, believe that there are few Christian duties more neglected than that of meditation, the very name of which has fallen of late into comparative disuse, that augurs ill for the frequency of the thing. We are so busy thinking, discussing, defending, inquiring; or preaching, and teaching, and working, that we have no time and no leisure of heart for quiet contemplation, without which the exercise of the intellect upon Christ’s truth will not feed, and busy activity in Christ’s cause may starve, the soul. There are few things which the Church of this day in all its parts needs more than to obey the invitation, ‘Come ye yourselves apart into a lonely place, and rest a while.’
Christ has set us the example. Let our prayers ascend as His did, and in our measure the answers which came to Him will not fail us. For us, too, ‘praying, the heavens’ shall be ‘opened,’ and the peace-bringing spirit fall dove-like on our meek hearts. For us, too, when the shadow of our cross lies black and gaunt upon our paths, and our souls are troubled, communion with heaven will bring the assurance, audible to our ears at least, that God will glorify Himself even in us. If, after many a weary day, we seek to hold fellowship with God as He sought it on the Mount of Olives, or among the solitudes of the midnight hills, or out in the morning freshness of the silent wilderness, like Him we shall have men gathering around us to hear us speak when we come forth from ‘the secret place of the Most High.’ If our prayer, like His, goes before our mighty deeds, the voice that first pierced the skies will penetrate the tomb, and make the dead stir in their grave-clothes. If our longing, trustful look is turned to the heavens, we shall not speak in vain on earth when we say, ‘Be opened!’
Brethren, we cannot do without the communion which our Master needed. Do we delight in what strengthened Him? Does our work rest upon the basis of inward fellowship with God which underlay His? Alas! that our Pattern should be our rebuke, and that the readiest way to force home our faults on our consciences should be the contemplation of the life which we say that we try to copy!
II. We have here pity for the evils we would remove, set forth by the Lord’s sigh.
The frequency with which this Evangelist records our Lord’s emotions on the sight of sin and sorrow has been often noticed. In his pages we read of Christ’s grief at the hardness of men’s hearts, of His marvelling because of their unbelief, of His being moved with compassion for an outcast leper and a hungry multitude, of His sighing deeply in His spirit when prejudiced hostility, assuming the appearance of candid inquiry, asked of Him a sign from heaven. All these instances of true human feeling, like His tears at the grave of Lazarus, and His weariness as He sat on the well, and His tired sleep in the stern of the little fishing-boat, and His hunger and His thirst, are very precious as aids in realising His perfect manhood; but they have a worth beyond even that. They show us how the manifold ills and evils of man’s fate and conduct appealed to the only pure heart that ever beat, and how quickly and warmly it, by reason of its purity, throbbed in sympathy with all the woe. One might have thought that in the present case the consciousness that His help was so near would have been sufficient to repress the sigh. One might have thought that the heavenward look would have stayed the tears. But neither the happiness of active benevolence, nor the knowledge of immediate cure, nor the glories above flooding His vision, could lift the burden from His labouring breast. And surely in this too, we may discern a law for all our efforts, that their worth shall be in proportion to the expense of feeling at which they are done. Men predict the harvests in Egypt by the height which the river marks on the gauge of the inundation. So many feet there represent so much fertility. Tell me the depth of a Christian man’s compassion, and I will tell you the measure of his fruitfulness.
What was it that drew that sigh from the heart of Jesus? One poor man stood before him, by no means the most sorely afflicted of the many wretched ones whom He healed. But He saw in him more than a solitary instance of physical infirmities. Did there not roll darkly before His thoughts that whole weltering sea of sorrow that moans round the world of which here is but one drop that He could dry up? Did there not rise black and solid, against the clear blue to which He had been looking, the mass of man’s sin, of which these bodily infirmities were but a poor symbol as well as a consequence? He saw, as none but He could bear to see, the miserable realities of human life. His knowledge of all that man might be, of all that the most of men were becoming, His power of contemplating in one awful aggregate the entire sum of sorrows and sins, laid upon His heart a burden which none but He has ever endured. His communion with heaven deepened the dark shadow on earth, and the eyes that looked up to God and saw Him, could not but see foulness where others suspected none, and murderous messengers of hell walking in darkness unpenetrated by mortal sight. And all that pain of clearer knowledge of the sorrowfulness of sorrow, and the sinfulness of sin, was laid upon a heart in which was no selfishness to blunt the sharp edge of the pain nor any sin to stagnate the pity that flowed from the wound. To Jesus Christ, life was a daily martyrdom before death had ‘made the sacrifice complete,’ and He ‘bore our griefs and carried our sorrows’ through many a weary hour before He ‘bare them in His own body on the tree.’ Therefore, ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law’ which Christ obeyed, becomes a command for all who would draw men to Him. And true sorrow, a sharp and real sense of pain, becomes indispensable as preparation for, and accompaniment to, our work.
Mark how in us, as in our Lord, the sigh of compassion is to be connected with the look to heaven. It follows upon that gaze. The evils become more real, more terrible, by their startling contrast with the unshadowed light which lives above cloudracks and mists. It is a sharp shock to turn from the free sweep of the heavens, starry and radiant, to the sights that meet us in ‘this dim spot which men call earth.’ Thus habitual communion with God is the root of the truest and purest compassion. It does not withdraw us from our fellow feeling with our brethren, it cultivates no isolation for undisturbed beholding of God. It at once supplies a standard by which to measure the greatness of man’s godlessness, and therefore of his gloom, and a motive for laying the pain of these upon our hearts, as if they were our own. He has looked into the heavens to little purpose who has not learned how bad and how sad the world now is, and how God bends over it in pitying love.
And that same fellowship which will clear our eyes and soften our hearts, is also the one consolation which we have when our sense of ‘all the ills that flesh is heir to’ becomes deep nearly to despair. When one thinks of the real facts of human life, and tries to conceive of the frightful meanness and passion and hate and wretchedness that have been howling and shrieking and gibbering and groaning through dreary millenniums, one’s brain reels, and hope seems to be absurdity, and joy a sin against our fellows, as a feast would be in a house next door to where was a funeral. I do not wonder at settled sorrow falling upon men of vivid imagination, keen moral sense, and ordinary sensitiveness, when they brood long on the world as it is. But I do wonder at the superficial optimism which goes on with its little prophecies about human progress, and its rose-coloured pictures of human life, and sees nothing to strike it dumb for ever in men’s writhing miseries, blank failures, and hopeless end. Ah! brethren, if it were not for the heavenward look, how could we bear the sight of earth? ‘We see not yet all things put under Him.’ No! God knows, far enough off from that. Man’s folly, man’s submission to the creatures he should rule, man’s agonies, and man’s transgression, are a grim contrast to the Psalmist’s vision. If we had only earth to look to, despair of the race, expressed in settled melancholy apathy or in fierce cynicism, were the wisest attitude. But there is more within our view than earth; ‘we see Jesus’; we look to the heaven, and as we behold the true Man, we see more than ever, indeed, how far from that pattern we all are; but we can bear the thought of what men as yet have been, when we see that perfect Example of what men shall be. The root and the consolation of our sorrow for men’s evils is communion with God.
Let me remind you, too, that still more dangerous than the pity which is not based upon, and corrected by, the look to heaven, is the pity which does not issue in strenuous work. It is easy to excite people’s emotions; but it is perilous for both the operator and the subject, unless they be excited through the understanding, and pass on the impulse to the will and the practical powers. The surest way to petrify a heart is to stimulate the feelings, and give them nothing to do. They will never recover their original elasticity if they have been wantonly drawn forth thus. Coldness, hypocrisy, spurious sentimentalism, and a whole train of affectations and falsehoods follow the steps of an emotional religion, which divorces itself from active work. Pity is meant to impel to help. Let us not be content with painting sad and true pictures of men’s woes,-of the gloomy hopelessness of idolatry, for instance-but let us remember that every time our compassion is stirred, and no action ensues, our hearts are in some measure indurated, and the sincerity of our religion in some degree impaired. White-robed Pity is meant to guide the strong powers of practical help to their work. She is to them as eyes to go before them and point their tasks. They are to her as hands to execute her gentle will. Let us see to it that we rend them not apart; for idle pity is unblessed and fruitless as a sigh cast into the fragrant air, and unpitying work is more unblessed and fruitless still. Let us remember, too, that Christlike and indispensable as Pity is, she is second, and not first. Let us take heed that we preserve that order in our own minds, and in our endeavours to stimulate one another. For if we reverse it, we shall surely find the fountains of compassion drying up long before the wide stretches of thirsty land are watered, and the enterprises which we have sought to carry on by appealing to a secondary motive, languishing when there is most need for vigour. Here is the true sequence which must be observed in our missionary and evangelistic work, ‘Looking up to heaven, He sighed.’
Dear brethren! must we not all acknowledge woful failures in this regard? How much of our service, our giving, our preaching, our planning, has been carried on without one thought of the ills and godlessness we profess to be seeking to cure! If some angel’s touch could annihilate all that portion of our activity, what gaps would be left in all our subscription lists, our sermons, and our labours both at home and abroad! Annihilate, do I say? It is done already. Such work is nothing, and comes to nothing. ‘Yea, it shall not be planted; yea, it shall not be sown; and He shall also blow upon it, and it shall wither.’
The hindrances to such abiding consciousness of and pity for the world’s woes run all down to the one tap-root of all sin, selfishness. The remedies run all up to the common form of all goodness, the self-absorbing communion with Jesus Christ. And besides that mother-tincture of everything wrong, subsidiary impediments may be found in the small amounts of time and effort which any of us give to bring the facts of the world’s condition vividly before our minds. The destruction of all emotion is the indolent acquiescence in general statements which we are too lazy or busy to break up into individual cases. To talk about hundreds of millions of idolaters leaves the heart untouched. But take one soul out of all that mass, and try to feel what his life is in its pitchy darkness, broken only by lurid lights of fear and sickly gleams of hope, in its passions ungoverned by love, its remorse uncalmed by pardon, its affections feeling like the tendrils of some climbing plant for the stay they cannot find, and in the cruel blackness that swallows it up irrevocably at last. Follow it from the childhood that knows no discipline to the grave that knows no waking, and will not the solitary instance come nearer our hearts than the millions? But however that may be, the sluggishness of our imaginations, the very familiarity with the awful facts, our own feeble hold on Christ, our absorption in personal interests, the incompleteness and desultoriness of our communion with our Lord, do all concur with our natural selfishness to make a sadly large proportion of our apparent labours for God and men utterly cold and unfeeling, and therefore utterly worthless. Has the benighted world ever caused us as much pain as some trivial pecuniary loss has done? Have we ever felt the smart of the gaping wounds through which our brothers’ blood is pouring forth as much as we do the tiniest scratch on our own fingers? Does it sound to us like exaggerated rhetoric when a prophet breaks out, ‘Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep night and day!’ or when an Apostle in calmer tones declares, ‘I have great heaviness and continual sorrow of heart’? Some seeds are put to steep and swell in water, that they may be tested before sowing. The seed which we sow will not germinate unless it be saturated with our tears. And yet the sorrow must be blended with joy; for it is glad labour which is ordinarily productive labour-just as the growing time is the changeful April, and one knows not whether the promise of harvest is most sure in the clouds that drop fatness, or in the sunshine that makes their depths throb with whitest light, and touches the moist-springing blades into emeralds and diamonds. The gladness comes from the heavenward look, the pain is breathed in the deep-drawn sigh; both must be united in us if we would ‘approve ourselves as the servants of God-as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.’
III. We have here loving contact with those whom we would help set forth in the Lord’s touch.
The reasons for the variety observable in Christ’s method of communicating supernatural blessing were, probably, too closely connected with unrecorded differences in the spiritual conditions of the recipients to be distinctly traceable by us. But though we cannot tell why a particular method was employed in a given case, why now a word, and now a symbolic action, now the touch of His hand, and now the hem of His garment, appeared to be the vehicles of His power, we can discern the significance of these divers ways, and learn great lessons from them all.
His touch was sometimes obviously the result of what one may venture to call instinctive tenderness, as when He lifted the little children in His arms and laid His hands upon their heads. It was, I suppose, always the spontaneous expression of love and compassion, even when it was something more. The touch of His hand on the ghastly glossiness of the leper’s skin was, no doubt, His assertion of priestly functions, and of elevation above all laws of defilement; but what was it to the poor outcast, who for years had never felt the warm contact of flesh and blood? It always indicated that He Himself was the source of healing and life. It always expressed His identification of Himself with sorrow and sickness. So that it is in principle analogous to, and may be taken as illustrative of, that transcendent act whereby He ‘became flesh, and dwelt among us.’ Indeed, the very word by which our Lord’s taking the blind man by the hand is described in the chapter following our text, is that employed in the Epistle to the Hebrews when, dealing with the true brotherhood of Jesus, the writer says, ‘He took not hold of angels, but of the seed of Abraham He taketh hold.’ Christ’s touch is His willing contact with man’s infirmities and sins, that He may strengthen and hallow.
And the lesson is one of universal application. Wherever men would help their fellows, this is a prime requisite, that the would-be helper should come down to the level of those whom he desires to aid. If we wish to teach, we must stoop to think the scholar’s thoughts. The master who has forgotten his boyhood will have poor success. If we would lead to purer emotions, we must try to enter into the lower feelings which we labour to elevate. It is of no use to stand at the mouth of the alleys we wish to cleanse, with our skirts daintily gathered about us, and smelling-bottle in hand, to preach homilies on the virtues of cleanliness. We must go in among the filth, and handle it, if we want to have it cleared away. The degraded must feel that we do not shrink from them, or we shall do them no good. The leper, shunned by all, and ashamed of himself because everybody loathes him, hungers in his hovel for the grasp of a hand that does not care for defilement, if it can bring cleansing. Even in regard to common material helps the principle holds good. We are too apt to cast our doles to the poor like bones to a dog, and then to wonder at what we are pleased to think men’s ingratitude. A benefit may be so conferred as to hurt more than a blow; and we cannot be surprised if so-called charity which is given with contempt and a sense of superiority, should be received with a scowl, and chafe a man’s spirit like a fetter. Such gifts bless neither him who gives nor him who takes. We must put our hearts into them, if we would win hearts by them. We must be ready, like our Master, to take blind beggars by the hand, if we would bless or help them. The despair and opprobrium of our modern civilisation; the gulf growing wider and deeper between Dives and Lazarus, between Belgravia and Whitechapel; the mournful failure of legalised help, and of delegated efforts to bridge it over, the darkening ignorance, the animal sensuousness, the utter heathenism that lives in every town of England, within a stone’s-throw of Christian houses, and near enough to hear the sound of public worship-will yield to nothing but that sadly forgotten law which enjoins personal contact with the sinful and the suffering, as one chief condition of raising them from the black mire in which they welter.
But the same law has its special application in regard to the enterprise of Christian missions.
It defines the spirit in which Christian men should proclaim the Gospel. The effect of much well-meant Christian effort is simply to irritate. People are very quick to catch delicate intonations which reveal a secret sense, ‘how much better, wiser, more devout I am than these people!’ and wherever a trace of that appears in our work, the good of it is apt to be marred. We all know how hackneyed the charge of spiritual pride and Pharisaic self-complacency is, and, thank God, how unjust it often is. But averse as men may be to the truths which humble, and willing as they may be to assume that the very effort on our parts to present these to others implies a claim which they resent, we may at least learn from the threadbare calumny, what strikes men about our position, and what rouses their antagonism to us. It is allowable to be taught by our enemies, especially when it is such a lesson as this, that we must carefully divest our evangelistic work of apparent pretensions to superiority, and take our stand by the side of those to whom we speak. We cannot lecture men into the love of Christ, We can win them to it only by showing Christ’s love to them; and not the least important element in that process is the exhibition of our own love. We have a Gospel to speak of which the very heart is that the Son of God stooped to become one with the lowliest and most sinful; and how can that Gospel be spoken with power unless we too stoop like Him? We have to echo the invitation, ‘Learn of Me, for I am lowly in heart’; and how can such divine words flow from lips into which like grace has not been poured? Our theme is a Saviour who shrank from no sinner, who gladly consorted with publicans and harlots, who laid His hand on pollution, and His heart, full of God and of love, on hearts reeking with sin; and how can our message correspond with our theme if, even in delivering it, we are saying to ourselves, ‘The Temple of the Lord are we: this people which knoweth not the law is cursed’? Let us beware of the very real danger which besets us in this matter, and earnestly seek to make ourselves one with those whom we would gather into Christ, by actual familiarity with their condition, and by identification of ourselves in feeling with them, after the example of that greatest of Christian teachers who became ‘all things to all men, that by all means he might gain some’; after the higher example, which Paul followed, of that dear Lord who, being Highest, descended to the lowest, and in the days of His humiliation was not content with speaking words of power from afar, nor abhorred the contact of mortality and disease and loathsome corruption; but laid His hands upon death, and it lived; upon sickness, and it was whole; on rotting leprosy, and it was sweet as the flesh of a little child.
The same principle might be further applied to our Christian work, as affecting the form in which we should present the truth. The sympathetic identification of ourselves with those to whom we try to carry the Gospel will certainly make us wise to know how to shape our message. Seeing with their eyes, we shall be able to graduate the light. Thinking their thoughts, and having in some measure succeeded, by force of sheer community of feeling, in having, as it were, got inside their minds, we shall unconsciously, and without effort, be led to such aspects of Christ’s all-comprehensive truth as they most need. There will be no shooting over people’s heads, if we love them well enough to understand them. There will be no toothless generalities, when our interest in men keeps their actual condition and temptations clear before us. There will be no flinging fossil doctrines at them from a height, as if Christ’s blessed Gospel were, in another than the literal sense, ‘a stone of offence,’ if we have taken our place on their level. And without such sympathy, these and a thousand other weaknesses and faults will certainly vitiate much of our Christian effort.
Let me not be misunderstood when I speak of adapting our presentation of the Gospel to the wants of those to whom we carry it. That general statement may express the plainest dictate of Christian prudence or the most dangerous practical error. The one great truth of the Gospel wants no adaptation, by our handling, to any soul of man. It is fitted for all, and demands only plain, loving, earnest statement. There must be no tampering with central verities, nor any diplomatic reserve on the plea of consulting the needs of the men whom we address. Every sinful spirit needs the simple Gospel of salvation by Jesus Christ more than it needs anything else. Nor does adaptation mean deferential stretching a point to meet man’s wishes in our presentation of the truth. Their wishes have to be contravened, that their wants may be met. The truth which a man or a generation requires most is the truth which he or it likes least; and the true Christian teacher’s adaptation of his message will consist quite as much in opposing the desires and contradicting the lies, as in seeking to meet the felt wants, of the world. Nauseous medicines or sharp lancets are adapted to the sick man, quite as truly as pleasant food and soothing ointment.
But remembering all this, we still have a wide field for the operation of practical wisdom and loving common-sense, in determining the form of our message and the manner of our action. And not the least important of qualifications for solving the problems connected therewith is cheerful identification of ourselves with the thoughts and feelings of those whom we would fain draw to the love of God. Such contact with men will win their hearts, as well as soften ours, It will make them willing to hear, as well as us wise to speak. It will enrich our own lives with wide experience and multiplied interests. It will lift us out of the enchanted circle which selfishness draws around us. It will silently proclaim the Lord from whom we have learnt it. The clasp of the hand will be precious, even apart from the virtue that may flow from it, and may be to many a soul burdened with a consciousness of corruption, the dawning of belief in a love that does not shrink even from its foulness. Let us preach the Lord’s touch as the source of all cleansing. Let us imitate it in our lives, that ‘if any will not hear the word, they may without the word be won.’
IV. We have here the true healing power and the consciousness of wielding it set forth in the Lord’s authoritative word.
All the rest of His action was either the spontaneous expression of His true participation in human sorrow, or a merciful veiling of His glory that sense-bound eyes might see it the better. But the word was the utterance of His will, and that was omnipotent. The hand laid on the sick, the blind or the deaf was not even the channel of His power. The bare putting forth of His energy was all-sufficient. In these we see the loving, pitying man. In this blazes forth, yet more loving, yet more compassionate, the effulgence of manifest God. Therefore so often do we read the very syllables with which His ‘voice then shook the earth,’ vibrating through all the framework of the material universe. Therefore do the Gospels bid us listen when He rebukes the fever, and it departs; when He says to the demons ‘Go,’ and they go; when one word louder in its human articulation than the howling wind hushes the surges; when ‘Talitha cumi’ brings back the fair young spirit from dreary wanderings among the shades of death. Therefore was it a height of faith not found in Israel when the Gentile soldier, whose training had taught him the power of absolute authority, as heathenism had driven him to long for a man who should speak with the imperial sway of a god, recognised in His voice an all-commanding power. From of old, the very signature of divinity has been declared to be, ‘He spake, and it was done’; and He, the breath of whose lips could set in motion material changes, is that Eternal Word, by whom all things were made.
What unlimited consciousness of sovereign dominion sounds in that imperative from His autocratic lips! It is spoken in deaf ears, but He knows that it will be heard. He speaks as the fontal source, not as the recipient channel, of healing. He anticipates no delay, no resistance. There is neither effort nor uncertainty in the curt command. He is sure that He has power, and He is sure that the power is His own.
There is no analogy here between us and Him. Alone, fronting the whole race of man, He stands-utterer of a word which none can say after Him, possessor of unshared might, ‘and of His fulness do all we receive.’ But even from that divine authority and solitary sovereign consciousness we may gather lessons of infinite value for all Christian workers. Of His fulness we have received, and the power of the word on His lips may teach us that of His word even on ours, as the victorious certainty with which He spake His will of healing may remind us of the confidence with which it becomes us to proclaim His name.
His will was almighty then. Is it less mighty or less loving now? Does it not gather all the world in the sweep of its mighty purpose of mercy? His voice pierced then into the dull, cold ear of death, and has it become weaker since? His word spoken by Him was enough to banish the foul spirits that run riot, swine-like, in the garden of God in man’s soul, trampling down and eating up its flowers and fruitage; is the word spoken of Him less potent to cast them out? Were not all the mighty deeds which He wrought by the breath of His lips on men’s bodies prophecies of the yet mightier ones which His Will of love, and the utterance of that Will by stammering lips, may work on men’s souls? Let us not in our faintheartedness number up our failures, the deaf that will not hear, the dumb that will not speak His praise, nor unbelievingly say, ‘Christ’s own word was mighty, but the word concerning Christ is weak on our lips.’ Not so; our lips are unclean, and our words are weak, but His word-the utterance of His loving Will that men should be saved-is what it always was and always will be. We have it, brethren, to proclaim. Did our Master countenance the faithless contrast between the living force of His word when He dwelt on earth, and the feebleness of it as He speaks through His servant? If He did, what did He mean when He said, ‘He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto the Father’? And the reflection of Christ’s triumphant consciousness of power should irradiate our spirits as we do His work, like the gleam from gazing on God’s glory which shone on the lawgiver’s stern face while he talked with men. We have everything to assure us that we cannot fail. The manifest fitness of the Gospel to be the food of all souls; the victories of nineteen centuries, which at least prove that all conditions of society, all classes of civilisation, all varieties of race, all peculiarities of individual temperament, all depths of degradation and distances of alienation, are capable of receiving the word, which, like corn, can grow in every latitude, and, though it be an exotic everywhere, can anywhere be naturalised; the firm promises of unchanging faithfulness, the universal aspect of Christ’s work, the prevalence of His continual intercession, the indwelling of His abiding Spirit, and, not least, the unerring voice of our own experience of the power of the truth to bless and save-all these are ours. In view of these, what should make us doubt? Unwavering confidence is the only attitude that corresponds to such certainties. We have a rock to build on; let us build on it with rock. Putting fear and hesitancy far from us, let us gird ourselves with the joyful strength of assured victory, striking as those who know that conquest is bound to their standard, and who through all the dust of the field see the fair vision of the final triumph. The work is done before we begin it. ‘It is finished’ was a clarion blast proclaiming that all was won when all seemed lost. Weary ages have indeed to roll away before the great voice from heaven shall declare, ‘It is done’; but all that lies between the two is but the gradual unfolding and appropriating of the results which are already secured. The ‘strong man’ is bound; what remains is but the ‘spoiling of his house.’ The head is bruised; what remains is but the dying lashing of the snaky horror’s powerless coils. ‘I send you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour.’ The tearful sowing in the stormy winter’s day has been done by the Son of Man. For us there remains the joy of harvest-hot and hard work, indeed, but gladsome too.
Then, however languor and despondency may sometimes tempt us, thinking of slow advancement and of dying men who fade from the place of the living before the gradual light has reached their eyes, our duty is plain-to be sure that the word we carry cannot fail. You remember the old story how, when Jerusalem was in her hour of direst need, and the army of Babylon lay around her battered walls, the prophet was bid to buy ‘the field that is in Anathoth, in the country of Benjamin,’ for a sign that the transient fury of the invader would be beaten back, that Israel might again dwell safely in the land. So with us, the host of our King’s enemies comes up like a river strong and mighty; but all this world, held though it be by the usurper is still ‘Thy land, O Immanuel,’ and over it all Thy peaceful rule shall be established! Many things in this day tempt the witnesses of God to speak with doubting voice. Angry opposition, contemptuous denial, complacent assumption that a belief in old-fashioned evangelical truth is, ipso facto, a proof of mental weakness, abound. Let them not rob us of our confidence. Shame on us if we let ourselves be frightened from it by a sarcasm or a laugh! Do you fall back on all these grounds for assured reliance to which I have referred, and make the good old answer yours, ‘Why, herein is a marvellous thing, that ye know not whence He is, and yet-He hath opened mine eyes’! Trust the word which you have to speak. Speak it and work for its diffusion as if you did trust it. Do not preach it as if it were a notion of your own. In so far as it is, it will share the fate of all human conceptions of divine realities-’will have its day, and cease to be.’ Do not speak it as if it were some new nostrum for curing the ills of humanity, which might answer or might not. Speak it as if it were what it is-’the word of God which liveth and abideth for ever.’ Speak it as if you were what you are, neither its inventors nor its discoverers, but only its messengers, who have but to ‘preach the preaching which He bids’ you. And to all the widespread questionings of this day, filmy and air-filling as the gossamers of an autumn evening, to all the theories of speculation, and all the panaceas of unbelieving philanthropy, present the solid certainties of your inmost experience, and the yet more solid certainty of that all-loving name and all-sufficient work on which these repose. ‘We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness. And we know that the Son of God is come.’ Then our proclamation, ‘This is the true God and eternal life,’ will not be in vain; and our loving entreaty, ‘Keep yourselves from idols,’ will be heard and yielded to in many a land.
The sum of the whole matter is briefly this. The root of all our efficiency in this great task to which we, unworthy, have been called, is in fellowship with Jesus Christ. ‘The branch cannot bear fruit of itself; without Me ye can do nothing.’ Living near Him, and growing like Him by gazing upon Him, His beauty will pass into our faces, His tender pity into our hearts, His loving identification of Himself with men’s pains and sins will fashion our lives; and the word which He spoke with authority and assured confidence will be strong when we speak it with like calm certainty of victory. If the Church of Christ will but draw close to her Lord till the fulness of His life and the gentleness of His pity flow into her heart and limbs, she will then be able to breathe the life which she has received into the prostrate bulk of a dead world. Only she must do as the meekest of the prophets did in a like miracle. She must not shrink from the touch of the cold clay nor the odour of incipient corruption, but lip to lip and heart to heart must lay herself upon the dead and he will live.
The pattern for our work, dear brethren, is before us in the Lord’s look, His sigh, His touch, His word. If we take Him for the example, and Him for the motive, Him for the strength, Him for the theme, Him for the reward, of our service, we may venture to look to Him as the prophecy of our success, and to be sure that when our own faint hearts or an unbelieving world question the wisdom of our enterprise or the worth of our efforts, we may answer as He did, ‘Go and show again those things which ye do hear and see; the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached unto them.’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. W. McGarvey 1914 · Public Domain On vv31–32 J. W. McGarvey's The Fourfold Gospel [LXVIII. Avoiding Herod's…
J. W. McGarvey's The Fourfold Gospel [LXVIII. Avoiding Herod's Territory].
LXVIII. ANOTHER AVOIDING OF HEROD'S TERRITORY. aMATT. XV. 29; bMARK VII. 31.
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b31 And aJesus bagain went out. aAnd departed thence, bfrom the borders of Tyre, and came through Sidon, aand came nigh unto the sea of Galilee; bthrough the midst of the borders of Decapolis. aand he went up into a mountain, and sat down there. [From Tyre Jesus proceeded northward to Sidon and thence eastward across the mountains and the headwaters of the Jordan to the neighborhood of Damascus. Here he turned southward and approached the Sea of Galilee on its eastern side. Somewhere amid the mountains on the eastern side he sat down; i. e., he ceased his journeying for some days.] [402]
[FFG 402]
J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv31, 33 Healing of the Deaf-and-Dumb.
Healing of the Deaf-and-Dumb.
The return to Palestine:
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v. 31. And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, He came unto the Sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis.
v. 32. And they bring unto Him one that was deaf and had an impediment in His speech; and they beseech Him to put His hand upon him.
The story of this healing is one peculiar to the gospel of Mark. After His sojourn in Syrophenicia, in the region between Tyre and Sidon, Jesus did not take the direct route back to Galilee. It seems, from all accounts, that He went through the borders of Coele-Syria and Upper Galilee, perhaps along the river Leontes, and then came down from the neighborhood of Caesarea-Philippi through Gaulanitis into the region of the Decapolis. Concerning this journey of the Lord, which was perhaps the longest single journey which He made, we know nothing, since none of the evangelists or apostles give accounts of it. But we are undoubtedly not far wrong in saying that He employed the time in instructing His apostles in things which were so necessary for them in their divine calling. It was after Christ’s return into the neighborhood of the Sea of Galilee, in the region where, not so very long before, He had healed the demoniac, that they, his relatives or friends, brought to Him a man that was deaf and had a bad impediment in his speech. He may have been able to make sounds and even indicate his wishes to people that watched him closely, but he could not articulate, his tongue was unable to form the words. It was a severe ailment, in which the extent of Satan’s power is evident. "For that this poor man is hurt in this manner that he can use neither tongue nor ears, like other people, those are blows and thrusts of the accursed devil. Before the world it may seem, and everyone be of the opinion, that they be natural ailments; for the world does not know the devil that he does so much harm, makes the people mad and foolish, inflicts all manner of misfortune upon them, not only in the body, but also in the soul, that they die for terror and sorrow and cannot attain to true joy. But we Christians should deem such defects and infirmities nothing else but blows of the devil; he causes such distress on earth and does damage wherever he call."
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv31, 33, 36 Connecting Statement:
Connecting Statement:
After healing people in Tyre, Jesus goes to the Sea of Galilee. There he heals a deaf man, which amazes the people.
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went out again from the region of Tyre
"left the region of Tyre"
up into the region
Possible meanings are 1) "in the region" as Jesus is at the sea in the region of the Decapolis or 2) "through the region" as Jesus went through the region of the Decapolis to get to the sea.
Decapolis
This is the name of a region that means Ten Cities. It is located to the southeast of the Sea of Galilee. See how you translated this in Mark 5:20. (See: How to Translate Names)
They brought
"And people brought"
who was deaf
"who was not able to hear"
they begged him to lay his hand on him
Prophets and teachers would put their hands on people in order to heal them or bless them. In this case, people are begging Jesus to heal a man. AT: "they begged Jesus to put his hand on the man to heal him" (See: Assumed Knowledge and Implicit Information)
translationWords
Tyre
Sidon
Sea of Galilee
beg
Jesus
hand
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv31, 33, 34, 36 7:31-37 This miracle is very similar in order and…
7:31-37 This miracle is very similar in order and vocabulary to the healing of the blind man in 8:22-26. Healing miracles in the Gospels follow a similar pattern—the constant telling and retelling of similar stories probably standardized their form and wording. • This healing miracle includes a change of scene. Although some interpret the next miracle as occurring in the Gentile world (Sidon or Decapolis), it probably took place after Jesus returned to the Sea of Galilee. The next incident takes place there (8:10) without a change of scene.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.