Trinity 12
September 7, 2014
Baptism of Landon Robert Andrews
Mark 7:31-37
When God made man, He did not make him defective. His ears were opened to the music of creation. His tongue, discovering nourishment and sweetness planted all around him, responded by singing the praise of his Maker, who had done all things well.
Sucking in a gulp of air, the man was glad. He did not know how to sigh except in contentment.
All this changed when death entered the world. The man’s sigh became his bitter companion. Breath burst forth from his rancid mouth in anger, annoyance, sorrow, until the day he sighed his last and returned to the earth. Gone were the days when a man said of God, “He has done all things well.”
Then, God entered His creation. In Jesus, God became man. And when this perfect Man Jesus comes to a broken man—and indeed we all are broken—what does Jesus do? “Looking up to heaven, He sighed.”
What does this tell us about Jesus? What does a sigh mean? For us at least, often frustration, discontent, melancholy. What does it mean for Jesus? Perhaps all of those together. He confronts, in this one man, the situation of every man: the purpose of creation has been circumvented. An architect comes to a house and says, “This is not how I designed it.” Yet such an analogy fails us, for what God has made is not merely an object, but a person. A physician may want to restore proper functioning to the body, but the Creator is interested in more: God wants to restore the human person to communion with Himself, and to participate in the ongoing care of creation and procreation.
All this is broken. So Jesus sighs. Elsewhere in the New Testament sighing is expressed as groaning or grief. And the sighing which is a groan is typically indicative of the corruption of creation and the longing for a remedy. St. Paul says to the disciples in Rome, “We also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body” (Rom. 8.23). And again, the same idea in 2 Cor. 5:2, 4:
For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven … For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life.
He is anticipating the hope of the disciple of Jesus, which is not a bodiless heaven, but the resurrection of the body, being “further clothed” with a glorified, fully restored body.
The enfleshed God, Jesus, goes through all this groaning in a twofold way: both for Himself, as He experiences the brutal beating and execution, but also on behalf of others, such as the deaf mute in today’s Gospel, whom Jesus loves both as a fellow human and as the man’s Maker.
So Jesus is God in the flesh, who enters His creation to repair, redeem, restore. Our vocation, man’s calling from the beginning, was to care for and tend the creation as God’s representatives upon the earth.
The friends of this man with broken hearing and speech did not have the means to repair their friend. But they knew Who did. So they bring their friend and request to Jesus. That’s all prayer is: bringing your requests to the One who promises to hear and answer, the One who made and still cares for His creation.
Our participation in the ongoing care of creation is an important part of the framework for how we think about the sexual ethic for the disciples of Jesus. The church does not forbid, for example, sex outside of marriage between one man and one woman for the purpose of repression or upholding a supposed patriarchal system; rather, everything is for the promotion, protection, and preservation of the family, especially those who are most often victimized: women and children.
An excellent article in The Week with the clearly written title “Why So Many Christians Won’t Back Down on Gay Marriage” (Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Sept. 3, 2014) is one of the best summaries of the reason for the Scriptural teaching on sexuality. Here is just a portion:
Christian opposition to homosexual acts is of a piece with a much broader vision of what it means to be a human being…. Everything in the Universe has been put here to be used by God’s children to reflect his loving glory — and to teach them about God’s love. This is particularly true … of the unique sexual complementarity between men and women. The sexual act is meant to reflect God’s love by fostering a union at once bodily and spiritual — and creates new life. … The fruitfulness of the marriage act reflects that God is a creator and has charged man to be an agent of his ongoing work of creation. And, finally, if God’s love means total self-giving unto death on a Cross, then man and wife must give themselves to each other totally — no pettiness, no adultery, no polygamy, no divorce, and no nonmarital sexual acts.
The inclusion of pettiness alongside adultery indicates what’s really going on: are our relationships oriented toward winning—getting our own way—or toward the blessing, the healing, the care and love of spouse? Our pettiness is a sign of our brokenness. Repent, and ruminate on what Jesus did in today’s Gospel.
What results from Jesus’ healing the deaf mute is not simply a successful medical procedure, or even a miraculous medical procedure. Ephphatha, “Be opened!” Jesus says, just as at a baptism, and his hearing was renewed, and the man spoke plainly, rightly.
Last Thursday Mrs. Hull at our Back to School night spoke about the students studying logical fallacies this year. She emphasized that it is not enough to teach the students how to detect logical fallacies; it is imperative that they learn how to respond to bad arguments with charity. When we hear about the deaf mute “speaking plainly,” or literally, “speaking rightly,” we learn that it is not enough to say the right thing, but as God’s Word teaches us, to speak the truth in love.
What would it mean for us to speak rightly? What would it mean to hear correctly? We must listen before speaking. Above all we listen for what the Word of God says about us: I am a creature of God (creature and not Creator, and thus a man under orders, under authority). I am broken – but redeemed by Jesus. Sins forgiven, I’m sent back to my family to forgive sins, and out into the world to do honest work that helps my neighbor.
Thus hearing, we speak, plainly with no games, but correctly, i.e., patiently with love. With such speaking, you bring your complaints to God, and your thanksgiving to God. And then speak positive, constructive words about your neighbors. And where they have gone astray, you forgive.
The ceremonies of Baptism are not the main thing; the only necessary thing is water and the Word of God. But we include things like the saying of Jesus, Ephphatha, “Be opened!”, the sign of the cross on the person’s lips, and speaking the Our Father directly into the baptized one’s ear to indicate that Baptism is not a task to mark off your spiritual to-do list, but the entrance of the Spirit of God into your life, transforming your hearing and speaking. It’s important that we pray for Landon Robert today, for all the baptized, and for ourselves, for that ongoing work of Jesus and His Spirit in our lives, that receiving the Father’s forgiveness, we also are transformed to hear and speak rightly.
Then in the resurrection, not only will our body be restored, but the soul that drives ears and lips, and we shall say, “He has done all things well.” +INJ+