READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Isaiah 29:17-24
2 Corinthians 3:4-11
St. Mark 7:31-37
To you all, the Elect Exiles of the Dispersion; may Grace
and Peace be multiplied to you (1 Pet)
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His Church, saying:
Today, the Gospel presents to us a man who cannot hear or
speak and in a way, this man was lucky. He was kept from hearing the evils of
this world and was able to keep his tongue tamed, which no man can do,
according to James 3:8.
But this guy did it! He fulfilled God’s Word. He obeyed
perfectly, by being unable. A Blessing! A blessing from the Lord. God be
praised.
What about his hearing? “Thus says the Lord of hosts”, in
Jeremiah 23, “‘Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are
prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; They speak a vision of
their own imagination, Not from the mouth of the Lord’” (v. 16).
And “An evildoer listens to wicked lips, and a liar gives
ear to a mischievous tongue” (Pro 17:4) and he is already a man of wicked
lips, surrounded by a people of wicked lips. Thus, his tongue not working, he
is in no danger of this grievous sin as well.
So when his buddies, I assume they're buddies, bring him to
Jesus, they are doing him a disservice. They should leave him in his infirmity
and he will be blessed according to the Word of God we just heard.
Indeed, if God had wanted a perfect world, He should have
created all of us dead. Then we could at least find this blessing from
Revelation 14, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on” (v.
13). No hearing. No seeing. No sinning. Heaven!
Where is the lie? Tell me.
Oh you don’t want to be deaf, dumb, or dead? Why? Because
it’s not fun? Because it gets in the way of what you want to do? Because you
should be able to live the life you want to, no matter what anyone tells you?
Well, you’re half-right. If you were all those things or
dead, you would be breaking other charges from God such as “pray without
ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17) and Psalm 71:15, “My mouth shall tell of Your
righteousness and of Your salvation all day long; For I do not know the sum of
them.”
Repent! How are you going to live your truth-filled and
righteous life now? You cannot tell the difference between good and bad. God’s
Word has spoken and you cannot tell which part of life He wants from you. Jesus
further complicates matters in the Gospel reading by saying “tell no one” and
these zealots don’t even listen, but kept on telling the story.
If you rely on the works of the Law of God, you are under
this curse (Gal 3:10) and whoever “does the commandments shall live by them”
(Rom 10:5). Live by them, perfectly, mind you. Not according to your
standard of living, but God’s.
Can this deaf and dumb man live such a life of perfection
and un-cursed-ness? Yes, he can. But in order to do that, he needs the Ministry
of Righteousness, which our Epistle taught us. He does not need glory, for the
Ministry of the Law, of Death, had such glory that it was carved in stone by
God’s finger, caused Moses’s face to shine brightly that the people couldn’t
look at him, and came with miracles and wonders.
In Christ, however, there is no distinction. You could be
perfectly able to fulfill all of God’s Laws and yet be on your way to hell in a
handbasket. You could be perfectly miserable, with every disease and misfortune
and yet be on your way to paradise and not know it. Or the opposite could be
true.
This confusion is only according to the covenant of the
letter, the Law, which is 50/50 for you at the Judges’ bench. The covenant of
the Spirit is 100%, gives life, and has a glory that far surpasses the Law.
This covenant is in Christ’s Body and Blood. Literally. It
does not come through sincere effort or dedication, look at our deaf and dumb
man! It comes the same way Jesus came to this man from our Gospel. First, it
must be brought or you must be brought to it. There is no getting to it on your
own, as we have already said.
Second, your brokenness, your curse of God’s Law, must be
removed. Jesus must open and release you. He must create in you Faith in order
that you be able to hear and believe His New Covenant. It is only after all
that, that…
Thirdly, you then speak plainly. Not “plainly” as in “just
like normal”, but plainly as in correct belief. Meaning, your speaking will not
include the wickedness of lying lips, your hearing will reject evil, and your
new life in Christ will give praise to God constantly and perfectly, according
to His merits.
How? Because your sufficiency is from Jesus Christ and Him
Crucified. Your competence to be ministers of this new covenant comes from the
One Who became a curse for you and hung on a tree. Through Christ offering
Himself upon the cross, that spotless life, you are redeemed from
insufficiency.
But that is just the beginning. Christ’s suffering and death
purchased and won sufficiency for you, but now it is the Spirit Who Gives Life
and will feed it to you. The benefits of the mercy and glory of God’s New
Covenant are found in Word and Sacrament.
Look at the Gospel again. What healed the man? Christ’s
mighty word of creation, “Be opened”! From nothing He creates something. But
that’s not all. Christ touched this man. Jesus includes His fingers and His spit,
along with His voice, to accomplish this mighty work.
What heals you today? Nothing different. You must still
hear, so your ears are opened when the Gospel is preached in its purity, and in
it find that your sins are forgiven, regardless of your life, your state at the
moment, or your opinion on the matter.
You must also be touched. That is that you must come into
contact with God Who heals you. And not in an abstract, self-induced
hallucination way. The Way God wants you to, that is through the Body and Blood
of His only Begotten Son. Just like the Gospel!!
And finally you must also speak. You must also be given the
words of plain faith and belief. You must sing and pray and praise. Your words
must be of Christ, our intercessor and mediator of this New Covenant. So His
Church gives you those words.
You sing them in every hymn, you confess them in every
prayer, and you repeat them in every Creed. These important words-to-be-spoken
are not left a mystery for you to uncover, somehow. They are freely given,
plain as day. The Lord gives the Word. The Lord gives the means. You are cared
for and blessed.
This man from the Gospel did not have to be healed in order
to be made perfect in front of God. He could have spent the rest of his life as
he was, because his sufficiency did not come from how great his life was, but
from how great God is.
And not just any God, the God Who works wonders, yes, but
the God Who chiefly works the wonder of being made man and suffering and dying
on the cross. It is through this, His greatest wonder, that you are no more
ashamed of or grow pale from what the world, the devil, and your sinful nature
has done to you.
Dear Christians, you must now consider yourself as better
than this deaf and dumb man. Not in a smug way, because truly you are worse
than him according to your sins. But you are better than him in that you do not
see and yet you believe.
You are better because today you don’t just receive fingers
and spit from Jesus, but Body and Blood. You are better because the Lord of the
Universe comes today to sit at the Feast of Salvation and commune with you in
His Church.
And yet, you are brothers in faith. Equals! The same Faith
that heals in the Gospel is the same faith that heals you today. The same Lord
over all Who performs miracles, gives you that same power in the forgiveness of
your sins in His Body and Blood given and shed for you.
Do not be fooled into thinking there is a better life for
you if you would have only done things different, or not forgotten prayer, or
just went to church that one time when you swore you would. Your best life ever
is the one you have right now, for not only is it a gift from God, no matter
what it looks like, but it is redeemed by God, renewed by God, and placed in
the Ministry of the Spirit by the grace of God.
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His Church, saying:
“And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a
speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him.”
No comments:
Post a Comment