This week’s gospel passage contains two great healing stories – the first, about the Syro-Phoenician woman, and a second, about Jesus healing a man who is both deaf and mute.
They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.
This healing is unique in several ways. First, Jesus healed the man in private. He doesn’t usually do that; in fact, some quite intimate healings happen in full view of a whole crowd. Perhaps the reason Jesus takes the man aside is related to the other distinctive feature of this healing – Jesus is unusually hands-on, even invasive. Jesus’ spiritual power is so great he can command a healing from afar. He need only speak healing and people are made whole. Why does he put his fingers in this man’s ears and touch his tongue with his own spittle before speaking a word of healing?
We can’t know the answer to that question, but it invites us to imagine. There is something powerful about Jesus using his physical life to bring healing to another – it reminds us that God does not eschew the material, fleshly world, but uses it for the purpose of redemption. That story is writ large in Jesus’ incarnation, of course, but we find it told in small ways throughout the gospels. The God come in human flesh uses his bodily existence to reveal the spiritual power of God. How amazing is that?!
And that God-Man coming so close to someone who is suffering, willing to put his fingers in another’s ears, and to touch his tongue with his own spit – that shows a God who wants to come close to us, who does not shy away from our infirmities but gives of himself to heal us. What wounds are you trying to hide from God, afraid he doesn’t want to know about them, or can't help? Can we invite Jesus that close?
There is another unique element to this healing – Jesus’ looking up to heaven and sighing, and then speaking the command to the man’s ears and voice: “Be opened.” A similar sequence is reported when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead – maybe the sighing bespeaks an inner effort to transmit this greater reality of God-Life into what we think of as reality. And he speaks the healing; he pronounces it into being, the way God “spoke” the world into being – “in the beginning was the Word.”
We too are invited to speak into being God’s transforming word. That is active prayer, prayer of faith that takes God up on God’s promises of spiritual authority over the material world. Paul writes in Romans 4:17 about, “the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.” Calling into being things that are not yet is what we are about. We don’t get to dictate God’s action, but we can direct God’s power and love into people and situations in need of transformation, as Jesus did with that man.
Prayer is bringing spiritual power to bear on physical situations. We can do that, right?
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