Dear Friends in Christ,
What our eyes see does not always reveal the entire picture. We might see a dirty, disheveled recluse living in a shack. When he dies, we discover he was a multimillionaire. When we lived in Arizona, we would take visitors to the western movie sets at Old Tucson. You walked down the dusty street with the saloon, jail, mercantile and other buildings on both sides. If you looked behind the storefronts, you discovered that is all they were, false fronts attached to meager wood supports.
There is much more to Jesus’ miracles than meets the eye. On the surface, Jesus fed the masses. Look beyond that and see the Bread of Life. Jesus raised the dead. Look beyond that and see he who is the Resurrection and the Life. In the Decapolis, a league of ten free cities east of the Jordan characterized by Greek culture, Jesus healed this man “who was deaf and could hardly speak.”
There is More Here Than Meets the Eye. Jesus is the Messiah who was to come. Jesus makes us new creations.
What a blessing that this man had friends who brought him to Jesus. They begged Jesus “to place his hand on the man.” Because the man could not hear, it was as if he had a band holding his tongue. What a blessing Jesus was to this poor man. Our Savior had compassion on him, took him aside and helped him. Jesus is the Messiah, God’s Anointed One, who was to come and buy back all sinners from sin, death and hell. This miracle is one of the signs of that.
We go back about eight centuries to hear the prophet Isaiah speak of this glorious day. How would the world recognize the Savior? What would be the sign to them? In our first lesson, we read, “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then the lame will leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy.”
Jesus surely did not have to go through all the motions he went through. He could have just said, “Be healed,” and it would have happened. Why the isolation? The man could concentrate on Jesus. The touching, the spitting? It was Jesus’ way to let the man sense that he cared about him and that the man should expect something good from Jesus. It was Jesus’ visible way of indicating his power over the body as its Creator and Redeemer. By looking to heaven, and sighing Jesus communicated his oneness with the love of the Father in heaven and then his sadness over the crippling affect sins bring to the body.
What good lessons for us. Peace and quiet do not make God’s Word more powerful but they do give us an atmosphere for contemplation and meditation on the Word. It is good at times to be away from the crowd even of our friends and be alone with Jesus. No one feels our pain and sadness and our physical limitations more than Jesus does. God sees us in this scarred world with our scars and his heart goes out to us. Jesus felt that scarring particularly in our sins and guilt he bore, as he became a curse for us on Calvary.
Jesus is more than a miracle worker although a miracle worker. There is more here than meets the eye. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. By believing in him, we have life in his name.
There also is more here than meets the eye in the man’s wellness. Jesus not only opened the man’s ears and loosed the band on his tongue. Jesus had compassion on him for another reason. Jesus
makes us new creations.
Jesus healing miracle had this reaction on the witnesses, “People were overwhelmed with amazement. ‘He had done everything well,’ they said. He even makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak.” This is exactly what the prophet Isaiah said the Savior would do to identify himself.
This commendation, ‘He has done everything well,’ matches up nicely doesn’t it with Moses’ words about God at the end of Creation, “God saw all that he had made and it was ‘very good” Hard to miss the point. Jesus is God who is the Creator and has power over all things. Jesus showed this by healing the man’s ears and tongue. He shows it by healing this man and the world from the power and condemnation of our sins.
Jesus Christ is God’s Son who came into the world to make us new creations by cleansing us from our sins and their guilt by his holy life and perfect sacrifice. Is Jesus interested in my body and its ills? Absolutely. Can he cure me through other people? He does according to his purposes. Jesus really is interested in my lost condition because of my transgressions of Gods holy will. He has redeemed me through his life and death. The Father says so through Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead.
Because of sin, our bodies and souls were bound by nature in Satan’s chains. Luther wrote in his hymn Dear Christians One and All Rejoice, “Fast bound in Satan’s chains I lay, death brooded darkly o’er me.” Jesus does everything well to throw off those shackles from our hearts and souls. Paul wrote to the Corinthians in second epistle, chapter 5, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come. All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…”
Jesus’ miracles were the visible picture of that release and that new creation. The old beggar’s tongue was bound so he could not speak.. Now the new beggar “began to speak plainly.” Before God called us to faith in Christ by the Holy Spirit our hearts and souls and tongues were bound in sin. Now as new creations, we are free to speak plainly our confession that Jesus is my Savior and yours. Now we are free to speak plainly “the wonders of God “just as the disciples did on the first Pentecost.
Last week in our sermon we heard James declare, “He chose to give us birth through the Word of truth , that we might be a kind of first-fruits of all he created.” Remember that? Jesus’ words to the beggar “Be opened,” is that parallel to the gospel invitation the Spirit brings us to believe and to keep growing in faith through the Word. We would still be deaf and speechless when it comes to God and his saving work in Christ had Jesus not made us new creations.
There is more here than meets the eyes. There is more here than theatrics. Here is our Savior, Jesus Christ, having mercy on a single deaf mute and in extension mercy on the entire lost world. Jesus loved the nameless man in the Decapolis. Jesus loves you. Amen. <SDG>