Scripture Reveals Itself

We had a great experience in our Wednesday morning Women's Bible Study this week.  It's a fantastic example of how Scripture speaks to us, revealing God's Spirit in new and interesting ways.  (It's also a fantastic example of why Bible Studies are enriching and irreplaceable.)

We were reading through the 7th chapter of the Gospel of Mark when we came across this story:

31 Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis. 32 There some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Jesus to place his hand on him.

33 After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue. 34 He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means “Be opened!”). 35 At this, the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.

36 Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it. 37 People were overwhelmed with amazement. “He has done everything well,” they said. “He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”

We had 500 questions about the proceedings here.  Why did Jesus pull the man away privately?  Jesus had performed plenty of miracles in Mark before this.  Some took but a word.  For some the recipient wasn't even present.  What was with the touching and the saliva and the extra words in this miracle?  Was it all a show?  What's up with Jesus commanding the man not to tell anyone and then the man blabbing anyway?

We answered these questions the best we could but we mostly left them with a shrug.  "Oh well.  It was an interesting story.  Maybe we'll never quite 'get it'.  It's nice that the guy was healed, though.  Onward!"

Proceeding onward into Chapter 8 we found a miracle of many people fed, one of several arguments between Jesus and the Pharisees, and then we read this story:

22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23 He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”

24 He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”

25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village.”

Wait a minute!  This miracle involves saliva as well.  Plus it took two applications of Jesus' power to get it right!  There's got to be more to this story.  It's too much coincidence for spit to show up twice in a row during miracles.

So we began drawing connections.  The saliva provided the first clue.  These two miracle stories are chained together.  That was the purpose of spitting...not that Jesus needed the saliva to perform the miracle, but to show us that these miracles were linked, two parts of a set.  Cool!

Knowing that the miracles were meant to be compared, we then started to look at details.

Each miracle starts with an important geographical designation.  The first saliva application happened in Decapolis, on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee.  This was Gentile territory.  People here would not have grown up with the Jewish Law and the Jewish faith that Jesus and his disciples shared.  They would not have known about God the same way the Jews did.  To the Jews they were foreigners, heathens, the unfaithful.

The second miracle happened in Bethsaida, among the Jews.  This was home territory compared to Decapolis, Tyre and Sidon.  People here would have been expected to know and accept God's word.

The first saliva miracle happened among outsiders, among people the Jews would have considered the non-dominant, non-favored culture.  The second happened among insiders, the "right" people.

Now consider the affliction in each story.  The Gentile man--the foreigner, the outsider--could not hear and could not speak.  There's a theological component to this physical ailment.  The outside group had never heard God's word.  Obviously they could not be messengers of it either, having not received it.  The "faithful" folks would not have bothered sharing it with them.  They were outsiders, the wrong people!  Ironically the inside group would then blame the outsiders for not being people of God.  It was the religious equivalent of a community denying a person any kind of job and then blaming that person for not having enough money, food to eat, or a roof over his head.  "They're ignorant of scripture because they're Gentiles!"  No, they're ignorant of scripture because you refuse to share it with them, because you make yourselves the privileged, knowledgeable ones by denying everybody who's not you.

But look at the affliction of the faithful, "inside" man.  It's blindness!  His problem isn't that he hasn't heard or can't speak the word.  His problem is that having heard and spoken, he still doesn't get it!  He doesn't see.  He can't make proper use of what he knows.  This is the fault of the dominant group.  They've got the power but they have no idea how to use it for goodness because they assume it exists only to support them, to keep them dominant and privileged.

Look now at the process of each miracle.  How easy was it for Jesus to cure the deaf, mute man?  It happened instantly.  Jesus' presence, a touch, and a word: "Be opened!"  The man's life was opened.  Not only did he hear again, he began to speak and started a tidal wave of acclaim and amazement directed towards Jesus.  He became an evangelist, just like that!  He shared the good news, it couldn't be stopped (even by Jesus himself), and many came to know God's mercy through this "outsider".

How easy was it to heal the blind man?  He had to do it twice.  You never see that happening in scripture.  Having Jesus "redo" the miracle isn't just an indication that it was twice as hard.  It makes this operation uniquely difficult.  Curing the blindness of the inside group is a far greater challenge than rectifying whatever might be wrong with the outside group.  Changing the behavior of the oppressors and setting them on the right track is nigh impossible compared to uplifting the oppressed even though the former are consider the "right" group and the latter the "wrong" one.

You can almost see Jesus looking at the Pharisees with whom he had argued in between these miracles stories and saying, "See?  Here's what all your 'rightness' has gotten you: a blindness that makes it impossible for you to understand me even when 'foreigners' and 'heathens' understand in an instant."

We have to be really careful as followers of Christ today.  In America we've been the "in" group since the founding of the country.  It might be less so in this new millennium than it has been in the past but if you asked people to identify just one religion which typifies and dominates our culture the answer would still be "Christianity" by a mile.  The classic approach is to claim that going to church makes us the wise, knowledgeable, powerful ones...the "right folks".  That's the same blindness the Pharisees had.  God has to work twice as hard to correct somebody who already thinks they've got it right as he does to guide somebody who has no clue.

We have to guard against keeping the Good News to ourselves.  Whatever power or grace or knowledge we've been given is for the purpose of uplifting and healing the world, not just preserving our own power and position.  We have to make sure we're not building walls to define "in" and "out" groups.  Where we see those walls--be they religious, cultural, economic, political, marked by gender or age or race or lifestyle--we have to do what Jesus did: cross through them in order to share love and grace on the other side...miracles more powerful and important than any barrier.  That's the mission, and the warning, spelled out by these two stories.

What a powerful realization!  I'm not sure any of us would have come to it on our own.  Mostly we would have scratched our heads about why Jesus was touching people with spit all of a sudden and moved on.  But together we were more powerful, more perceptive in the Spirit than any of us could have been individually.  What a wonderful revelation!  And that's why we do Bible Study.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)