Mark 7:34

Mark 7:34

I. The general study of this story would furnish several very excellent and edifying lessons suggested by our Lord's action in working this miracle upon the shore of Decapolis. (1) We might note the wide reach of the Master's zeal. Jesus had just come from Tyre and Sidon, clear across in a heathen land; He was now in the midst of some Greek settlements, on the eastern shore of the Sea of Tiberius. We see how He appears thus going upon a foreign mission. (2) We might dwell upon the need of friendly offices in apparently hopeless cases. (3) We might also mention the manipulations of our Saviour as illustrating the ingenuity of real sympathy. (4) We observe our Lord's respect for everyone's private reserves of experience. "And He took him aside from the multitude privately." (5) We notice the naturalness of all great services of good. At the supremely majestic moments of His life our Lord became simpler in utterance and behaviour than at any other time. He fell back on the sweet and pathetic speech of His mother-tongue.

II. The singular peculiarity of this story, however, is what might be made the subject of more extended remark. Three things meet us in their turn. (1) Why did our Lord sigh when He was looking up to heaven. Everyone is aware of the pleasure it gives to bring cure to a chronic weakness, or give a hope in the place of humiliation. Somehow our Saviour seems depressed, and we look for a reason. But in the narrative there is furnished not even so much as a hint for our help. (2) We are left in this case to conjecture. And in a general way, perhaps, it would be enough to say, that there was something like an ejaculatory prayer in this sigh of Jesus' soul; but more likely there was in it the outbreaking of sad and weary sympathy with the suffering of a fallen race like ours. It may be He sighed (a) because there was so much trouble in the world everywhere; (b) because there were many who made such poor work in dealing with their trouble; (c) because He could not altogether alleviate the trouble He found; (d) because the trouble He met always had its origin and aggravation in sin; (e) because so few persons were willing to forsake their sins which made the trouble. (3) Christians need more sighs. They are a royal priesthood, and they have an office of intercession to exercise. There was a day when Jehovah sent an angel with an inkhorn by his side through Jerusalem, to set a mark upon the foreheads of those who, in their sad hearts, kept up a great masterful, pitiful yearning for sinners' conversion, and a cry against the abominations of sin.

C. S. Robinson, Sermons on Neglected Texts,p. 281.

I. This is not the only record of the sighs and tears and troubled heart of Jesus. We are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews that in the days of His flesh He offered up supplications with strong crying and tears. By the grave of Lazarus, when He saw Mary weeping, and the Jews also weeping, He groaned in the spirit, "and the silent tears streamed down His face." He wept aloud over the hypocrisy and crime of Jerusalem. Truly, He was a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."

II. But on two of the occasions on which we are told that Jesus sighed and wept, He was immediately about to dispel the cause of the misery. He sighed because He was not thinking only of the individual case. That He had power to remedy; but how many myriads were there of the bereaved whom He could not thus console? of the deaf and dumb who in this world could never hear and never speak? Even in the individual cases there was, to His quick sympathy, cause enough to sigh for the wreck caused by the sin of man and the malice of Satan, in deforming the beauty of God's fair creation. His sigh for these was not the sigh of powerlessness it was the sigh of sympathy. But more than this, He was thinking of all the world, looking down to the very depths of its drear abyss of sorrow. His act of healing could be but a drop in the ocean.

III. In that poor afflicted man our Lord saw but one more sign of that vast crack and flaw which sin causes in everything which God has made. (1) Jesus had seen, laid stark upon the bier, the widow's only son. He had seen the little maid of Jairus lying pale and cold. He had seen Mary weeping for Lazarus dead. And as He looked out upon a world of death, can you wonder if, looking up to heaven, He sighed? (2) This, alas! was not all, and was not the worst. Sickness may be cured and pain assuaged; and Time lays his healing hand on the wounds of death. But the ravages of sin! there is mischief and unmingled mischief there. Can you wonder if, as Jesus looked on the world of sin, He looked up to heaven and sighed? (3) Our Lord saw all the sorrow; He did not ignore it; He sighed for it; He wept for it; He prayed for it; but not for one moment did He despair for it; nay, He worked to lighten it, leaving us thereby, as in all things, an example that we should follow His steps.

F. W. Farrar, Ephphatha: Sermons,p. 1.

Sorrow in Healing.

Our Lord sighed, we cannot doubt,

I. At the thought of that destructive agency of which He had before Him one example. Here was one whom Satan had bound. Here was an illustration of that reign of sin unto death to which the whole world bears witness. This deaf-and-dumb man reminded Christ of the corruption that had passed over God's pure creation; and therefore, looking up to heaven, He sighed.

II. But there was more than this, as we all feel at once, in that sigh. That outward bondage was but the token of an inward thraldom. Whether healed or not in this life, no bodily infirmity can have more than a temporary duration. Death must end it. But not so that spiritual corruption of which the other was but a sign. That inward ear which is stopped against God's summons, that voice of the heart which refuses to utter His praise these things are of eternal consequence. And while bodily infirmities and disorders are occasional and partial in their occurrences, spiritual disease is universal. It overspreads every heart. Christ's thoughts at that moment were directed to the sins of the whole world, feeling them as a sore burden laid upon His soul, and made by man's obstinacy too heavy even for Him to bear.

III. He sighed therefore, we may say, further, from a sense of the disproportion in actual extent between the ruin and the redemption. The ruin universal. All the world guilty before God. Every soul of man corrupted by estrangement from God. And yet the great multitude refusing to be redeemed. And again, through the simple negligence and cold-heartedness of the professed Church of Christ, to how few, comparatively speaking, does the message of life come at all! Generation after generation, since the word was first spoken which bade the Church go forth into all the world, and evangelise the whole creation, has fallen asleep utterly ignorant of that holy name, for lack sometimes of a sender and sometimes of a messenger. And this even until now; and even without remorse, without shame, without any vigorous or at least adequate efforts to repair the wrong. Might not He who foresaw these things sigh within Himself as He plucked one brand from the burning? Might He not sorrowfully contrast the price paid with the possession purchased the multitude of the redeemed with the fewness of the saved?

C. J. Vaughan, Harrow Sermons,p. 279.

I. Our Lord may have sighed (1) As He contemplated the afflicted one before Him. (2) As He viewed the desolation and disaster which moral evil had been the means of spreading in the world. (3) The sigh may have been the result of that feeling of sadness which comes over our hearts even in moments when all things suggest joy. These feelings are more reasonable than we suppose. The tears that steal forth unbidden at the wedding feast, the sigh which love heaves over the cradled treasure of the nursery, are not empty exhibitions of a feeble hysteria. They have their roots in sober truth. It is the shadow of the future which calls forth that sadness. Life's experiences tell us that, notwithstanding all that hope has prophesied, there have been failures and mishaps that many a golden morning has been followed by a stormy afternoon and a dark and disastrous eventide. It is the thought, though only half realised, of the shipwrecks of life which prompts the sigh and compels the unbidden tear. Thus it was, I think, with Christ. He knew, as we and all men know, that the boon He was about to bestow might prove no real blessing.

II. Yet Christ did not withhold the boon. If there crossed His mind all the evil, the rancour, derision, and scandal which the unfettered tongue might occasion, He did not on that account stay the hand of His benevolence. Freely, ungrudgingly, were His miracles of love performed, though it is too much to suppose that the recipients of His mercy always made good use of their restored senses or newly won faculties. Though the boon may be used for evil, Christ does not withold it.

III. There is a remedy for the evils that accompany our freedom. Christ, while He teaches us that the remedy is not to be sought in depriving man of the gift, points by His conduct where the real remedy is to be sought. It is by conferring an additional and guiding gift; not by withholding one boon, but by bestowing another, does He suggest to us the true course of conduct. There is another "Ephphatha." He speaks "Be opened," and the tongue is loosed; but the ear is unstopped also. The tongue is set free to speak, and it may be the instrument of untold harm; but the ear is open, and there is a voice which speaks truths in tones of unearthly sweetness, and that voice the sufferer can now hear. While therefore He bestows the faculty of speech, He bestows the opportunity of hearing those glad and soul-elevating principles of righteousness and forgiveness and love which will fill the loosened tongue with joy, and put a new song of praise in that silent mouth. The Ephphatha of gift and the Ephphatha of new opportunities for good go hand in hand.

Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, Sermon Preached May 28th,1876.

From the text we learn

I. The duty of compassion. The world has, in all ages, deeply needed, and in this age still deeply needs, the lesson of pity. We profess and call ourselves Christians; have we yet learnt the simplest and earliest element in the sigh of the Saviour, the divineness of mercy, of compassion, and of love?

II. Yet we must learn the lesson not of compassion only, but of energytherewith. Compassion which ends in compassion may be nothing more than the luxury of egotism; but the sigh of Jesus was but an instant's episode in a life of toil. If His sigh binds us to pity all sin and sorrow, it binds us no less to bend every effort of our lives towards the end that sin may cease and be forgiven, and sorrow flee away. (1) The world is full of sorrow. The sigh of Christ pledges us, as our first duty, not to add to that sorrow, either actively or passively, either directly or indirectly, by our pride or self-indulgence, by cruelty or malice, for our gain or our gratification, by taking unfair advantages, or by speaking false, bitter, and unwholesome words. (2) The world is full of disease. The sigh of Christ pledges us not only to be gentle and sympathetic and helpful to all who are afflicted, but also to strive by pureness and kindness, by high example and sound knowledge, to improve the conditions which shall make life sweet and healthy, cheerful and genial, vigorous and pure. (3) The world is full of sin. The sigh of Jesus pledges us ourselves to keep innocency, and do the thing that is right; not to set examples which lead to sin; to lead men, both by our life and doctrine, to that Saviour who died for sin, and who can alone forgive it, and cleanse us from its guilt and power.

III. A lesson of hope (1) For ourselves; the perfect confidence with which each one of us may throw ourselves upon Christ's love; the infinite conviction with which we may each of us say, "Christ died for me." (2) For all the world. Who was it that sighed and said, "Ephphatha, Be opened"? Ah, it takes the fourfold Gospel to answer that question! It was He whom St. Matthew set forth as the Divine Messiah who fulfilled the past; and St. Mark as the Son of God, filling with power and awfulness the present; and St. Luke as the Seeker and Saviour, to all ages, of the lost; and St. John in the spiritual Gospel as the Incarnate Word. God is everywhere;and the footsteps of Him who sighed for the miseries of man have illuminated even that unknown land which every man must enter.

F. W. Farrar, Ephphatha: Sermons,p. 229.

There is one trait, and only one, in which, though it may be our necessity, and perhaps our privilege, yet it can scarcely be called our duty, to be like our great Master. And yet that trait is almost the largest in our Saviour's character sadness of spirit; and the reason why we are not to copy our Saviour's sadness is evident: it is twofold. One, because He Himself is happy now, and the duty of being like Him as He is, is greater than the duty of being like Him as He was; so that we are most copying Christ when we are exceedingly happy. And the other reason is, that those sorrows of Jesus were the very materials out of which He was making the Church's joy. Therefore to imitate them would be as if a man should think to copy a rainbow by painting a shower. For when we are sad, we are so far frustrating the sadnesses of Jesus. In all our Saviour's sorrows I do not enter now into the mysteries of Gethsemane and Calvary but in all the sorrows of our Saviour's life among men, there are two features characteristic, beautiful, and instructive. (1) Our Saviour's recorded sadnesses were all for others. (2) His sorrow was never an idle sentiment. The sigh of Jesus when He healed the deaf-and-dumb man at Decapolis was

I. The Sigh of Earnestness. Because it says that, "looking up to heaven, He sighed." Some connect the two words, and account that the sigh is a part of the prayer, an expression of the intensity of the working of our Lord's heart when He was supplicating to the Father.

II. The Sigh of Beneficence. He who never gave us anything but what was bought by His own suffering so that every pleasure is a spoil, purchased by His blood did now by the sigh, and under the feeling that He sighed, indicate that He purchased the privilege to restore to that poor man the senses he had lost.

III. The Sigh of Brotherhood. The scene before Him would be to His mind but a representation of thousands of thousands. His comprehensive thought, starting from that point, would travel on, till it embraced, in one dark union, all the miseries with which this earth is filled.

IV. The Sigh of Holiness. Do you suppose our Saviour's mind could think of all the physical evil, and not go on to the deeper moral causes from which it sprang? Doubtless, in those closed ears and that chained tongue, He read, too plainly written, the fall the distance the degradation the corruption the universal defilement of our world. He sighed. That is the way in which perfect holiness looked on the sins of the universe.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,1874, p. 198.

References: Mark 7:34. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year,p. 109; W. F. Hook, Sermons on the Miracles,vol. ii., p. 49; Preacher's Monthly,vol. viii., p. 152; C. Kingsley, Town and Country Sermons,p. 358. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 394.Mark 7:36. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. v., p. 314.Mark 7:36; Mark 7:37. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 76.