And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is,
Be opened. (St Mark 7:34)

Anyone who grew up watching cowboy movies is familiar with the stand-off between gun slingers. That's the scene where the cowboy faces the bad guy (or a group of bad guys), each side faces each other, and waits for the other to draw his gun. The standoff made its way from Westerns to other adventures such as the Treasure of Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart.

The lesson about a standoff that I drew from those scenes as a child is that the loser always makes the first move. Usually the bad guy draws his gun first, and the hero miraculously shoots seven or eight people with one six shooter in the space of 2 or 3 seconds.

My friends and I tried to do our own version of a standoff in elementary school by holding staring contests. The first person to blink, like the first person to draw his gun in a Western movie, always lost the staring contest. Children understand the rules quite well — the weaker person, the loser, budges first. The winner remains detached and impassive.

Unfortunately, as we get older, we sometimes apply this same principle to standoffs of a different sort in our relationships with friends and family. How many of us have experienced or witnessed the situation where friends or family have argued and become estranged? Like the dramatic tension of two gunslingers squaring off and facing each other from afar, we experience distance after a breach in relations that only grows with time.

As time goes on, it is harder and harder to break through the ice and reestablish the friendship, and there is a total impasse if each person continues to wait for the other to make the first move and apologize or at least reinitiate contact.

This occurs not only with friends but also with dating and marriage. When couples have a heated argument (whether serious or silly), that is sometimes followed by a chilly silence that only grows with the passage of time. Each person waits for the other to act first by apologizing or at least breaking the ice.

If we are not careful, we may find ourselves thinking that the first person to apologize or heal the breach is the weaker and needier person. It is a sign of power, from a fallen human perspective, to be willing to let the estrangement go on forever rather than be the first to admit fault or, if the other person is at fault, to insist on waiting until the other person makes an adequate apology.

Now it should go without saying that there are situations in which someone really does need to apologize first before reconciliation should begin. For example, for a family with a physically abusive family member who has a violent temper and substance abuse problems, if may be necessary first that the abusive person take affirmative steps to repent, apologize, and seek treatment before it is safe at all for other family members to interact with him or her again.

But leaving aside those justifiable situations in which it is important to keep a distance (i.e., situations in which our safety and wellbeing are at stake), many of our standoffs in life occur because of pride and anger. We may find ourselves thinking, on a level that is not too far from that of child engaged in a staring contest, "This time, I'm going to be strong. There's no way I'm going to move first. I'll make so-and-so apologize because I'm not going to break the angry silence until he or she gives in." We have learned the false lesson, from our childhood to our adult years, that strength means never making the first move to restore a breach in relations.

This is a symptom of our fallen, human condition. While our fallen and sinful perspective separates us from each other, it also separates us from God. Adam and Eve dwelled in the garden of Eden with God without distance or separation. After the fall of man, when Adam and Eve were driven from the garden, they were distant from God physically and spiritually.

Over succeeding generations, their descendants grew even more distant from God, as the memory of life in the garden faded and consequences of the fall of man began to take root and blossom.

Collectively, all of mankind is engaged in a standoff with our Creator. How fortunate we are that God does not wait for us to act before making the first move to break the impasse and heal our estrangement from him! In fact, we see in a dramatic way how God acts first in our Gospel passage for today.

Like so many of the details about our Lord's ministry in the Gospels, today's lectionary passage from the Gospel of Mark contains specific actions with deep significance.

As a background context, Jesus has just delivered the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman from demonic possession in the passage from the Gospel of Mark that just precedes today's lesson. He accomplished that miracle without visiting the girl or making any physical contact whatsoever.

In contrast, with the miracle that is recorded in today's Gospel lesson, the Lord took the opposite approach. As Jesus approached the sea of Galilee, we reach that the crowds brought someone who was deaf and had a speech impediment to him. The people who brought this man begged the Lord to put his hand on the man to work a miracle.

What did Jesus do at this point? He took the man away from the crowd. He placed his fingers in the man's ears, then he spit and touched the man's tongue. Then he looked up to heaven, sighed, and said "ephphatha," a command that means, "be opened", in Aramaic.

If we can stop for and reflect for a moment, why did the Lord pull the man away from the crowd? Don't the faith healers on television always do miracles in the midst of crowds, for everyone to see and filmed on camera for national broadcasting?

But Jesus takes the man away from the crowd before he works a miracle. This action reflects a recurrent theme in the Gospel of Mark. Although the Lord's miracles are a sign that he is the Son of God, he did not seek publicity and tried to keep a low profile for most of his ministry.

Perhaps the Lord wanted to bring the man away from the tumult of the crowd for a more personal reason — so the deaf and dumb man could see and understand the miracle that was about to occur in a calmer environment that was more conducive to prayer. Whatever the reason, the Lord's action in taking the man aside showed that he was personally focused on the needs of one suffering individual (the deaf and dumb man) rather than the immediate interests of the crowd.

Our Lord's next action is one of the more peculiar accounts for a Gospel miracle. He took his hands and placed them in the man's ears. But the word "place" does not do justice to the original Greek. There is a milder Greek verb for placing something somewhere, "tithemi" or the compound "epithemi," which means to place something upon something. Instead, here, the Greek verb is "ballo", which can mean to place something on something as a secondary meaning, but the primary meaning of the verb is related to throwing something, hurling something, rushing forward, etc. — all activities that carry the idea of swift motion.

Applied to the text, this conveys the idea that the Lord acted swiftly and immediately to place his fingers in the man's ears — perhaps "thrust" or "plunge" might be a better translation. The point is, the Lord acted with a rapid movement, and it probably shocked the man as well as the smaller group who witnessed the incident away from the crowd. Then the Lord took the extra step of spitting, probably on his hand, and he touched the man's tongue.

Finally, he looked up and breathed audibly before commanding that the man's ears and tongue be loosened.

Some translations of this passage suggest that Jesus Christ audibly groaned with this audible sigh. This may have been an expression of compassion and sympathy for the pain of our human condition, as well as a lesson for all of us to learn to let the Holy Spirit intercede for us in prayer. According to St. Gregory the Great, the Lord's exhalation had a didactic purpose:

And looking up to heaven, he groaned; not that He had need to groan Who Himself granted what (as man) He prayed for, but to teach us to groan to Him Who rules in heaven, that our ears also may be opened by the gifts of His Holy Spirit, and our tongue loosed by the saliva of His Mouth, that is, by the knowledge of His divine words, so that we shall proclaim them.¹

Pope Gregory's description of the sigh seems to be a reference to Romans 8:26, in which Saint Paul writes: "In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express." (Romans 8:26).

In other words, the Lord, by sighing, is teaching us to release and turn matters over to God when we pray, relying on the Holy Spirit to speak for us, interceding and asking for things we are not wise enough to request. It is another indication that God is moving first and is already at work even when we first turn to him to pray.

Whatever the reasons for the audible exhalation, what we are left with in this account is a very tactile and messy way to deliver the deaf and dumb man from his impediments.

What is so unique about this messy encounter is the contrast between it and the preceding miracle in the Gospel of Mark, the healing of the Syro-Phoenician woman's daughter that I mentioned a bit earlier. With the Syro-Phoenician, who was a gentile woman, Jesus tested her faith with a question that implied that gentiles are "dogs." After the woman responded with great humility — by comparing herself to a dog begging for crumbs that fall from a table — Jesus responded by proclaiming to the woman that her daughter was well. At that point, we learn that the girl instantly was delivered from demons from a distance away. Thus, the daughter was not even in the Lord's presence when he declared out loud to she had been set free.

The encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman teaches us that God does not need physical contact to work a miracle. Why, then, would the Lord choose such an earthy and tactile way to heal the deaf and dumb man in our Gospel lesson for today?

I don't know if any of you have seen the famous seen from one of the movies portraying Helen Keller's life in which the teacher makes the first breakthrough. Helen Keller is blind, deaf, and dumb, totally cut off from the world. To catch her attention, the teacher has to place her hands under a stream of water from a pump before she has the girl's attention. It took a tactile act that engaged one of Helen Keller's limited remaining senses to overcome the loss of her other senses and catch her attention.

There are no doubt multiple reasons (including some reasons that are forever beyond our comprehension), with every miracle that we encounter in the Gospels. Nonetheless, with the miracle in today's Gospel, one of the reasons that the Lord took such a physical approach may have been to break through the isolation of a person who had been cut off in certain ways from others for quite a long time.

It is likely that there was no developed system of sign-language for the hearing-impaired in first century Galilee. Particularly if the man in question was illiterate, he may have lacked the ability to communicate with anyone beyond making simple gestures. Standing in a crowd of people, he may felt isolated and trapped in his own thoughts — as cut off from the crowd of people in which he stood as if he were looking at them from a great distance.

It is in that context that the Lord removed the deaf man from the crowd. Having pulled him aside, the Lord abruptly placed his fingers in the man's ears, spat on his hand, and touched the man's tongue. Having engaged those senses still available to the man, the Lord now had his undivided attention. It is at that point that the Lord looked up to heaven, showing this man through body language that he was engaged in prayer. And he exhaled in a way that was probably visible as well as audible, just before removing the man's hearing and speech impediments.

Jesus Christ did not need to do anything physical to cause this miracle. God can work a miracle anywhere at any time, in the middle of a crowd or in isolation, with touch and the full engagement of our senses or simply by the decision on his part to will a miracle to occur.

Yet our Lord chose to act in a tactile way in this case. God acted first — before the deaf man took any affirmative steps to merit a miracle (indeed this Gospel pericope provides no indication that the man took any steps physically or internally in his own thoughts to receive this act of healing; the action was simply initiated by Jesus Christ as an act of grace as well as a sign for all of us that the Son of God incarnate was ministering in first century Galilee.

And this miracle was indeed a prophetic sign. The Greek word used for the type of speech impediment that beset this man, mogilalos, is found nowhere else in the New Testament. In the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was commonly used in the first century, the word mogilalos is used only once. It is found in Isaiah 35, as part of a passage predicting the messianic age in which physical infirmities would be healed.

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. (Isa 35:5-6, NIV)

Taken in context and based on the rareness with which mogilalos was used, Christians familiar with the Septuagint in the first century would have instantly understood that Saint Mark saw in the miracle from today's Gospel passage the explicit fulfillment of Isaiah 35:6.

God acted first, penetrating the haze of isolation in which a deaf and dumb man was trapped, and he worked a miracle as a sovereign act of his will that did not depend on any human response. And he did so in a way that was not only a sign for all of us but also a direct physical encounter that engaged the full attention of the recipient of the miracle. This shows us that God is concerned both with our salvation as a group and with the individual circumstances each of us face.

God knows the problems we face and the isolation we feel after a lifetime of standoffs with God and our neighbor. God knows and acts first, even before we are willing, much less capable, of responding to Him.

The idea that God moves first, when we can do nothing of our own will or power, is also an implicit theme in our epistle reading today from 2nd Corinthians.

Saint Paul writes about a confidence that we Christians can succeed that has no basis in human effort or merit:

SUCH trust have we through Christ to Godward: not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. (2 Cor.3:4-6, BCP Lectionary, Trinity XII)

In other words, we have trust and confidence, through Christ, that God has chosen to make us sufficient to minister to the world the Gospel set forth in the New Testament. This trust is based on nothing in ourselves. We aren't confident that we have the ability to spread the Gospel through any of our natural attributes. Rather, our trust is in God, in God's ability through his Son, to sustain us and empower us to spread the Good News of the New Testament, a new covenant that God established for mankind through the Son's incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

We have nothing within us that is sufficient to perfectly minister and meet the standards of the Old Covenant according to Saint Paul. The law, the standard of the Old Testament, condemns us because it is a standard we cannot meet. We cannot truly fulfill God's standards through our human effort — each and every one of us falls short.

But the New Covenant — for which God makes all Christians his ministers — is a ministry of the Spirit that has no origin in our human will and attributes, a ministry of the Spirit that that brings life, grace, and forgiveness instead of death pursuant to a standard we can never meet.

God acts first, and he is sufficient to strengthen us to spread the good news of what he has done and is doing regardless of our individual circumstances and attributes.

And what he is doing in Christian communities all over the world is marvelous.

Saint Paul, in our Epistle today, employs a technique that is common to rabbinical literature. If proposition X is true, how much more then is proposition Y true.

Jesus himself used this oratorical technique in talking about God's attitude toward us. If child is hungry, a father won't give him a stone or a snake to eat. If even human fathers know to give things to their children, then how much more God will give to us when we ask him for the Holy Spirit.

Saint Paul uses the same technique in our Epistle. St. Paul has noted in other writings that the law of the Old Testament is not bad. In fact, it is a standard that was designed to bring us closer to God, like a teacher and mentor. But if the law of the Old Covenant was good, if it served a noble purpose, then how much better is the New Covenant that is based on grace and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.

But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: how shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious? For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory. (2 Cor.3:7-10, BCP Lectionary, Trinity XII)

You see, Saint Paul was referring to the fact that Moses' face shone like a light-bulb because he had encountered God in a powerful way as he was bestowed with the Law and empowered to deliver it to the people.

And afterwards, his face was veiled. I have read two reasons commentators have provided for this action. First, Moses' face was so bright that it was hard for the Israelites to look at him, just like you or I cannot look up into the sky on a bright summer day without sunglasses. For Moses to receive the 10 Commandments engraved in stone, his face glowed so brightly after that it was like looking at the sun to look at his face.

The other reason for veiling his face was because this bright light began to fade as time went on. The Israelites did not have to see the light dwindle each day because they saw Moses' face at its peak, at its very brightest, and then the veil obscured the diminishing of this miracle over time.

According to St. Paul, our ministration of the New Covenant is even more glorious than the light that radiated from Moses' face when the law was given. And while the light faded from Moses' face over time, our Lord Jesus Christ promised that when we come to faith in him we have living water within us like an underground well, replenished and full when all the world around us is parched.

The good news of the New Testament is the reality of paradise breaking through into this earthly existence in the Christian community, as we celebrate and enter into union with the risen Christ in the Church. We will know this experience fully only in the next life, but the kingdom of God is already piercing the darkness while we are still alive.

You, me, everyone in the world, we are like the deaf and dumb man the Lord healed. Rather than wait for the man to respond, Jesus acted first and caught his attention in a dramatic way. For all of us, the Good News of the Gospel is not a work of human effort but a true story of what God has already done and is doing in your life and mine through the risen Lord Jesus Christ.

But if God already takes the first step, if God makes the first move to break the icy separation between God and man, why should we take any effort to reach out toward God? Does God simply do everything? What role is there for us to play in this great cosmic event as the kingdom of heaven breaks through even now to penetrate this fallen world?

Here, I would suggest that, while God chooses to act before we even know to respond, He does not force us into heaven against our will. In some cases he gently whispers in our ears to repent and turn around, while other people, like Saint Paul, are basically whapped on the head with a two-by-four to get their attention.

Still, if salvation is anything like a marriage or any of the other covenants we see in human relationships, it involves a call and response. God invites each and every one of us to repent and follow him. He alone can give us the ability to respond and receive His Gospel, because this is beyond our human effort and ability. But he does not force us into heaven against our will, so we need to open our hearts to him and respond, or at least ask God for to help us to respond to his call — even as he takes the first move, commands that our spiritual ears be opened to the Gospel, and loosens the restraint that binds our tongues so that we may freely proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Additionally, I would call your attention to the role of the man's friends in our Gospel pericope for today. The man himself is not described as taking any affirmative effort to be healed, and yet we know that his friends or family forced their way through the crowd to drag him up to the Lord, at which point they begged for Jesus to heal him.

Similarly, in the story of the Syro-Phonecian woman that precedes today's miracle, the girl who was delivered from demonic possession is not recorded as taking any action to merit or trigger her miraculous deliverance. Instead, it is the mother who makes her way to the Lord, falls at his feet, responds humbly when the Lord tests her pride, and is told in turn that her daughter will be healed.

God knows in advance what he will do. He knew in advance that he would heal the man in today's lesson, or the Syro-Phoenician woman's daughter in the preceding passage in the Gospel of Mark, and yet he still carved a role out for friends and family to play as the miracles took place.

God carves out a role for all of us to play in ministering his Gospel of the New Covenant. We are to bring people who are deaf to the Gospel, who are speechless when it comes to talking about God. As we do so, relying on God's sufficiency rather than our own strengths and abilities, God will make the first move and begin to melt hard hearts everywhere, in spite of our inadequate human effort.

There is no magic method for evangelism. There is no one-size-fits-all way to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. We must simply present ourselves to God, ask him to fulfill what we are too fallen to even imagine asking for in prayer, then try to follow his guidance as a church community, with faith that God will teach us and give us the strength to administer the Gospel he already has entrusted to us in every situation and hardship that may later confront us. The focus is all on responding to what God has already done, is doing right now in our midst, and will continue to do tomorrow.

Today's collect really says it all. It is a fitting prayer for all of us to take to heart:

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen. (Collect, BCP Lectionary, Trinity XII)

Footnote
¹ Hearing the Word of God, by St. Gregory, Translated by M.F. Toale, DD
   (PL 76, Hom. 10 in Ezekiel I, col. 886, paras 1-5; Ezechiel iii. 10)