Hearing and Sharing

In this episode, I delve into the often-overlooked Gospel of Mark, shedding light on its renewed scholarly interest. We explore a fascinating passage where Jesus takes an unconventional route to meet a specific individual in the Decapolis, emphasising His mission to reach out to all, including Gentiles. Through the intimate healing of a deaf man, we see Jesus’ personal touch and the transformative power of faith. I reflect on the importance of personal encounters with Jesus, the sacrament of baptism, and the call to actively share God’s love and mercy with others.

00:00:00  Even when I was at seminary, the gospel of Mark really wasn’t esteemed. You know, it wasn’t the kind of book that you would spend much time at all in studying, unlike Matthew or Luke or John. They were always given much more weight, and indeed, right across the centuries, that’s always been the case, even though we now know that the gospel of Mark was the first to be written, it was never the first to be read. Like when you open the New Testament, you get the Gospel of Matthew as the first gospel to meet you. And I think that was because a lot of people in the early church thought that Matthew was the first to be written, and the mark was kind of this abbreviated version of, of Matthew. So it’s not even until the sixth century that we find any existing commentaries on the gospel of Mark. There are certainly commentaries on the other gospels before then, but Mark was neglected. And indeed, in the last 40 years, more commentaries have been written on the gospel of Mark than in the first nineteen and a half centuries combined.

00:01:13  So there’s this new discovery, a new wonder about the gospel of Mark. But it’s not without its problems. And one of them is the geography that we are presented with today. And we don’t get this part, these little detail in any of the other gospels. We’re told that Jesus started in the region of Tyre, which is in modern day Lebanon, and he goes, he’s heading from Tyre towards the Sea of Galilee. But so it’s like you’re saying, you’re in Sydney and you’re heading down to Bowral, say, but you go by way of Newcastle. So rather than heading south, you begin by going north and remember they’re on foot. And so it would have been a couple of days extra journey to go north. And then he says that he goes to the Sea of Galilee. But where does he go? By the way of the Decapolis! Well, the Decapolis is to the east of the Sea of Galilee. So if you’re going from Sydney to Bowral, you go via Newcastle, down through Wollongong, down to Nowra and then kind of make your way along to it.

00:02:23  It doesn’t make any sense why Jesus is doing this. It would have taken weeks and weeks to go on this journey, and it’s perhaps all because he wanted to meet this man. He wanted and needed to encounter this one individual. And perhaps he knew that this was the only way that he could do it. That if he turned up in the Decapolis, this foreign region, this region, again full of pagans, people that weren’t Jewish, it wasn’t a place of Jewish faith. It wasn’t a place where Jesus would likely find someone who would be open to him. But there he meets this man and the people bring him this man. But notice that Jesus doesn’t just kind of heal him straight away. First he takes him. I can imagine it’s by the hand. Takes him away from the crowd. He’s off just in this little private space where it’s just Jesus and the men. Again, it’s a reminder that Jesus never treats us generically. We’re not just a number. We’re not just a person in the midst of a crowd.

00:03:31  Whenever Jesus interacts with us, he likes to do it this way. He takes us into a private place where we can be there alone. I mean, how many times do we hear Jesus going off with the disciples, often just 1 or 2 of them at a time, so they can all be alone, and they can have that time together and have that time with the father. We need to do this. Perhaps it was also because this man who Jesus knew, who was about to be healed. And when the. Imagine the first sounds that you hear is the cacophony of a crowd, all these different voices, it would just be so overwhelming if it’s able to be just the voice of the one who just brought you such life and such love and such intimacy and such tenderness. How much different that would be for this man. I mean, we know how awkward it is when we’re talking with someone who’s not able to hear very well. You know, naturally, we just start to shout, and then they get annoyed and frustrated and or, you know, that whole kind of interaction.

00:04:37  And this poor man who’s not only deaf, but he’s got an impairment in his lips, in his, his tongue, he’s not able to speak properly. And so how isolating that must be. And then Jesus takes him. And it’s this really interesting description. Mark is the most likely of all of the gospel writers to tell us how often Jesus touches people. Again, he doesn’t do things at a distance. Of course he could. He could just simply say the word, and that would be enough. That the person would be healed by that. But now Jesus takes this finger and inserts it into the man’s ears. How personal, how intimate is that? Then he spits on his fingers and puts them inside his mouth and again, you know, oh, that’s a bit gross. Jesus, don’t you know about hygiene and proper practices and all of this? And yet he wants to confront us. He wants to engage us. He wants to be there in our lives. I mean, we still use this father, right? In the sacrament of baptism.

00:05:46  It’s one of the, the, the four explanatory rites that we do. And it’s part of that ritual of being announced, of being declared or being commissioned. The first To, then these two families will experience it next weekend. Or about the dignity, you know, being clothed in white, being anointed on the top of their head. The whole experience of the profound identity of who they’ve become in Christ. But then we light a candle from the Easter candle, and we pray the Ephphatha Rite over their ears and their mouth, because Saint Paul tells us in Romans ten that faith comes from hearing, you know, I would never have been a Christian unless someone told me about Jesus, unless my family, unless people at church, people in the Antioch group and and father Jerry especially, you know, those those people who announced to me the good news they had to speak that word into my life first. So first, we need to hear. First we need to be formed and shaped by God’s words.

00:06:52  And so our ears need to be opened. And so Jesus will come and you’ll stick his fingers into our ears in order to open our minds, open our hearts. Open us to. That experience opens us to that possibility of encountering him through listening to the Word of God. But it’s not enough just to hear. We also need to speak. We also need to take our place and our role in speaking forth the truth of his love, of continuing to announce the wonders of what God has done, and allowing that God who loves us and calls us into life to be so transformative that we naturally just want to share that gospel, to share that announcement of his love and his mercy and his truth into the world. Let’s indeed pray that we might open our ears to His Word, that we might be available to go off to that private place to encounter the Lord Jesus, and that he will indeed touch us where we need to be healed. So this week let us listen and then announce the wonders of what God has done, the God who does all things well.