Prayers and Sighs

Mark 7:24-37

September 5, 2021

 

            Remember, if you can, the last time you sighed. I mean really take a minute and think about it. If you can’t remember a specific time that you sighed, try and think about something that makes you sigh. Is it sadness, relief, weariness, resignation, contentment? Now, I’m going to ask all of us to sigh. I’m serious, let out a sigh. If you need to close your eyes and think about something specifically, please feel free to do so. If you are watching from home, I encourage you all to sigh too. Sigh more than once if you feel so moved, but just sigh. I know that it isn’t easy to sigh on demand, but please try.

            When you sighed, were you thinking about anything in particular? Was your sigh born out of weariness or out of contentment? Was it a sigh of relief? I know that the biggest sighs of relief I have ever exhaled have been when I’m made it through bag check and security and long walks to my gate at the airport and I have plenty of time before my flight departs. I sink into a chair at the gate, and I sigh. I made it.

            I remember noticing that my kids would sigh with contentment when they were little, and they finally got to sit down at the table and eat. If they had been playing hard all day and they were hungry, those first few satisfying bites of food made them sigh. I know I’ve sighed over food. If I take a bite of a perfect piece of chocolate cheesecake, I’m going to let out a sigh of delight.

            But we sigh for other reasons. Listening or watching the news makes me sigh. When we had our collective sigh at the beginning of this time, I was thinking about everything that is happening in the world – all that is taking place close to home and around the globe. It is hard not to sigh with despair or worry or anguish at the many and profound ways that humans and creation suffers. So, when I listen to troubling news, I often find myself sighing.

            Until this sermon, I hadn’t given much thought to sighing. Most of the time it seems to be an involuntary response on our part. I didn’t give a whole lot of thought to sighing until I read this last part of our passage from Mark’s gospel. Jesus sighed. In previous years when this passage has rolled around in the lectionary, I have chosen to preach on the first part of the passage – the healing of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter. I have focused more on that troubling exchange because I wanted and needed to wrestle with Jesus’ downright rude response to her request. Because I have been so focused on that part, I have not given much attention – if any – to this second part of the passage, to this other healing of a man who was deaf and struggled with a speech impediment.

            And because of that, I have not paid as much attention to the details of this healing; to one detail in particular – Jesus looked up to heaven, and he sighed.

            What are the details of this passage? From the beginning of these verses, we learn that Jesus is deep in Gentile country. The issue of who Jesus had come for is at the heart of his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman. Who should receive his attention first and foremost? The children on Israel only or was his ministry to be more expansive?

            From this Jesus travels further into a Gentile region. And while he is there, “they” brought this deaf man to him and “they” begged Jesus to heal him. It is unclear who the “they” is. Is it the crowds that were growing and following Jesus? Is it the family and friends of the man? It does say that Jesus takes the man away from the crowd, so that he could heal him in private, but who made up that crowd is not spelled out.

            Perhaps that does not matter, but what does matter is that Jesus took the man away from the crowd so that he could respond to the man’s need in private. This seems unusual for Jesus. In fact, the whole way that he healed the man seems unusual for Jesus. Just a few verses earlier, Jesus healed the woman’s daughter from afar. But this healing of the deaf man is hands on.

            I have been trying to put myself in the shoes of this deaf man. What must it have been like for him? I suspect it would be challenging for anyone to be deaf at any time, challenging to be deaf in a hearing world, but we do have more resources at hand now than the man would have had access to then. Did he understand what the people who brought him to Jesus wanted to have happen? Did he wish it for himself? Or was he just brought along? Did he have an idea who Jesus was? Was Jesus just another supposed healer in a long line of healers who had tried to “cure” him of his deafness, but had achieved nothing? What was he thinking when he saw Jesus? What did he want from Jesus?

            Perhaps Jesus understood that the jostling of the crowd and being brought to Jesus would have been confusing for the man, so that is why Jesus took him aside for privacy. Jesus wanted the man’s whole attention to be on him. Jesus was more physical in his healing, so the man would be able to see and understand more of what was happening.

            With the man’s full attention on him, Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears. He spit – something that some believed had curative properties – and touched the man’s tongue. Then Jesus looked up to heaven and sighed and said, “Ephphatha.” “Be opened.”

            Immediately, the man’s ears were opened, and he could hear. Immediately his tongue was unbound, and he could speak plainly.

            The crowd of people who had brought the man to Jesus must have sidled their way back to where Jesus and the man were, because Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened. But of course, the more Jesus ordered them to keep their peace, to keep their silence, the more zealously and the more fervently they proclaimed what had just happened, the miracle Jesus worked. And in their proclamation, they quoted scripture.

“He makes the deaf to hear, and the mute to speak.”

I realize there are many questions to be asked of this passage. What’s up with messianic secret in Mark? Why does Jesus not want news of his actions and deeds proclaimed? Why did Jesus use these rather strange actions to heal the man? And why did Jesus look to heaven and sigh? Was he merely sighing out the word Ephphatha? Or did his sigh signify something else?

I know there is no way of knowing why Jesus sighed, and my speculation about it is just that – speculation. I see Jesus’ sigh as a deeply human response. That certainly ties in with the earlier story in this passage. Jesus was deeply human. And that can be something that we struggle with. We proclaim, we confess, that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. But I think when it comes to grappling with what it means for him to have been fully human, what the realities of that might look like, we struggle. We don’t want to think of Jesus as having his own biases as a fully human man of his culture and time. But if he was fully human, wouldn’t he have had them? We don’t want to think about Jesus needing to learn, to have his own mind and heart opened, but if he was fully human, that would have been necessary, just as it is necessary for us, for our own learning.

And maybe the fully human Jesus sighed in this moment because he knew that it was not only the ears of the man that needed to be opened up. Maybe he realized that curing the physical ailments of the people brought to him was only one piece of the puzzle. Maybe Jesus sighed because he knew that for every person he healed, there were so many more that needed his healing, and he would not have the opportunity to reach them. The needs were greater and bigger than he could affect in his earthly lifetime. Perhaps Jesus sighed because he was tired and worn and his full humanity struggled with his call and his ministry.

Whatever the reason Jesus sighed, he died. He sighed. He prayed. He wept. He learned. He even had moments of despair. He was fully human, and while the reality and consequences of his humanity might disturb us at times, it is also where I find some of my greatest comfort.

When I am ready to give up on faith, when I am ready to walk away from it, I remember the incarnation of God into the world. I remember that Jesus was fully human. You see it is the incarnation that keeps me going. It is the reality that God was willing to take all this on, not because God had to, not because God even needed to, but because God wanted to. God wanted to take on our humanity because God wanted to be in relationship with us. God chose us so that we could choose God.

Let’s face it, y’all, we humans are a mess. We were given this beautiful creation and we have messed it up. We were given one another to love, and we fail at that. But Jesus came into the world out of love for us in all of our messiness. Jesus was fully human, and took on the realities of humanness, the frailties and flaws of humanness, because we are so deeply and irrevocably loved by God.

Jesus sighed and said, “be opened.” And that’s what God wants for us is to be opened. God wants our ears to be opened, our minds to be opened, our hands to be opened, our hearts to be opened. And yes, we are going to misunderstand and fail and fall. But that doesn’t keep God from loving us. That doesn’t prevent God from calling us back, back into the fold, back into God’s arms. Jesus was fully human and Jesus sighed, and we see in Jesus all that we are called to be, the full humanity we were created to be. So, whatever makes us sigh this morning, know that Jesus sighed too. Know that Jesus felt it all as well. Know that our God became fully human so that we could be more fully human. And give thanks.

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

Amen.