Open Up

Spitting Fire

Mark 7:31-31

Pastoral Prayer: Lord Jesus, even we who declare You are Lord of All, find ourselves hard of hearing You and unclear when we speak of You. So for the sake of all, command our ears be opened and our tongues loosed so that we may hear You speak to us this day and that we may speak clearly to all that You are Lord and that You do all things well. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to You, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. And all God’s people say, Amen.

It cost him $57,222.

In an undisciplined instance, only six seconds into the game, Philadelphia Offensive lineman Jalen Carter used the face of Dax Prescott as his spittoon. Carter was suspended from the game and forfeited his check.

It cost him $57,222.

Had Carter lived six hundred years before Jesus, his action would not have cost him so much. His spitting may have been perceived as an attempt to provide a curative, a healing aid. According to Franz Gonzalez-Crussi, Heraclitus believed,

Life is a continuous flow. In living organisms, there is an unceasing circulation and streaming of fluids with various beneficial, life-promoting effects. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was so strongly impressed by this fact that he made it the leading principle of all his reflections on life. He was not alone.

Carter may have been viewed as offering a beneficial effect to help Dax Prescott overcome his last season's shortcomings.

Had Carter lived in the first century, he might have read Pliny the Elder. Frank Gonzalez-Cussi’s book The Body Fantastic offers this description:

Pliny the Elder praises the therapeutic powers of human saliva in his “Natural History” (Book XXVIII, vii). Not only is it the best of all safeguards against serpents, he says, but daily experience teaches that many other advantages attend its use. Surely the ancient Romans were sensitive to such notions: They spat upon the victim of an epileptic fit, and they spat to ward off the “bad luck that follows meeting a person lame in the right leg.” If deemed guilty of too presumptuous hope, they asked forgiveness of the gods by spitting in their own bosom. They spat into the right shoe before putting it on, for good luck; and, of course, they treated ophthalmia by applying a saliva-based ointment every morning. Pains in the neck were treated by applying fasting saliva (interestingly, to be useful the saliva had to be obtained during fasting) with the right hand to the right knee and with the left hand to the left knee. So powerful was the force attributed to saliva, wrote Pliny, that the Romans believed that spitting three times before taking any medicament sufficed to enhance its curative power.

Until the late 19th century, few cared about saliva and where anyone spat.

In the West, hygienic and biomedical considerations were the chief factors that put a stop to the habit of spitting on the floor. Tuberculosis was a scourge that devastated European populations throughout the 19th century and beginning of the 20th.

So concerned were medical experts,

the American Lung Association undertook a veritable “crusade” against spitting. Children in schools were given a list of 19 rules to observe, all of which hammered, in various tones, the injunction to avoid spitting: “1.—Do not spit. 2.—Do not let others spit. . . . 19.—Last, as well as first, DO NOT SPIT.” Brigades of boy scouts distributed notices and fixed posters with anti-spitting slogans. This campaign was still active in the 1940s.

Given that we live in a day and time where football players are fined for spitting in another’s face, where at one time 19 rules emphasized that children should not spit on floors, and today we think it uncouth and inappropriate except on baseball fields and outdoors, we cannot hear the suggestion that anyone would spit on their fingers and touch another person’s tongue. We would be like the man brought to Jesus, unable to hear.

Our attempts to speak would be unintelligible. That is, if we can extend the analogy, we cannot hear what is unfamiliar to us, what we have already decided does not make sense. And when we speak, we speak from a place that makes what we would say unclear to those who do not share our vocabulary.

Those living in Jesus’s day would find our insistence that spitting is unhealthy as unintelligible. They would not be able to hear our arguments. And their response to us would be unclear.

That Mark includes this event in the life of Jesus is worth noting. While the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as the modern Chinese and other cultures, viewed saliva as possessing healing properties, Jesus would have been aware of Moses’s instructions that spitting on another might transfer infection. Albeit a bit risqué for a public reading and explanation in mixed company, the Mosaic system forbade spitting on another, given the risk of making another unclean.

Another way of making the conflict clear would be the way medical advice has become politicized in our own Country. Vaccines. Viruses. Treatment regimens. And the odd expectation that somehow we know the human body, that is, every single human body, well enough to judge success and failure where healing is the measure. Put more clearly, doctors and practitioners are now held to an impossible standard, given that every human body is different. We have not discovered the universal silver bullet for all medical issues.

What that means is that we cannot hear each other. And when we do speak, we are unintelligible to one another. We talk with an impediment.

And they returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee in the region of the Decapolis.

Jesus did not stay with his in-crowd. He did not side with the vaxxers or the anti-vaxxers, the Covid believers or the Covid deniers, the Left or the Right, or the Jews or the Gentiles. One thing the miracles of Jesus reveal is that God is determined to side with those in need, those who need a physician, those who need to be liberated, those who need to be delivered, those who need to hear, to see, to speak, those who need to walk, and those who need to live.

And what the miracle stories reveal is that whether we are willing to admit it or not, Jesus reveals that God is determined not to be God without us, without you.

And, here in this instance, Jesus works harder and involves his body in ways we have not seen to this point.

I offer the regular reminder. While the miracle restored the man’s hearing and his speech, we are looking at the miracles of Jesus for what they reveal about Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity.

And to get ahead of ourselves, and to be sure this preacher does not distract, Mark reveals what we may discover,

He does all things well.

And when we are working in these passages, we find not only the reality of the miracle itself, but we are invited to receive these miracles as, in this case, making it clear that Jesus’s preaching is opening up the ears of all people to hear the Word of faith, and as a result, opens up their mouths to declare clearly,

He does all things well.

One way this is revealed to us is found in Jesus' traveling itinerary. He has just spent time in the region of Tyre and Sidon. This destination represents a deliberate foray into Gentile regions. And when we hear Galilee and the Decapolis, these locations are multi-ethnic. Jesus does well to include those who have traditionally been believed to be excluded - Gentiles - from the Promise when hearing and telling the Story of God, God’s History.

Human beings have always divided into Us versus Them. We see it then. We live it now.

Rather than making our ethnic differences the stuff of separation, Jesus reveals a different kingdom. Rather than making our political agendas the cause for division, Jesus clearly points to the Kingdom of God. And in the end, He will be insisting that we open up to His way rather than the way that leads to self-righteous smugness, whether rooted in our ethnicity or our politics.

Jesus heals Jews and Gentiles, men and women, sons and daughters, Roman officials’ servants, and synagogue rulers' family members.

There are no litmus tests, no loyalty tests, no ideological tests. All in-group identity tests make us deaf to the Good News and unintelligible when, at the same time, we claim to declare the Good News. That is, we are giving something different than Jesus and His Promise to a world staggering from the blows of division that separate.

The Power of Sin and Death.

We cannot find the way forward together. Or, we don’t want the together as we move forward in life. Yet God revealed in Jesus is bringing the Promise of God to bear on all our lives together and our future in Him.

The man here in Mark 7 does nothing. He is brought to Jesus. And all the actions that restore the man are undertaken by Jesus. And to Jesus for the man, they begged, “Lay your hand on him.”

Lane quips,

They brought the man to Jesus for a blessing, and he left having been healed.

The description of the man’s condition conveys that these were not congenital; these conditions developed. Dear Christian, we must admit that from time to time, we find ourselves deaf and speaking with an impediment. Brandishing our faith within the context of our politics or social preferences often leaves us in the same condition. It is the word to the Church at Ephesus in the Revelation: we have left our first love, or, put another way, we have left the One who first loved us.

May our prayers for one another always be that our ears would be open to hear the Spirit of the Lord and that our tongues are loosed so that when we speak, it is intelligible that we are confessing that Jesus is Lord and everything else is sewer-bound.

If we can receive the reality of the miracle, we may also hear the ways the miracle points to the life of Jesus for the world.

In Jesus’s day, those who saw him spit would not be repulsed. They would have readily identified that Jesus intended the well-being of the man. It would not be a stretch to see the saliva, the spit, as analogous to Jesus giving and being Living Water.

Jesus pokes his fingers in the man’s ears. The imagery is as if Jesus were piercing the barriers to hearing. My friend Mark, in his commentary on this passage, makes this action a sign that calls back to the piercing of a servant’s ear, a servant who desires to stay with his master.

Jesus groans. Earlier in Mark 7, Jesus tells the disciples that it is what comes out of a person that makes them unclean. And here, what comes out of Jesus is a groan, an exhale that becomes the breath of life for the man who cannot hear or speak well.

It is reminiscent of Jesus breathing on the disciples the life-giving Spirit. We are reminded that the Apostle Paul animates the condition of the world as it groans in expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. We hear the Apostle comfort us that the Spirit groans for us, and from within us, the deep needs we find hard to express.

Jesus speaks. “Be opened,” he declares. And with words he makes to hear and speak, to walk and to see, to break bonds and make alive. The Preacher in Hebrews makes clear that the power of his word holds all things together.

And when Jesus speaks,

The man hears. And we hear the Word of Faith

The man speaks. And we exclaim the Promise for all.

The crowds confess—and we repeat, He does all things well.

Hear Jesus say to us all today, whether again or for the first time,

Be opened!

There is a euphemism found in Hip Hop culture. And if you are like me, my ears can’t keep up with that style of music, nor do I understand the often poetic vocabulary. But this one line makes sense in relation to the miracle that includes Jesus spitting. Those who hear a great musical track might say,

He’s spitting fire on this track!

And indeed when Jesus speaks we hear the fire of the Spirit calling us to -

Hear and trust!

Speak and announce!