St. Matthew tells us in general terms that when the Lord had
returned from those coast of Tyre and Sidon unto the sea of Galilee, ‘great
multitudes came unto Him, having with them those that were lame, blind,
dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus’ feet, and He
healed them’ (xv. 30). Out of this number of cures Mark selects
one to relate more in detail, and this, no doubt, because it was signalized
by some circumstances not usual in other like cases of healing. ‘They
bring unto Him one that was deaf and had an impediment in his speech,’
one who, if he was not altogether dumb, was yet incapable of making any
articulate sounds. His case differs, apparently, from that of the
dumb man mentioned in Matt. ix.32; for while that man’s evil is traced
up distinctly and directly to a spiritual source, nothing of the kind is
intimated here, nor are we, as Theophylact suggests, to presume such.
Him his friends now brought to the great Healer, ‘and they beseech Him
to put His hand upon him.’ But it is not exactly in this way
that He will heal him.
It has already been observed that there must lie a deep meaning in all
the variations which mark the different healings of different sick and
afflicted, a wisdom of God ordering all the circumstances of each particular
cure. Were we acquainted as accurately as He, who ‘knew what was
in man,’ with the spiritual condition of each who was brought within
the circle of His grace, we should then understand why one was healed in
the crowd, another led out of the city ere the work of restoration was
commenced; why for one a word effected a cure, for another a touch, while
a third was sent to wash in the pool of Siloam ere ‘he came seeing;’
why for this one the process of restoration was instantaneous, while another
saw at first ‘men as trees, walking.’ We are not for an instant
to suppose in cures gradually accomplished any restraint on the power of
the Lord, save such as He willingly imposed on Himself,--and this, doubtless,
in each case having reference to, and being explicable by, the moral and
spiritual state of the person who was passing under His hands. It
is true that our ignorance prevents us from at once and in every case discerning
‘the manifold wisdom’ which ordered each of His proceedings, but we are
not less sure that this wisdom ordered them all.
On the present occasion He first ‘took him aside from the multitude,’
whom He would heal; compare Mark viii. 23: “He took the blind man by
the hand, and led him out of the town.’ But with what intent
does He isolate him thus? The Greek Fathers generally reply, for
the avoiding of all show and ostentation. But this cannot be, since
of all the miracles which He did, we have only two in which any such withdrawal
is recorded. Shall we say that there was show and ostentation in
all the others? It is not much better to answer, with Calvin, that
He might pray with greater freedom. He, whose life was altogether
prayer, needed not solitude for this. His purpose was, rather, that
the man apart from the tumult and interruptions of the crowd, in solitude
and silence, might be more receptive of deep and lasting impressions; even
as the same Lord does now oftentimes lead a soul apart, sets it in the
solitude of a sick chamber, or in loneliness of spirit, or takes away from
it earthly companions and friends, when He would speak with it, and heal
it. He takes it aside, as He took this deaf and dumb out of the multitude,
that in the hush of the world’s din it may listen to Him; as on a greater
scale He took His elect people aside into the wilderness, when He would
first open their spiritual ear, and deliver unto them His law.
Having this done, Christ ‘put His fingers into his ears, and He spit
and touched his tongue.’ These are symbolic actions, which it
is easy to see why He should have employed in the case of one afflicted
as this man was;--almost all other avenues of communication, save those
of sight and feeling, were of necessity closed. Christ by these signs
would awake his faith, and stir up in him the lively expectation of a blessing.
The fingers are put into the ears as to bore them, to pierce through the
obstacles which hindered sounds from reaching the seat of hearing.
This was the fountain-evil; he did not speak plainly, because he did not
hear; this defect, therefore, is first removed. Then, as often through
excessive dryness the tongue cleaves to the roof of the mouth, the Lord
gives here, in what next He does, the sign of the removal of this evil,
of the unloosing of the tongue. And, at the same time, the healing
virtue He shows to reside in His own body; He looks not for it from any
other quarter; but with the moisture of His own mouth upon His finger touched
the tongue which He would release from the bands which held it fast (cf.
John ix. 6). It is not for its medicinal virtue that use is made
of this, but as the apt symbol of a power residing in, and going forth
from, His body.
St. Mark, abounding as he does in graphic touches, reproducing before
our eyes each scene which he narrates, tells us of the Lord, how this doing,
‘and looking up to heaven, He sighed.’ He has further preserved
for us the very word which He spake, in the very language in which he spake
it; He ‘saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.’ The
‘looking up to heaven’ was a claiming of the divine help; or rather,
since the fulness of divine power abode permanently in Him, and not by
fitful visitation, as in others, an acknowledgement of His oneness with
the Father, and that He did no other things save those which He saw the
Father do (cf. Matt. xiv. 19; John xi. 41, 42). Some explain the
words, ‘He sighed,’ or ‘He groaned,’ which are the words
in the Rhemish Version, as the deep voice of prayer in which He was at
the moment engaged; but rather, we suppose, that this poor helpless creature
now brought before Him, this living proof of the wreck which sin had brought
about, of the malice of the devil in deforming the fair features of God’s
original creation, then wrung that groan from His heart. He that
always felt, was yet now in His human soul touched with a liveliest sense
of the miseries of the race of man. Thus on another still greater
occasion ‘He groaned in the spirit and was troubled’ (John xi. 33),
with a trouble which had, in like manner, its source in the thought of
the desolation which sin and death had effected. As there the mourning
hearts which were before Him were but a sampler of the mourners of all
times and all places, so was this poor man of all the variously afflicted
and greatly suffering children of Adam. In the preservation of the
actual Aramaic ‘Ephphatha,’ which Christ spoke, as in the ‘Talithi
cumi’ of Mark v. 14, we recognize the narrative of an eye and ear-witness.
It is quite in this Evangelist’s manner to give the actual words which
Christ used, but adding in each case their interpretation (iii. 17; v.
41; vii. 11; xiv. 36; xv. 34; cf. x. 46; xv. 22). He derived, no
doubt, his account from St. Peter, on whose memory the words of power,
which opened the ears, and loosed the tongue, and raised the dead, had
indelibly impressed themselves.
The injunction, ‘He charged them that they should tell no man,’ implies
that the friends of this afflicted man had accompanied or followed Jesus
out of the crowd, and having been witnesses of the cure, were now included
with him in the same command that they should not divulge what had been
done. On the reasons which induced the Lord so often to give this
charge of silence something has been said already. On this, as on
other occasions (see Matt. ix. 31; Mark i. 44-45), the charge is nothing
regarded by those on whom it is laid; ‘the more He charged them, so
much the more a great deal they published it.’ The exclamation
in which men’s surprise and admiration finds utterance, ‘He hath done all
things well,’ reminds us of the words of the first creation (Gen. i. 31),
upon which we are thus not unsuitably thrown back, for Christ’s work is
in the highest sense ‘a new creation.’ The concluding notice, ‘They
glorified the God of Israel,’ implies that many of those present were
heathens, as we should naturally expect in that half-hellenized region
of Decapolis, where this miracle was wrought, and that these, beholding
the mighty works which were done, confessed that the God who had chosen
Israel for His own possession was above all gods.
