Verse 37
Low Estimate of the Church's Work.
Let us compare the danger, to which we are open, of taking a low estimate of the Church with the popular view once taken of the ministry of our Blessed Lord.
I. There were few, when He was alive on earth, who came to Him in the spirit of Nicodemus, seeking truth. The greater number followed, like the multitude at Capernaum, not because they saw His miracle, but because they ate of the loaves and were filled. Two of the disciples owned how they were mortified at the loss of their political expectations from Jesus. Can we suppose that there was a more spiritual mind in those who cheered Him on this road with such applause as this, "He hath done all things well: He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak"?
II. Then, as to our own danger, what the miracles of Christ and His beneficence were to the witnesses of His ministry, the indirect but manifest effects of Christianity in the world are to us. Let us take the case of public charities in this and other Christian countries. Who would not point to them as evidence of the power of the Gospel? And yet, are these public charities a gauge of religion? Men give largely, or admire those who do so, under a vague impression that benevolence is equivalent to God. (2) Again, education is one of the most obvious benefits arising from the influence of Christianity in this age. But, great and precious as are the benefits conferred by education, let no one imagine that the best of schools atones for an ill-appointed Church.
III. There is a high and admirable sense in which the description of Christ in the text may be read. "He hath done all things well" so the redeemed in heaven will say of Him. "He hath done all things well," and not according to the right and wrong of this world, but well according to the judgment of eternity well, insomuch as the work answered perfectly to the design, the end to the beginning. When did He say that His work was finished? Was it when crowds followed Him whom He had fed in their hunger or healed in their sicknesses or raised from the dead? No; but at the moment when His admirers forsook Him, and left Him in the hands of His enemies. When the world stood only near Him that they might gaze on His misery, when He disappointed all popular expectations and was despised and rejected of men, then, in the hearing of God, when His voice alone of all His bodily powers survived His agony, He said of His work, "It is finished."
C. W. Furse, Sermons at Richmond, p. 121.
The Gift of Hearing.
I. It is Christ who enables any one of us to hear any of the common sounds that enter into our ears as we walk out on an August day. If you have heard the singing of the birds or the running of the stream or the voices of children, recollect it was Christ who caused you to hear them. He fills the earth and air with all melodies, and He gives to men the power of taking them in. By giving back hearing to this man who had lost it, He declared this: He said, I am the Giver of hearing, the power comes from Me. Think how wonderful that is.
II. There is another kind of deafness besides that which cannot take in sounds. We may hear sounds, and yet the words that are within the sounds may never reach us. They may float about us, and seem as if they were coming unto us. And then we may feel just the same as if they had never been uttered. As far as we are concerned, we might as well have been a hundred miles away. But if they are words of health and life words that come from the good God words that are to make us right and true men words that are to make all that is past fresh and new to us, and what is going on around us good and not evil, and what is to be hereafter through all ages blessed, it is a very sad thing, is it not, that they should be all lost upon us? But must it be so? Shall it be so with any of us? What, when it is written, "He maketh the deaf to hear"! When we can say, Lord, Thou hast sent us these words; they are Thine! Once more say, Ephphatha; Be opened! to, me and to all who have not received the good news of Thy New Testament into their hearts.
F. D. Maurice, Sermons in Country Churches, p. 10.
I. Our Lord, it is remarked, took this man aside, as in the eighth chapter He is represented as taking the blind man by the hand, and leading him out of the village, before He restored his sight, probably for this reason in both cases that both patients might be moved out of the noise and bustle of the wondering crowd, and thus the lesson of the heavenly power and goodness of Him who healed them might sink more quietly and deeply into their hearts. Unlike the pictures of those workers of mere wonders which men's fancies have devised, the Lord is ever represented as anxious in His great works for this, almost above all things that the healing of their bodies might be, for the cured, the outward and visible sign of His power to heal their souls. And He knew that for this purpose each character required its own peculiar treatment; sometimes the patient's temptation was to lose the sobering and hallowing impression in the midst of much talk, while he professed to be showing forth the mercy he had received among his friends and acquaintances; sometimes (as in the case of the demoniac in the country of the Gadarenes, whose dwelling had before been in the tombs) the best help to the patient's holiness was to be found in the society of his friends, and in no solitary brooding over his state, but in telling to all how great things the Lord had done for him.
II. In the instance before us, the Lord's solicitude for the sufferer and regard for the peculiarities of his case seems, it has been remarked, to be shown even in the form in which He sets about the miracle. The man could not hear, and therefore the Lord spoke to him by signs; He put His fingers into his ears, and touched his tongue, and looked up to heaven, to let him more readily understand the blessing which was intended, and the source from which it was to come. He sighed, too, as He wept afterwards at the grave of Lazarus, thinking in both cases how vast was the amount of spiritual evil that remained to be vanquished, and how easy it was, comparatively, to cure men's bodily diseases, or even to raise them bodily after death to life again; how difficult to regenerate their souls. This mixture of anxiety to effect a spiritual along with a bodily cure is one great source of deep interest in our Lord's miracles. He is not, as we have said, the mere wonder-worker, manifesting His Divine commission by a supernatnral power that awes us into conviction. His power is not more remarkable than His love a love which begins with the body, but is not at rest till it has laboured for the soul. And hence that curiosity is very natural which has led men to ask whether they cannot learn something as to the ultimate spiritual fate of those who were blessed to be thus the objects of His solicitude. But God has not thought fit to gratify this curiosity, and we may be content to leave the subjects of it in the hands of Him who so evidently cared for them, and who does all things well, both for our bodies and our souls.
A. C. Tait, Lessons for School Life, p. 183.
References: Mark 7:37 . H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty, vol. ii., p. 104; C. Girdlestone, A Course of Sermons, vol. ii., p. 273; J. C. Hare, Sermons in Herstmonceux Church, p. 245; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. v., p. 32; J. Vaughan, Sermons, 14th series, p. 5.Mark 7:37 . Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 114.Mark 8:1 , Mark 8:2 . J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity, Part I., p. 254.Mark 8:1-8 . Outline Sermons to Children, p. 146. Mark 8:1-9 . Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii., p. 13; J. C. Harrison, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvii., p. 321; H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man, p. 165.Mark 8:1-26 . W. Hanna, Our Lord's Life on Earth, p. 237. Mark 8:2 . J. Keble, Sermons on Various Occasions, p. 189. Mark 8:2 , Mark 8:3 . G. Huntington, Sermons for Holy Seasons, p. 47; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iv., p. 225; G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, p. 41.
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