A Clear Diagnosis and Even Clearer Healing

Text: Mark 7:24-37

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

            It’s generally considered good manners to avoid drawing attention to someone’s weaker spots, their disabilities, or things that they might be ashamed about. In the course of our regular daily interactions with each other, it’s often considered impolite to point out someone’s physical differences, or ask pointed questions about the more embarrassing parts of their family history. And yet, in our Gospel reading today, Jesus once again completely overthrows our cultural taboos and does that exact thing. During His quick visit to the region of Tyre and Sidon, Jesus points out something that a distressed woman may have been ashamed of: her Gentile Syrophoenician racial heritage. She knew that there was a Jewish Messiah coming, and she hoped that He would be able to help her, but she also knew that she did not belong to the covenant people of Israel. So when she asked that Jesus help her little daughter, who was under attack from an unclean spirit, His answer—which exposed the very thing she was afraid would be exposed—must have stung. “Let the children be fed first; for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” He not only told her that she was outside the household of Israel, but that she was a dog, belonging to a lineage that was unclean.

            And again, in the same reading today, after Jesus returns from that region, He comes across a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment. Now we would do as little as we could to draw attention to that, finding ways to accommodate and spare him the spotlight of having those things focused upon. But what does Jesus do? He puts His fingers into the man’s deaf ears—actually physically pointing out his weakness—and after spitting, He touches the man’s tongue; again, literally pointing to the flaw this man carried.

            I wonder how we would react if we were in the place of the Gentile woman or the deaf man. Of course, we’re culturally trained to move immediately to outrage. How dare Jesus do that and cause such grief and mental anguish to these people? How can He go around, pointing out what any polite person would simply accept and move past? We might try to find a way to defend ourselves, to say that we have nothing to be ashamed of, even when we know that it’s something we wish wasn’t true about us. We might want to find a way to go on the offense and find something of His to pick apart, as seems to be the pattern of discourse today in nearly every arena. At the very least we would find an inner circle of people to gripe to, discussing and criticizing this Galilean preacher who seems to have no qualms with pointing out everyone else’s flaws and weaknesses.

            And if you think you wouldn’t react this way in that situation, think about how you do react whenever Jesus points out the weak spots you do have, your illnesses, your sins. What’s your gut reaction when you hear preaching about that Commandment that hits a little too close to home? When the pastor speaking Jesus’ words from Scripture says that you’ve done something that God has said you should not? When you hear someone try to correct you using the wisdom of God’s Word rather than feeding the fires of fallen human nature or the corrupted thought of this wicked age? How do you like that? You don’t. And the reactions are the same across the board: denial, saying you haven’t done it, or that it’s not a sin; comparison with other people’s flaws, saying yours aren’t as bad so they don’t deserve as harsh of punishment; anger that it’s stirred up something in you that feels like guilt or shame; despair that you haven’t improved yourself as you had thought.

            Yet even knowing that it will shake things up in our hearts and souls, Jesus does not flinch from telling us exactly what we need to have corrected, precisely where our weaknesses and diseases of body, heart, and soul lie. But He does this not just to make us feel bad, or angry. He doesn’t do it to hold Himself up above us, like some kind of petty vindictive judge. He certainly doesn’t do it to create a sliding scale where we can compare ourselves to others and find out who’s better than whom. No, there’s a good reason for Jesus exposing our weaknesses, our flaws, our sins and mistakes, the brokenness of our bodies and souls. He does it so that we can have a clear diagnosis of what ails us. For it’s only when there’s a clear diagnosis that there can be a clear and full remedy.

            Jesus does this with the Syrophoenician woman, revealing that she has indeed been born to a nation that had its faith in murderous and false gods. He pointed out that she had no right to welcome herself to the table in the household of faith. And with the deaf man, Jesus pointed out where the effects of being a fallen person in fallen world had corrupted this man’s body. But Jesus diagnoses these things, He points them out and brings them to the light so sharply, so that He would heal them. Medicine will not be given unless the doctor knows the disease. Jesus, as the Great Physician of body and soul, gives us a laser focused diagnosis in order to give us an even clearer, more focused, and stronger healing.

            This is why He points out your need for salvation. It’s why He speaks of your sin in such stark and uncompromising tones. It’s why He doesn’t say to you that it’s all OK, or that you can do whatever you want, or that you don’t have any real issues. He does all this clear, unflinching revealing not to make you feel bad, but to show you the problem and then reveal the remedy. And the remedy is not just trying harder, or just having a diagnosis for its own sake. It’s not in ignoring the sin or hiding it better. It’s not in denying or pretending it’s not there. And it certainly isn’t in the sham snake oils and placebos offered by the world in all its babbling. The solution is in Jesus, with all His grace and mercy. The cure is Jesus, with forgiveness for your specific sins and sicknesses. He gives you the medicine of the Lord’s Supper; His body given for your body’s healing, His blood shed for the forgiveness of your sins. He gives you the right Word spoken at the right time: Law to reveal your problem, and Gospel to heal you of it. And when a specific ailment goes deep, when you can’t shake it, when you keep doing what you know you shouldn’t do and the hooks of temptation grab hold of your conscience and trouble you, then He gives you deeper, even more focused healing. He gives you the gift of private confession and absolution, to speak out into the air those things that have poisoned you and left you feeling empty and unclean. You speak those before the man that God has sent to preach Jesus to you, and then, in the stead and by the command of the Lord Jesus, your pastor privately speaks forgiveness for that specific thing that troubles you, applying the salve of absolution to you and no one else, to that sin so that it disappears in the light of Jesus’ cross.

            And look at the effect that forgiveness has. The Syrophoenician woman is brought into the family of faith as Jesus heals her daughter from afar. The deaf man hears and his tongue is loosed so that he can praise the Lord who saved him from those things that had troubled him, the things Jesus pointed out. They both have faith in the Savior who rescued them in body and soul. The same happens to you. That’s why you come back, to have your faith strengthened in the Lord who forgives your sins continually through this service. You come back for another dose of healing until the Lord restores you completely in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Really, that’s what it’s all about. It’s why we do what we do. It’s so that we can lean on Him all the more, trusting Him even to eternal life. In the name of Jesus, who rescues us completely. Amen.