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

Be careful what you pray for. For when you receive it, it might turn out to be something very different from what you expected. The friends of the deaf mute come to Jesus asking Him to lay His hands on him. That was their prayer. And Jesus does according to their prayer. He touches the man-but in a way that probably surprised both the deaf mute and his friends. Jesus does something that frankly seems a little weird and bizarre to us. He sticks His fingers into the man's ears; and He spits and touches the man's tongue.

The deaf-mute's friends saw the importance of there being contact with Jesus. But they probably expected it to be a little more sanitary and prophet-like and pious-looking. And that is also how it often is with us. We know that it's important for us and for our family and friends to be in contact with Jesus. But we want that contact to be a certain way, to fit our notions of how the Lord should be. We want everything to be neat and clean and tidy and respectable-nothing embarrassing or unpleasant. And that's not always how our Lord operates. We pray for good health, or enough money to pay the bills, or for the kids and grandkids to stay on the right path, or for the marriage to get better, or whatever the case may be. We ask God to "touch" a particular area of our life. And then He does the equivalent of sticking His fingers in our ears and spitting and touching our tongues. He answers our prayers, but in ways we often don't expect, that unsettle us, that shake things up a bit, that seem a little unusual and leave us wondering what He's doing. For His goal is not simply to give us what we want, but to give us what we need-not just to restore us but to restore us to Himself, to humble us that He may exalt us and give us life forever. The Lord is not subject to doing things the way we think He should. He knows far better than us, and He does what He wants the way He wants according to His good and gracious will.

So why does the Lord act the way He does toward the deaf mute? Well, He touches the man's ears and tongue because that's where the problem resides. Jesus makes direct contact with what ails the man so that He might take it away from him and make him whole once again. Our Great Physician is a hands-on doctor who isn't afraid of contaminating Himself by touching us, the way we avoid someone who has a contagious illness. No, Jesus comes to us and makes contact with us and breathes our infected air so that He might take it all out of us into Himself and heal us forever.

The deaf mute is a reminder to us that even if we can hear and talk, our main problem is still with our ears and our tongue. For by nature we don't listen to God. We're tuned out. We prefer to listen to other more entertaining voices or the voice of our own personal wisdom. We're deaf to His Word. I Corinthians 2 says, "The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them." And when our hearing is messed up like that, our speaking also gets messed up too. Instead of praying to God without ceasing as we should, too often our tongues are mute and silent, or what they speak is garbled and faithless. By nature we are just like the deaf-mute.

But Jesus comes also to us and touches us. He sticks His fingers in our ears through the preaching of His Word. In the Bible, the "finger of God" is a reference to the Holy Spirit and His work. God puts His finger, His Holy Spirit into our ears with the Scriptural words which He Himself inspired. Only by the power of God's Word and Spirit can our natural spiritual deafness be turned to a listening ear which understands and believes the things of God. The Epistle reading said, "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God."

Jesus also spits and touches our tongue in the Sacraments. For what is Baptism but water and words from the mouth of God? In baptism Jesus says His "Ephphatha" to us, releasing us from our bondage to death and unloosing our tongues to sing the praises of Him who has given us everlasting life. We pray in the Psalms, "O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise." Only when the Holy Spirit has opened our ears and freed our tongues can we truly worship Him rightly. It is written, "No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit."

And of course, our Lord Christ touches our tongue very literally in Holy Communion, where He places His body and blood onto our tongues and into our bodies for the forgiveness of our sins. To the world it is a rather strange thing that you would come forward and kneel at this rail and let someone else place food and drink into your mouth. But you do so at the Lord's Word. For this is the Lord's concrete, earthy way of touching you and giving you eternal healing. And it especially seems strange to the world that you would all drink from the same cup of the Lord. It seems so untidy in our day and age. But that's what the Lord directs us to do. He says, "Drink of it (the one cup) all of you." To be blunt, individual glasses are a neat and tidy man-made intrusion into what the Lord instituted. If the deaf mute could live with Jesus grabbing His tongue, certainly we can live with receiving the blood of Christ from His one chalice.

There's a couple more things to note about this miracle. Jesus heals the man only after He has taken him away from the crowd. Jesus was not just doing this for show. He wasn't using the deaf-mute as a prop to glorify Himself, the way celebrities do good works when they know the camera is rolling. No, Jesus was there completely for this man. His attention was focused solely on him. That's how Jesus always operates. You're not just a number to Him. He knows you and deals with you personally and individually.

The fact that Jesus takes this man aside from the crowds also is meant to teach what it means to be a follower of Jesus. You are separated out from the world. You are called to follow the Lord and not the crowd. Your attention is to be first and foremost on Him. Jesus even went so far as to say, "He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me." Your love for Christ is to be even greater than that for your best friend or your closest family. For you have been taken aside from the multitude to be His own. Your connection with Him is even closer than family; for you are baptized into His body. You have become His flesh and blood, even as He became your flesh and blood when He descended to this earth to become man.

Finally, let us consider what Jesus does as He is about to heal the deaf-mute. He looks up to heaven, and He sighs; He groans. Our Lord groans because He makes our pain and loneliness and sickness and sin His own. The cost of our healing is His death, and Jesus knows that well. He groaned and cried out and was spitefully spit upon for us on the cross. And yet through that death Jesus is not defeated but victorious. For in so doing He breaks the power of sin's curse. Jesus overcame all that makes you sigh and groan in this fallen world through the cross. And by rising bodily from the grave, He has restored your bodies to life that is whole and immortal and imperishable-no more deafness (or even hearing aids), no more blindness and disease and death. That resurrection life will be revealed to you and to the whole creation when Christ returns on the Last Day. Isaiah prophesied of this when he said, "In that day the deaf shall hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity and out of darkness. The humble also shall increase their joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel."

God grant us all to rejoice in the Holy One, Jesus, who has rescued us from deathly silence and has caused the living melody of the Gospel to sound in our ears. Even in the midst of the ups and downs and the untidiness of your life, let your confession of faith be like that of the multitude in the Gospel, "He has done all things well. He makes both the deaf to hear and the mute to speak."

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