September 5, 2021 – 15th Sunday after Pentecost

This is a difficult week for miracle stories.  As I looked at the heartbreaking images coming out of Afghanistan and Haiti, as I hear that doctors fear ICU’s will again fill to capacity with Covid patients, and as Hurricane Ida bore down on Louisiana, I turn to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s miracles — and I wonder.  I want to trust Scripture’s dramatic stories of healing, deliverance, and transformation. But sometimes I find it difficult.

In this week’s Gospel, a crowd brings “a deaf man who has an impediment in his speech” to Jesus for healing.  Jesus takes the man aside, puts his fingers into the man’s ears, spits, and touches the man’s tongue.  Then he looks up to heaven, sighs, and says to the man, “Be opened.”  “Immediately,” Mark’s Gospel reports, the man’s ears are opened, his tongue is released, and he is able to speak plainly.  The story ends with the man proclaiming the miracle far and wide despite Jesus request that he keep it a secret and the crowd proclaims that Jesus “has done everything well.”

There is so much that captures my attention in this short story.  But there are two words that really stand out.  “He sighed.” Two short words.  In some translations it is he “murmurs or “groans.”  Before he healed the man who needed help, he looked up to heaven and “sighs.”   I wonder why, Jesus of all people.

A phrase that frequently crosses my lips is “I wonder.”  It takes my imagination to some interesting places.  I wonder about the sigh because in these days a divine sigh makes absolute sense to me, it touches me deeply.  Exhausted sighs, frightened sighs, angry sighs, “oh not again” sighs, “Jesus looks up to heaven and sighs.”  this moment gives us a glimpse of a vulnerable fully human Jesus. Why does he sigh?  and how does that speak to us here and now.

I wonder if Jesus sighs because he’s misunderstood.  We know from the Gospels, that Jesus’s mission is to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God.  He comes to teach and to embody what the love of God, the forgiveness of God, the justice of God, and the salvation of God look like.  He comes to point beyond himself to God the Creator, the liberator of all.  Everything he says and does is meant to point people in the direction of God. 

We also know, as we read the Gospels, that many people who meet Jesus in his day don’t understand his mission at all.  They flock to him for magic.    They mistake his “signs” as ends in themselves. They don’t understand them to be a part of a larger mission.  They adore him as the One Who Heals, but shy away when he speaks about his building the Kingdom, as One Who Calls, One Who Convicts, One Who Leads, and One Who Transforms.  They embrace him as a hero when he rides a donkey into Jerusalem but abandon him as he dies on the cross.  They lose sight of his difficult teachings that tell us we must give in order to receive, loose in order to win, die in order to live.

Maybe Jesus sighs in this week’s story because he knows the building of the Kingdom is a slow, difficult, costly work.  It is not achieved with the waving of a wand or snapping of fingers.  It is mostly quiet and subtle.  And yet “the crowds”, in other words all of us, want him to work miracles, for many worthy achingly real reasons.  But that is not who he is. 

I wonder if Jesus sighs because “cures” aren’t the point.  Wholeness is the point.  Restoring the lonely, and those on the margins, to healthy community. 

The church has, for the most part, failed to understand.  We have ignored those who don’t fit, those who are different.  We pray for God to cure them. ***We forget the Gospel imperative that we must be the body of Christ to those who experience the world differently.***

I notice in this week’s story that Jesus pulls the deaf man aside, away from the people who initially request his healing.  I wonder if Jesus does this to give the man some privacy to tell Jesus of his own hopes and desires.  What does he want?  Who does he think Jesus is?  What word does he need to hear from the Messiah who stands before him? 

In the context of the culture of Jesus day, illness and disability were seen as a moral failure.  To cure him would in effect restore him to his family and his religious community, a place where he would thrive.  And yet Jesus sighs.  This sigh invites so many questions.  Was he frustrated with the crowd who can’t see past the man’s deafness? Is Jesus longing for the crowds to experience healing as well?  Healing from their assumptions about disability and morality?  Healing from their own smug sense of superiority and well-being? 

I wonder if we can hear Jesus’s sigh from where we are today.  What would it look like for us to encourage others to flourish?  What would it look like to recognize that in God’s eyes, all of us are in need of healing and wholeness?  That absolutely no one should seek the kingdom of God and expect to walk away unchanged?

Jesus sighed.  Out of that sigh comes longing, love, sorrow, and hope.   Because if there’s anything the world needs right now, it is hope, the kind of hope Jesus offers. a hope that is grounded in the truth of who God is and what the kingdom of God actually looks like.  In these frightening times, we — the church — represent the hope at the heart of Jesus’s life and message.  Today’s Gospel calls us to invite the world to be opened, not to promote cheap fixes.  The work of the Kingdom is hard, it’s slow. There is nothing about discipleship that is easy.

This week, as our prayers, and sighs for the healing of the world, join those of Christ, we must have faith in the One who says, “Be opened.”  We must listen and be healed.