Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text is the Holy Gospel reading which has already been read.

Dear baptized Christians, St. Mark wants to show us two things in this morning's Gospel reading. The first thing he wants to show us is that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, God's promised Savior, and the second thing he wants to show us is what happens after we are brought to Jesus.

This morning's miracle story of Jesus restoring the deaf, tongue-tied man shows us that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of Israel's hopes for a Savior, since this miracle takes us back to a great prophecy about the Messiah in our Old Testament reading from Isaiah, "In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see". A few chapters later Isaiah tells us that God will arrive on the scene to save His people and "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy". The restoration to health of the blind, deaf, lame, and mute would signal to Israel that the promised Messianic age had arrived. When Jesus said, "Ephphatha! Be opened!" He was showing that He was the fulfiller of the Lord's prophecy through Isaiah.

But the Messiah would not just heal the sick; He wasn't simply a miracle worker. Isaiah also says that in the Messiah God will "come with vengeance, with the recompense of God He will come and save you". God's Messiah would come with vengeance to save His people from their enemies, and while health problems are vicious enemies, they are only symptoms of the biggest enemy, death—more specifically, eternal death as a result of our sin; that is Enemy #1.

And so our God takes on human flesh from the Virgin Mary in order to stand in our shoes and take on our foes, right down here in the trenches. With vengeance Jesus comes to fight the devil and to take into Himself our sickness and sin and sorrows. But then seemingly the Christ Himself is conquered as He is mowed down by friendly fire: "Stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted...it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief".

But the death of Jesus was no cosmic accident. It was the Lord's way of taking vengeance on His foes, by placing the guilt of His foes on His own Son—and by the way, God's foes include not just the devil and demons but also us, ungodly sinners who were at enmity with God because of our transgressions. Isaiah explains that Jesus "was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed". Christ's death was the Lord's way of not only taking vengeance on His enemies but also of granting us the undeserved recompense of eternal life instead of everlasting punishment. As the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, God the Son took on flesh and blood and suffered so "that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery".

When Jesus died, the devil thought he had won and could keep us in slavery, but he could never keep Christ in the grave. The Father raised His Son and therefore Satan cannot be the Grim Reaper for us any longer. Oh, he can taunt us with death but cannot inflict it. Our Lord has freed us from that greatest of enemies, that dark cloud that strikes terror into the hearts of all humans—physical death that looms on the horizon and eternal death hovering over the heads of all sinners. Now in Christ we need not fear these foes. Instead, we take heart, knowing that He has taken the death sentence for us so that we might live eternally, and He promises, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life".

Of course, on the day that Jesus healed the deaf and tongue-tied man, the fact that Jesus was the Christ and that He would do all those things to save us was not obvious. But it is now clear to us since we have been taught the whole story of the New Testament and we believe in the Messiah and all that He has done. And so for us, as we look back on the miracles of Jesus, we can see more there than was apparent to the people who were there. Now, through the ears and eyes of faith we see beyond the physical miracle and learn that our Lord wants to teach us spiritual truths about life in the Christian Church through the words and actions of Jesus.

Today's miracle has much to tell us. The first thing we hear is that the friends of this deaf man brought him to Jesus. This man had no way of hearing about Jesus, and even if he could have found Jesus, had no way of speaking to Him. Now apply his situation to ours. This corresponds to our spiritual state before being brought to Christ. Sinful ears cannot hear the voice of Jesus, and unbelieving tongues cannot speak to Him, so we too must first be brought to Jesus before we can be healed.

Today, it is popular to say things like, "I found Jesus" or "I made a decision to follow Him," but this really gets things backwards. We do not find Him; He finds us. We do not choose to follow Him; He chooses to make us followers. This is true in every case, because none of us brought ourselves to Jesus. For many of us, this truth is obvious, if we were brought to Jesus as infants in Holy Baptism. For others, it seems that they found their way to Jesus when they were older, but look at what actually happened. Some of you were brought by friends or family to church to hear Jesus speak to you. Or Jesus was brought to you through the Gospel in the witness of another Christian or from the written words of Holy Scripture. But regardless of how we were brought to Christ, the point is that none of us can take a shred of credit for coming to Him, just like that deaf, tongue-tied man; the Lord used someone else to bring us to Jesus.

And once we are brought to Jesus, He opens up our spiritually deaf ears, just as Jesus reached into that deaf man's ears to open them up. Before Jesus healed our spiritual deafness, we could not hear God's speech to us at all. We could not hear God's Law saying, "You are a poor, miserable sinner on the way to hell." In our conscience we could see no evil and hear no evil about ourselves—we thought that things between God and us were all right. We thought our obedience to God's Law was good enough to save us. We could not hear the words of St. James, who says, "Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it". That means that in our natural state, we are all accountable for breaking all of God's laws and we are deserve the punishment, eternal death.

So when we are brought to Jesus in His Word, the first thing He does is reach into our ears and create the ability to hear so we can listen God's Law, His judgment against our sin and His threats of punishment. And just as those first loud sounds that the newly-hearing deaf man heard must have been jarring and even scary, so also the words first spoken to us after being enlightened about God's judgment are terrifying: "You are a condemned sinner!" God's Law says.

But then Jesus does His Gospel work on us by saying, "Ephphatha! Be opened!" Jesus said those words to the deaf and tongue-tied man and opened up His senses to entirely new abilities through hearing and speaking. Likewise, Jesus opens up our ears to hear not only God's judgment against our sin, but also His gracious forgiveness of all of our guilt, for the sake of Christ's suffering and death. We hear the gentle voice of Jesus that brings comfort to our newly hearing ears with those words, "I have shed my blood for you. I have baptized you to wash away yours sins and give you everlasting life. I absolve you to strengthen your conscience. I reach down to your lips to place on your tongue My own body and blood in order to forgive your sins and strengthen your faith. Trust in Me." And those words of Jesus give us full healing, full salvation.

But then what's next? Well, look at the man Jesus healed. After the deaf man was given his hearing, do you think he stuffed cotton balls back into his ears so that he couldn't hear anymore? Or after his tongue was loosed, did he put a sock in his mouth so he could no longer speak? Of course not! Now more than ever the man wanted his ears to do their proper work of hearing and his tongue do its job, speaking clearly. In fact, I'll bet he was ready to make up for lost time, listening attentively to every chirping bird, and talking his friends' ears off. Likewise, after Jesus opens our ears to hear that He has saved us, now we want our ears to keep attentively hearing our Savior's voice in the Scriptures and Bible Class and preaching, and we want our loosened tongues to be constantly at our Lord's service, by singing His praises in church, by daily prayer, and by speaking God's Word to our family and friends. As St. Peter wrote to the Christian Church, "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light". Your ears are doing their main function when they are hearing God's Word, and your lips are doing their main work when you are confessing your sins and your faith, and singing the praises of the One who called you out of darkness into the marvelous light of the Gospel.

And just as it was only the power of Jesus' voice that healed the deaf, mute man and restored his hearing and speech, so also it is only the power of the Gospel of Jesus that makes you whole again, so that all glory goes to God alone, for He has done all things well. And so we pray every day those beautiful words that open the Matins service: "O Lord, open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise". Let's do it. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.