The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

Earlier in the chapter God indicts a people who honor Him with their lips while their hearts stay far from Him (29:13), and to such blind eyes the prophetic vision lies shut like “words in a sealed scroll” (29:11). Into that darkness verses 17–24 announce the Great Reversal. “In a very little while” Lebanon’s forest becomes a fruitful field, and the deaf hear the words of the scroll while the blind see out of their gloom: God heals more than the body; He heals the deaf and blind heart, unsealing His Word so it can at last be heard. The meek find fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor exult in the Holy One of Israel. Here the Septuagint turns a striking phrase: it renders “the poor among mankind” as hoi apelpismenoi ton anthropon, “those given up to despair,” naming the very people God means to fill with joy.

The ruthless tyrant and the mocking scoffer come to nothing, the false witness who ruins the innocent is cut off, and Jacob is no longer put to shame. His children, when he sees them, are called “the work of My hands,” God’s doing and not his own, and those who wandered astray in spirit are brought at last to understanding, a promise the Lord Jesus will speak into a deaf man’s ears in today’s Gospel.

Paul will not let the ministry rest on human competence. Whatever confidence he has stands “through Christ toward God”; he is not sufficient of himself even to claim a single thought as his own, for his sufficiency (hikanotes) comes from God, who made him a minister of a new covenant (kaines diathekes). Then comes the great antithesis: this covenant is “not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The letter (gramma) is the Law, carved on stone, which demands a perfection it cannot supply and so can only accuse and put to death. The Spirit gives life through the Gospel, raising dead sinners and working the faith the Law never could.

Paul presses the point from the lesser to the greater: if the “ministry of death,” engraved on stone, came with such glory (doxa) that Israel could not gaze at Moses’ shining face, how much greater is the glory of the “ministry of the Spirit” that justifies. The old glory was real, yet fading; the new glory, won in Christ, is permanent, and so far outshines the old that the old seems to have no glory at all.

Jesus crosses into the Decapolis, Gentile country, and the healing He works there preaches that His kingdom reaches all nations. The crowd brings Him a man who is deaf and mogilalos, a rare Greek word that means he could scarcely speak, rather than that he was wholly mute. The word matters: the Greek Old Testament uses it in Isaiah 35:6, where the tongue of the speechless sings in the age of the Messiah, so Mark is showing Jesus fulfilling that very prophecy. Jesus takes the man aside from the crowd, and since the man cannot hear, He speaks through touch: He puts His fingers into the man’s ears, spits, and touches his tongue.

Looking up to heaven, He sighs (estenaxen), the groan of the Creator over a creation gone wrong, and speaks one Aramaic word, Ephphatha, “Be opened.” At once the man’s ears are opened and the bond of his tongue is loosed, and he speaks plainly. The early Church so treasured this word that it kept Ephphatha in the baptismal rite, a prayer that God would open deaf ears to His Gospel. Though Jesus charges them to silence, the crowd only proclaims it the more, astonished beyond measure: “He has done all things well.” The words echo Genesis 1, where God saw that all He had made was very good, and so the crowd confesses more than it understands: the One standing before them is the Creator, come to mend His broken world.