Ephphatha: Mark 7:31-37

They brought him pushing and pulling, a man trapped in silence. Deaf from birth or accident, no one knows—but the world had been mute to him for years. His own speech had deteriorated into garbled sounds that embarrassed him to make. They begged Jesus to lay hands on him.

But Jesus did something strange. He took the man aside, away from the crowd, into privacy. What happened next was intimate, almost shocking.

Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears—actually inside them, touching the place where sound should enter. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue—the saliva of the healer on the muscle of speech.

He looked up to heaven and sighed deeply. That sigh carries weight: the Greek word suggests groaning, the kind of sound that comes from a heart broken by the brokenness it encounters. God in human flesh, sighing over the damage sin had done to his creation.

"Ephphatha," he said. Be opened.

The man's ears popped open. Sound flooded in—wind, voices, his own heartbeat suddenly audible. And his tongue loosened, words forming properly for the first time, language unlocked.

Jesus commanded them to tell no one. They disobeyed spectacularly. The more he ordered silence, the more they proclaimed it. They were overwhelmed with amazement:

"He has done everything well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak!"

The echo was deliberate. Isaiah had promised that when the Messiah came, "the ears of the deaf will be unstopped... and the mute tongue shout for joy." The crowd recognized the fulfillment even if they didn't fully understand who stood before them.

Everything well. The Creator was repairing his creation, one broken body at a time.