Mark 7:32-37

Mark 7:32

The Deaf and Dumb.

I. Our Lord healed the deaf and dumb man miraculously, by means at which we cannot guess, which we cannot even conceive. But the healing signified at least two things that the man could be healed, and that the man ought to be healed; that his bodily defect the retribution of no sin of his own was contrary to the will of that Father in heaven who willeth not that one little one should perish. But Jesus sighed likewise. There was in Him a sorrow, a compassion, most human and most Divine. It may have been that there was something too of a Divine weariness I dare not say impatience, seeing how patient He was then, and how patient He has been since for more than eighteen hundred years of the folly and ignorance of man, who brings on himself and on his descendants these and a hundred other preventable miseries, simply because he will not study and obey the physical laws of the universe; simply because he will not see that those laws which concern the welfare of his body are as surely the will of God as those which concern the welfare of his soul; and that therefore it is not merely his interest but his solemn duty to study and to obey them, lest he bear the punishment of his own neglect and disobedience.

II. Christ had indeed some good seed in his field. He had taught men by His miracles, as He had taught them by His parables, to whom nature belonged, and whose laws nature obeyed. And the cessation of miracles after the time of Christ and His Apostles had taught, or ought to have taught, mankind a further lesson the lesson that henceforth they were to carry on for themselves, by the faculties which God had given them, that work of healing and deliverance which He had begun. Miracles like prophecies, were to vanish away; but charity charity which devotes itself to the welfare of the human race was to abide for ever. Christ, as I said, had some good seed; but an enemy we know not whence or when, certainly within the three first centuries of the Church came and sowed tares among that wheat. Then began men to believe that man's body was the property of Satan, and his soul only the property of God. No wonder if in such a temper of mind the physical amelioration of the human race stood still. How could it be otherwise, while men refused to see in facts the acted will of God, and sought, not in God's universe, but in the dreams of their own brain, for glimpses of that Divine and wonderful order by which the Eternal Father and the Eternal Son are working together for ever through the Eternal Spirit for the welfare of the universe?

C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons,p. 48.