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And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well.”
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints of God, when I was asking the vicar this morning for sermon help, he said that I should unravel the James 2 passage. I wanted to preach on the gospel, so I figure we’ll do a little bit of both, if we can. Because this passage from James chapter 2 is oftentimes used against the Lutheran Church or the Lutheran confessions or those who would confess that salvation is by faith alone. Because after all, James says, “Someone will say, ‘You have faith, and I have works; show me your faith apart from your works, and I’ll show you my faith by my works.'”
Now St. Paul says in Romans chapter 4, verse 5, “But to him who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.”
Now which is it? Are we justified by faith and by faith alone? Or is salvation by a mix of faith and works? Is there a contradiction between the two texts? Well, no. We know that the Holy Spirit speaks clearly.
Here’s the thing that James is getting after. There are some who would say, “Well, I just need to believe in God, and that faith, which is invisible, will always stay invisible.” The key thing about the James text is what James says here: “Show me your faith apart from works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” Faith is an invisible work or act of the heart, which simply believes or clings to the promises of God. You can’t see faith at all. It is invisible. But that faith, which is invisible, shows up in how you live. Jesus makes everyone to whom he gives faith a new person, a new creature, to delight in the things that the Lord delights in, to love the things that the Lord loves, to eschew the things that the Lord forbids.
And so our faith shows itself in works of love, and most especially in those works that the world can’t understand. James here is especially talking about the dangers of holding people up because they have lots of money. Someone comes in and they’ve got a lot of nice gold rings on, and they’re dressed fancy, and we say, “You come sit up front.” And someone comes in and they look poor and shabby, and we say, “You sit there in the back or sit here at my feet,” and James says, “That is the way that the world thinks, not the way that the Christian thinks.”
Jesus comes to save and to serve everyone. We see it in our Gospel text. And so the Christian should not look at the neighbor through the eyes of the world or through the eyes of the flesh, but rather with the eyes of Jesus, as an object of the Lord’s love and also as one that we are to love and to serve.
So, if we were to think that we can believe in Jesus and it won’t make a bit of difference in the way that we live or the way that we talk or the way that we think, we would be deceived. Faith without works is dead.
Martin Luther said it like this: “Faith alone saves, but the faith that saves is never alone, but is in fact always busy, loving, serving, blessing, caring for the neighbor,” as we see Jesus doing in the Gospel text. So let’s turn our attention there.
Now, I want to… it’s rare that the gospel readings would give us two miracles like it does back to back. Normally, the readings would just be one miracle or one event, and you would just kind of have it standing alone, but we have the special occasion this morning of the lectionary giving us these two texts.
The first is the healing of the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman who has an unclean spirit. Can you imagine? I mean, it’s hard enough having children without unclean spirits. Imagine raising a daughter who has a demon. It seems like this woman is raising this daughter alone. I mean, maybe the dad had enough and… she’s not a… she’s not Jewish, she’s… she’s Gentile, she’s Syrophoenician. She’s way Gentile; she’s way up north. This is probably, aside from the transfiguration, as far north as Jesus goes. He’s trying to get away by himself, but this woman hears that he’s in town, and she goes and she knocks on the door, and she comes and she just will not stop until Jesus comes and delivers his daughter.
Now, the Gospel of Matthew tells us about this and in fact tells us more because this is a surprising text, right? When at first we read it, it seems to us that Jesus is being rude at best or maybe cruel at worst, and when we see the details that Matthew gives us, it seems like it’s even worse, that Jesus treats her even worse. She’s crying out after Jesus, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me; my daughter has an unclean spirit,” and Jesus first ignores her; just doesn’t say anything at all. But she doesn’t stop. She keeps pressing on Jesus to rescue her daughter, and the disciples say to Jesus, “Send her away.”
It’s not clear in the text if the disciples are like, “Why don’t you just heal her daughter so she’ll leave?” or “Why don’t you just get her to leave?” But Jesus then says to the disciples, “I came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” which again is like a rebuff. Although at that point, we start to say, “Well then, Jesus, why are you in Tyre?” But that’ll become clear later. She does—again, Jesus, so Jesus doesn’t talk to her; he just talks to the disciples—but she still doesn’t stop.
So she comes and falls at the feet of Jesus, holds on to His feet. She won’t let go; she’s begging Him for mercy. And Jesus finally says what seems like the worst of all, “It’s not right to take the food from the children’s table and give it to the dogs.” There’s a… some of the Greek scholars say that there’s a couple of different words for dog in Greek, and so there’s the mangy kind of run-around outside dogs, and then there’s the domesticated in-the-house dogs, and this is the word for the domesticated pet dog that Jesus used? But I’m not sure that helps. I mean, Jesus is still insulting and saying that this is not for you.
But she does not let go. She grabs a hold of that word that Jesus says, “dog,” and she says, “Fine. If you’re going to call me a dog, I’ll just claim what the dog gets. Even the dogs…” In fact, she says, “Yes, Lord, yes. Even the dogs get the scraps that fall from the table.” And Jesus’ face, which you have to imagine up to this point was pretty closed, pretty stoic, now breaks open in a smile. This is just what Jesus was doing. What he was training her in and what he was training us in—that she would be persistent in prayer there—and he says, “Oh daughter, your daughter is healed.” This is just the thing that Jesus was waiting for.
Now, it is a lesson that the Holy Spirit has for us that we are to be persistent in prayer. I mean, that’s the key lesson to take away from this text, that the Lord wants us to keep praying. In fact, Jesus tells these parables that seem obnoxious. He tells a parable about the man, about the widow, who goes to the judge to get justice. And the judge is a wicked, corrupt judge, and he knows that the widow doesn’t have enough money to bribe him, and so he won’t hear her case. But she’s persistent. She keeps going back. She goes back to the judge over and over and over again until he hears her case and gives her justice just because she’s annoying. And Jesus says, “Pray like that.”
Or, remember this parable, that Jesus says that there was a man who had people come to visit and he didn’t have any food, and so he went to his neighbor, and he knocked on the door, and he said, “Could I have some bread? I have friends; they came to visit; I don’t have anything to give before them,” and the guy says, “We’re all in bed; the kids are tucked in; I’m not—no, I’m not going to give you any bread.” And the guy, what does he do? He just keeps knocking. That is a terrible way to be a neighbor. I mean, you don’t want neighbors like that, but Jesus does. Jesus wants Christians like that, who just keep asking, keep at it, that we are to annoy the Lord with our… that we’re to cling on to the Lord’s Word, that we’re not supposed to give up.
Jesus tells these parables, and He gives us this example of the Syrophoenician woman. In fact, He puts her through this rigmarole so that He could bless us with this lesson that we should be persistent in our prayers, that we should cling to the Lord’s Word. Jesus calls this woman a dog, and He says, “Fine, just give me the crumbs like you do for the dog.” Jesus comes along, you know this, in the law, and He calls us sinners, and we say, “Fine, just give us what you’ve prepared for sinners—your body and your blood, the forgiveness of our sins, eternal life.” That’s what the sinners get. Just… Fine, Lord, yes, we’re sinners. We’ll be sinners that sit under Your table and receive the crumbs that You give of Your mercy.
I’ve found, and I don’t know if this is always the case, but I found that the people who have the most trouble with the way that Jesus treats this lady—who will meet in the resurrection… I mean, it’ll be wonderful, to meet her daughter in the resurrection, to meet her in the resurrection, to say, “Were you as upset at Jesus as it seems like you should have been?” And she’ll say, “Oh, no.” But the people who are most troubled by this are young Christians, new Christians, because the older Christians look at this text and they say, “Yeah, that’s how it goes with Jesus. Sometimes it seems like He’s not listening at all. Sometimes it seems like He’s given us a promise and then made every effort to make sure that we don’t get that promise. Sometimes it seems like He’s turned His back on us. Sometimes it seems like He’s ignoring us. Sometimes this is what it’s like to be a Christian,” so that the Lord wants us to press through. In fact, I mean, I think that’s probably our normal Christian life, that the Lord has each one of us in this school of prayer, each one of us in this school of perseverance, each one of us in this school of enduring oppression so that we would walk by faith and not by sight and trust in His mercy.
Then Jesus leaves, and he goes from Tyre to Sidon down to the Decapolis. I looked it up on Google Maps last night. It takes about 31 hours to walk from one place to another. I think that was going through a couple of security checkpoints. I’m not 100% sure how it was then versus now. In other words, these two healings are not right one after the other. They’re quite a bit separated, but the Holy Spirit wants us to have them right next to each other.
Jesus goes over to the Decapolis, which is an area of the 10 cities that’s northeast of the Sea of Galilee. It was a kind of Roman area settled by a lot of Romans up there, so again, not a Jewish area. And they heard of his fame, and they bring to Jesus a man who was deaf and he couldn’t speak. And they begged Jesus to lay hands on him, but Jesus doesn’t. He has something else in mind. Only Mark gives us these details.
So where Matthew told us more about the Syrophoenician woman, Mark tells us more about this man. Jesus pulls him aside, and he does this weird stuff. First he takes his fingers and he puts them in the man’s ear. And then he spits, maybe on the ground but probably he spits on his hand, and he touches the man’s tongue. And then Jesus looks up into heaven, and he sighs, this deep sigh. Ah. And then he speaks a word, one word. Mark, more than any of the other gospel writers, likes to give us the Aramaic original of what Jesus said. Mostly we have it translated into Greek, but every now and again, we’ll see the Aramaic original, and so we have it here: Ephaphatha, which means “be opened.”
I think, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I think that’s probably the word that Jesus will speak when he comes to open your grave: Ephaphatha, “be opened,” and you’ll be raised up out of the grave to see Him on the last day, the judgment day. Says to him, “Ephaphatha,” and the man’s ears are opened, his tongue is loosed, and he praises the Lord. He speaks rightly.
Now, I didn’t used to, a couple of years ago, know what all this touching and spitting and everything was until I received the call down here, and now I realize what Jesus was doing. He was speaking to him in sign language, putting his fingers in his ears and touching his tongue and moaning like this. He was preaching to this man to give him faith.
And imagine the wonder. I mean, it’s what Isaiah promised, that blind will see and the deaf will hear. So now imagine the wonder that the first… the very first sound that this man hears is the voice of Jesus, his Savior. And the very first thing that he says out of his mouth, now opened, is praising the Lord. It’s a stunning, stunning gospel. And this will be another man we’ll want to check in with in the resurrection and ask him about that day.
But why is it that the Holy Spirit has these two texts back-to-back? One right after the other. This is my idea. Now, I’m happy to, if you guys have more thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them after the service, but here’s my thinking about this. Jesus, on the one hand, goes up to Tyre and here’s a woman who had heard of him, who had heard the miracles that he was doing, had heard the name Jesus and believed in him, and then she came and she was praying and she didn’t stop praying.
And we might think that that’s what’s required, that we have to hear first and then pray incessantly for the Lord to come to us, but now enter a man who hadn’t ever heard anything and who couldn’t say anything at all. And Jesus also comes to him and rescues him. We see in the Syrophoenician woman an example of someone who hears the gospel and rejoices in it, but we see in this deaf man a man that Jesus just comes to to rescue.
They’re very different; they’re like opposite cases. But what’s the commonality in both of them? Jesus. Jesus, the savior of sinners. Jesus, who delivers this woman and her family. Jesus, who opens this man’s ears. Jesus, who died for you. Jesus, who comes to us because he knows that he is our only hope and He brings us His life and His peace and the forgiveness of all of our sins—Jesus, who knows that this man and this woman and her daughter and everyone else deserves to die under His wrath and condemnation, but who can’t bear to see it, and so He comes to save—Jesus.
No matter what the problem—if it’s an unclean spirit, or if it’s deafness, or muteness, or if it’s sickness, or if it’s death, or if it’s bondage to the fear of death and the devil, or whatever—it doesn’t matter. Jesus comes to rescue and deliver and save. He is the one that does it. And the people are astonished. He does all things well.
For your brother, this deaf-mute man, for your sister, the Syrophoenician woman, and her daughter, for you and your family and for your neighbors and for all people, Jesus is the Redeemer. And we rejoice in Him.
There’s a little essay that Martin Luther wrote. Professor Pless reminded us of it last week. It’s called, “How to Read the Gospels Rightly.” And he says that when you read the Gospels, you have to put yourself in there. And we have the temptation to put ourselves in there as the hero, but he says you got to put yourself in there as the sinner, as the sick, as the dying, as the suffering. We’re the Syrophoenician woman; we’re her daughter; we’re the deaf man, and Jesus comes now to us. He touches us. He speaks to us. He blesses us. He delivers us. And this is true also for us today.
For while it’s weird that Jesus stuck the fingers in the ears of the deaf man, Jesus has put Himself into your ears today in the preaching of His Word. While it’s weird that Jesus spit on His hands and touched the man’s tongue, Jesus will put His body and His blood on your tongue today to give you the same deliverance, the salvation and the hope of eternal life. So we, together with the crowd, rejoice that Jesus, our Jesus, does all things well.
God be praised. Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
