Body to Body, Place to Place
Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.
Hey guys, this is Jae. I'm one of the team members here at The Table. Thanks for tuning into the podcast. Uh, we're jumping into Mark 7:31-37 this week:
Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee in the region of Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd and put his fingers in his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then he looked up to heaven. He sighed and said to him, Ephaphtha, that is be opened. And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.
Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one, but the more that he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measures saying he has done everything well. He even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.
So tonight, uh, we're here as one big church body, and that word body is what we're going to get to talk about tonight because it's the one thing that I know a hundred percent of us have in common in this room, is that we are living in a body. Whether we're having a good time with our body right now, or whether we're a little frustrated with it, whether we love to run around with it or we're struggling to get up in the morning with that body, each and every one of us, unless you have surpassed some very strange part of human technology in biology is living in a body.
So that's what we're talking about tonight, and we're going to start off by talking about the journey that Jesus takes with his own body, um, because as we read it, it might kind of sound like Jesus just bops around a little bit, like, oh, he's in Tyre. And then he just goes right down through Sidon and, um, lands at the Sea of Galilee. Super quick, easy peasy, but that is not the case.
So I wanted to show you this map. So this map up here, and I'm actually going to, I'm going to go up here to kind of point out some things. So Tyre is here, right? And Sidon’s here. And that doesn't look super far in our map, does it? That's actually 25 miles. Looks really short on the map. That's 25 miles. And then from Sidon all the way down to here is I think something like what's 50 I think from Tyre to the Sea. So if we went up 25, we came back down, it's about 75 miles he then had to travel. So the, and then he's going actually not stopping at the sea, but he is going down here to this area that's not labeled. It just says Daily Bible study. But that's not part of the map, right? It just goes right down here and it's called Decapolis or the area of 10 cities.
And the reason I want to show you this map and point that out physically is because in the text it kind of sounds like it's a straight shot. Like he just goes straight from Tyre through Sidon down to the region of 10 cities. And that's not true. Jesus takes this huge detour to go from this city all the way up to one that's in the opposite direction of where he ends up. And then he goes all the way down. Going through Sidon to get to Sea of Galilee is like if I went through Duluth to get to Iowa, not by distance, but like conceptually, right? It doesn't make any sense, but it does make sense if his goal isn't fast travel. His goal is intentional relationships.
Because the thing about Tyre and Sidon, and the area of 10 cities are Decapolis, is that all of those areas are places where Gentiles live. All of those areas are predominantly Gentile instead of Jewish. So for a Jewish man to go by foot in his body to taking this long and arduous journey to meet with people who are completely unlike him is unheard of for the day. Not only would people not go out of their way to spend time with Gentiles, but they certainly wouldn't even want to go through their cities. And so this is meaningful. So that's why I want to show you, uh, that map. And Patti, you could leave it up for a little bit or you can go back to the picture of the bread.
But why would Jesus do this? I actually realized something while I was reading Mark this week. Did you know, Jack? Did you know, I feel like you know a lot of things about the Bible. Grace, did you know that Mark 7 31-37 is, well not this specific verses, but Mark 7, the chapter is the first time in Mark where Jesus actually interacts intentionally with Gentiles. So every person that he heals before this, every person that we're, we have accounts of, of him healing or stopping to talk to, or people reaching out, for the most part, we have evidence that they were probably Jewish.
Whether that's Jairus, right? He's accounted to be a member and a leader in the Jewish community. Whether that is the woman who touches his, the fringe of his cloak to be healed. We know that likely she was Jewish because she was adhering to purity law. There's so many people that he heals. But this is the first time that Mark specifically says right before this we had the Syrophonecian woman that, that Debbie had. That was the first time it says specifically, this woman was Greek. She was of Syrophonecian descent. And now in this text, this deaf man is in a city that's predominantly Gentile. So I think that's, that's important. He's going across boundaries to interact with bodies that are different than his. He walks in a desertous climate, he's tired. You can probably imagine he gets thirsty. He's experiencing this journey in a human body.
Have you ever walked 75 miles, Soren? Have you ever walked 75 miles anywhere? No? What's the longest you think you've ever walked? “I've biked 11.” You've you've biked 11? And that was pretty tiring. Has anyone in here ever walked 75 miles? Maybe some of the runners in here have run definitely 75 miles, but has anyone ever walked through a desert 75 miles? No, but we can imagine it's probably pretty hard. So he puts his body, he puts effort in his body to get to a place to interact.
And so when Jesus heals this man, he starts to use his body in another way, a way that might sound a little bit gross to us, a little bit strange range. But he doesn't just say a blessing and then poof, the man can hear Jesus takes him aside, that that involves taking him, leading him somewhere. He takes him aside. Then he does what? What does he do? What does the text say? He plug plugs the man's ears like this. He puts his fingers in the man's ears. That also might sound a little bit strange, but think about it. He's trying to give signals, physical signals to a man who probably can't communicate very well with people. And so he's communicating with that man. And the only way he probably knows how, which is to physically signal to this man, I'm going to heal your ears. So he touches them.
Then Jesus spits, kind of gross again, talk about cringy passages last week. There's a lot of times in the Bible Jesus spits, did you know that guys? Andrew, did you know Jesus spits a lot? Soren, do you think that you would want to be spit on by Jesus? No, probably not. But Jesus spits. And I didn't think that becoming a pastor, uh, would lead me down a rabbit hole where I spent an hour reading about the ancient history of spit. Um, but I did just for you all, just for all of you.
I read for an hour about the history, the ancient history of saliva and because it feels super weird to me to talk about Jesus spitting. But back then it was super meaningful, spit. And our saliva, this gross drool coming out of our mouth back then meant a lot. People viewed it as healing people actually viewed it as medicine. So could you imagine if instead of taking, um, taking some Tylenol, your parents like spit in a cup for you and then gave it to you? No, that'd be pretty gross. It'd be pretty gross. But back then, people believed in the healing power of saliva.
People also believed that it was a extremely powerful, um, bodily fluid. And so that's why some people also spit in aggression. They spat because they were calling upon this supernatural very strong power against their enemy. So saliva could be used for good or for bad. So he spits and he does this not because Jesus needs to spit to heal the man, but Jesus spits because he knows that it's culturally meaningful to that man to have the physical sign of spit present, to know that a healing thing is going to be done. Jesus has all the power in the world, power that goes way beyond any of our understanding. Jesus doesn't need to spit to make this man hear again, but he does because he's interacting on that person's level. Does that make sense to us?
I think it's pretty cool that Jesus knows what's going to be meaningful to someone. So he treats them in a way that he knows will feel good to them with bodily signs. And then he looks up to heaven, which is actually, we can interpret it maybe as an act of prayer. He looks up, some of us might look up to the ceiling or to the sky when we pray. And he does this physical act and an act of prayer. So he is now going into the spiritual, not just the physical, but he's putting them together, that there's a physical and there's a spiritual. And so it's very embodied. It's in his body.
There are many commentaries that describe this maybe as an act of grief or empathy, trying to connect with this man who's been really disconnected. Because if we can't hear others and then our tongue is not allowing us to communicate properly, we're completely cut off. They didn't have, uh, they didn't have assistive devices back then. They didn't have probably forms of sign language, although maybe people who were deaf back then were starting to try to create one. But they had no real way of communicating with everybody in their community. So this man is disconnected.
So Jesus feels that Jesus is empathetic and he's been on this long physical journey to be with this man. And so standing with this man, he looks up and he's there with him in some of that grief and some of that pain. So Jesus shows up not just in words, not just in prayers, but to be with that man. One-on-one physically touching his ears and spitting to show him healing.
So I think that Mark 7 reminds us that that in or in addition to our spiritual intercession with one another, intercession means sort of like intervening or showing up kind of between someone and their challenges. So interceding for somebody or stepping in, it's not just always spiritual, it's not just, I'll pray for you. Oh, you're in my thoughts. I keep you in my prayers. That's important too. It's important for people to know that you are praying, but to be present with people is also the physical. It's matching up that spiritual part with our physical. We are meant to show up for one another to put our whole body into it.
I have this soup pot over here. Soup is a really like healing, calming liquid that we have, right? We don't spit on people, we, uh, make soup for people, right? Yeah. Alex, if I was going to make soup for somebody, could I just put this pot down Alex and then say, “Wow, I just pray that there'd be soup, uh, for Alex while he's sick. And then soup would just appear. Yeah, you probably not. Probably not. You would hope so. It'd be great if we could just pray and soup would appear. But if I wanted to make sure there was going to be soup in this pot, what would I have to do? Make it, make it make the soup. I'd have to physically cut up vegetables, maybe meat. If the person wants meat in there, I'd have to pour things in this pot. I'd have to mix it. I'd probably have to stand there for a while, watch it boil, and then I'd have to pour it into another thing and then I'd bring the soup to somebody, right?
I can't spiritually just hope soup into existence. I have to make the soup if I want the soup to have any healing power. That's what I think Jesus is showing us tonight, that I can't just pray hot soup into existence. I can't pray the kind of physical support someone might be needing in their physical needs all the time. Sometimes that's all we can do. But I think there are many moments that we can find where our faith demands that we show up for one another in tangible ways.
And Jesus doesn't just do this sitting in his comfort zone. Jesus doesn't just stay in a Jewish city with Jewish people and physically healing and showing up for just Jewish people. Like that map showed Jesus went on an extremely long out of the way journey to show up physically in places where he might not have been invited. He might not have been wanted, he might not have been recognized at all. Like I don't know who this guy is, but he showed up in those places.
And so today, I think we're invited to think about how we can put the spiritual and the physical together to show up for our neighbors, to show up for our community, to show up for people in places that we never go or we might not think of going or we might be afraid to go. I think that our faith invites us to get up to go a bit out of our way, that faith in action, that it ought to produce the thing, the faith and action that our faith produces isn't meant to be done solo in our little comfort zone, in our little corner of the world. Faith, it is meant to be body to body and in places to places, right?
So as we wrap up this message today, just invite you to think this week, where are those places that might feel a little out of the way? Whether that is physically, literally, or if there's a block keeping you from a place where you might be invited to interact with bodies that don't look like yours, that don't believe like yours, that are experiencing a completely different day to day bodily reality than yours. And in those places, what kind of things can you tangibly do to show up with people? It might seem weird to us, but Jesus meets that person where they are in the cultural language that they speak. He does not have to, he chooses to, to bring that comfort and to bring that healing. So where, where in our experiences might we have opportunities to do that?
Join me in prayer as we think about that. Thank you for this time to hear Mark seven. Um, and to hear specifically how you, through Jesus, went place to place even when it felt out of the way, even when it felt strange. Uh, even when you weren't invited to show up with people physically to meet their tangible needs, to bring them comfort, uh, to bring them solace, to bring them healing in those moments. And God, we thank you for those ways that you show up in our lives, in our communities, helping us support one another and helping us reach out to the world around us. May you empower us as we go forward to continue to reflect on how you faith in you drives us in those actions. God, we pray all of this in your name. Amen.