MARK 7 (PART 2)
Read Mark 7:24-37
Chapter 7 ends with two more miraculous events carried out by Jesus. In the first one Jesus was outside the Jewish territory in Tyre and dealing with a non-Jewish lady. She is described as being Greek, which is not about nationality, but rather it is about religion. The point is that she was a pagan and not a Jew. In the first part of this chapter we saw that Jesus received criticism from the religious authorities because he did not conform to their accepted practices on how to behave, he rejected their man-made traditions. Now he has gone even further by interacting with non-Jewish people.
What Mark is telling us in this story is that God’s grace in Jesus is not limited to the Jewish people. Jesus is for everybody. Up to now Jesus’ ministry had been among the Jews, but now we see it opening up to non-Jews as well, which would have appalled the authorities who saw the Jews as God’s people and all foreigners as not God’s people (unless they converted to Judaism). The fact that the woman’s daughter was healed validates the fact that the Kingdom of God is for everyone and is not limited to a particular class of person, something that some people in some churches need to be reminded of. Jesus is for everybody, not just ‘people like us’.
Jesus crossed a boundary dealing with a non-Jewish woman. The second story here sees him crossing another boundary setting free a man with physical disabilities, who were considered to be unclean and prevented from worshipping in the community. What is perhaps more important than the healing itself is the reaction of the people who witnessed it. Mark tells us that the ‘people were overwhelmed with amazement’ and they said, ‘he has done everything well, he even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak’ (v37). Apart from being astonished at seeing Jesus making a deaf and mute man hear and speak I think there is an echo of the prophet Isaiah that the crowd picked up on. In Isaiah 35, the prophet spoke of a future time when the Lord would act powerfully through his anointed one, the Messiah. Various things would indicate that the Messiah had arrived, including:
‘Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
and the ears of the deaf unstopped
Then the lame will leap like a deer
and the mute tongue shout for joy’ (Isaiah 35:5-6)
As he has done all along, Mark is saying who Jesus is; he is the Messiah, he is Emmanuel, God with us. The demons knew this. The people are starting to get the idea. The disciples are still in the dark and the authorities can’t see beyond their own traditions and ignore the evidence of their own eyes.