Deaf Hear, Mute Speak

Good morning.

Today's reading is from Mark seven, thirty-one through thirty-three.

Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the region of Decapolis.

And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him.

And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue.

And looking up into heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephatha, that is, be opened.

And in and his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

And Jesus charged them to tell no one.

But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.

And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, He has done all things well.

Even he even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Looking forward to moving into our text today.

I I was looking uh up here and I was like, wow, the setup, stage setup looks so clean and so spare.

If something's missing, and I realized her communion's not there.

So we've got some we've got some folks on it.

We're going with the minimalist design aesthetic, is what that is.

So there's fewer distractions.

Um so that that will be uh that may be delivered mid-sermon, in which case you should applaud uh Jacob Carr and Bo Kellum who are preparing communion for you.

All right, so with that, let's pray with that, you know, that Holy Father, we thank you for our gathering together, the bringing together of your body, uh, being able to behold and see one another's faces as we come in.

Lord, I pray that our church would be a a place which I experience it as a of joyful reception and uh gratitude to see one another.

Lord, as a church, we we didn't choose one another.

Lord, you you give you give us to each other.

And we praise you for that, Lord, for who you have filled this room with, uh, who you have made parts of the body of our church.

Lord, we thank you for your particular guidance in that.

Father, we lift up to you our children just behind us.

We pray that that L-shaped garage would warm up with their singing to you.

Lord, we pray that you would uh hasten the completion of construction on our building that they might not meet in a garage forever.

Lord, we uh we thank you for the children that you've blessed our church with.

Lord, we pray that today we would be able to encounter you personally as you have a private and personal encounter with a deaf man with a speech impediment who needs your healing.

Lord, might we see what that encounter is, but through that, might we participate in it in some way?

Lord, we need you to meet each of us personally.

And I pray that our hearts will be prepared to receive that as your spirit meets us personally this morning.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Last week we began this uh sort of season of Jesus' ministry in the Gospel of Mark, in which uh he has moved away from a Jewish territory and he kind of takes this really scenic route uh up north of the uh north of what was traditionally Israel.

Uh and now he comes back down south, but instead of coming down south to the west side of the Sea of Galilee, he's on the east side of the Sea of Galilee, which, as you all know, is Gentile territory.

You know, I should put maps up here.

Uh and that's a uh uh this is a sort of an interesting moment for Jesus' ministry because he's begins by seeking this time of retirement, uh, rest and repose after difficult time in the predominantly Jewish regions.

He's seeking a more private time with just his disciples, but he is bombarded by people as his fame has spread who are in need, who need healing, and who are desiring his presence, even in the Gentile lands.

We saw last week how what's being brought to a head in this time in Jesus' ministry is the question of the relationship between the Jewish people who have received this covenant from the Lord since the time of Abraham, and the Gentile people who are not anticipating this Savior to come, and least of all are anticipating that the Savior of the Jews is actually the Savior of the world.

And so we see this dynamic happening where Jesus is sent as the Savior, the Messiah, the answer to the prophecies that are given to the Jewish people.

But that those promises and prophecies are to the Jewish people and yet somehow they are for the whole world.

So that dynamic is playing itself out where Jesus is seeking to demonstrate this priority to the Jews, that he is the answer to their prophecies, their promises, their law.

And yet we see what that priority means.

Now, this brings us right into something which I mention pretty frequently, but I mention it because I think it is the it's a central dynamic of our faith, but it's also one of the central stumbling blocks to our faith.

And that is this what theologians call the scandal of particularity.

What's so scandalous about Jesus, perhaps the most scandalous thing, is that the way of salvation, the Christians claim, we claim, all claim this morning, is through one man.

Now, we see this play out, we saw this play out last week, where the claim is salvation is from one people group, one people group, just the Jewish people, and that is a scandalous claim.

Especially, it was a scandalous claim in a pluralist culture like the Roman culture, but it's a scandalous claim in our culture, which would seek to level the playing field of all religions and even provide us some sort of a neutral secular space where we could stand in this neutral space and then assess equally the claims of all religions.

The claims of Christ don't allow that type of neutral space.

The claims of Christ are uniquely singular.

They are hierarchical.

Christ is above all things, they are exclusive.

Now, I I haven't uh, you know, I I like to read corporate value statements, and uh singular, hierarchical, exclusive, that hasn't made the list recently.

I don't think that's like here at Whole Foods, we are we seek to be singular, hierarchical and uh exclusive here at Whole Foods.

You know, although now that I think about it, that is, you know, they wouldn't say it.

Um but you know, you don't smell like patchouli to fit to stand out in Whole Foods, you know.

You smell like patchouli to fit in, so who knows.

Anyway, this stumbling block, the scandal of particularity, is also in Christianity, if we if we view it from just this different level of analysis, you'll see that the scandal of particularity is also the glory of the Christian faith, the particularity of Christ, the embodied personal nature of the Son of God who became a man and dwelt among us.

This is also the glory of particularity.

So in this way, this nature of Christ, that he is particular, one man, that our claim is there's one man who is the way.

Our claim is also there's there's by one man, there's a way.

It's also a glory of particularity, and I want us to see that this morning.

Okay, so we'll begin by kind of saying, all right, all right, we're kind of laying out a here's what I'm not saying.

So this same section of scripture, this same story of Jesus healing this deaf uh man with a speech impediment, is also described in the Gospel of Matthew.

But the way that Matthew describes it is from a different level of analysis.

Here's Matthew's description.

I only put one verse on the screen, but you can hear the whole thing.

Matthew 15, 29 through 31.

Jesus went on from there and walked beside the Sea of Galilee, and he went up on the mountain and sat down there.

And great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others.

And they put him at his feet, and he healed them, so that the crowd wondered when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled healthy, the lame walking, and the blind seeing, and they glorified the God of Israel.

Okay, so in Mark, we get just this one story describing this season of ministry along the Sea of Galilee with one man, the healing of the deaf man.

But the way that Matthew tells the story is a much bigger picture.

It's just a more macro scale.

Here's what it was like to the community along the Sea of Galilee when Jesus was present.

Crowds were gathering, they were bringing those who were sick and the blind and the and the deaf and the lame, and they were gathering to him, putting them at his feet, and he was healing them.

And the crowd was wondering together.

Now, crowd, you know, just that description of the crowd doing something.

This is a macro level of understanding.

And I say that to, I bring this to our attention to show that a macro level of understanding of Christianity is legitimate.

It's legitimate to consider what does the person of Christ mean, what does Christianity mean for our culture at large?

What are the interactions of Christianity with our culture?

And we can make assessments like that, and we can write think pieces on those things, and we can make real claims about the interactions of Christianity with our culture, and we can say real things about that.

In fact, it would be difficult to understand how our culture receives Christianity without a general understanding of how the sexual revolution has played out in our culture.

How could we understand these hot topics of Christianity without understanding that these are touch points because our culture has an understanding of sexual liberation as one of the guiding arcs towards justice that our culture holds.

And so when Christianity contradicts that and says, what you call sexual liberation, we actually call sexual slavery.

Sexual liberation is actually better described by an adherence to the norms that the Bible describes.

Well, then we see, okay, we can understand why this is such a flashpoint because of our macro level assessment.

Does that make sense?

So when Matthew gives this macro level assessment of the way that the person of Jesus interacts with the culture at large, then we can see he's talking about real things.

Now, what I'm doing now, none of you need to be convinced of, but I want to take some time to try and convince you of it.

Because for the rest of the sermon, I'm you'll be able, you'll you might get this impression that the we can't actually make any general claims.

Or because the a culture is not something that you can walk up and touch, you know?

You can't just like, when is a culture at the level of your personal experience?

You know, when do you go and touch a movement in the culture?

You don't really.

So you might think, oh, well then there's nothing really there.

And therefore, we should not speak of it's foolish to speak of any sort of general cultural engagement uh in the Christian world.

Now, I I know I don't need to convince you of this because our culture at large has it in it, especially since COVID.

Do you guys remember COVID?

The coronavirus.

Um, especially since the coronavirus, now is a good time to switch back to calling it coronavirus, isn't it?

Or another thing that I like to do is miss mispronounce it, call it COVID.

Is this a good time for that?

To be like, did this guy make it through the whole thing and not know how to?

So especially since COVID.

Our culture has done uh has been at this like doing this project together to convince us that only macro levels of analysis are real.

We can only understand the world in terms of a macro level of analysis.

And the only thing worth considering in your personal life are things which are able to tie up into a macro level of analysis.

And those are the things that you should be most concerned about, most care about, those are the most real things in the world.

And so when I'm telling you, see, look in the Bible, macro levels of analysis are really there.

It's intuitive for you to think, yeah, yeah, of course.

Those are the only things that are really real.

All that's really real are cultural movements, and those just happen to be playing themselves out in my life and the lives of others.

That's why I don't really need to get to know anybody.

I can learn who they voted for, or learn a political affiliation, or learn how they say COVID, and I'll know all that I really need to know about them because they're just a symptom of the macro uh cultural movement, and that's that's the real thing.

Do you see what I'm saying?

So what so what I want us to see, look, the macro is real.

It's really there, and it's not all that's there.

And if it's disproportionate in your thinking, then you will at least become a bad analyst.

You'll at least become someone who isn't really able to understand the world that you're engaging with.

Because you'll always be missing the important, uh, more refined details.

And you'll lose the ability to understand the world around you as the person that you are.

Because slowly, and I think this happens, the person that you are vanishes.

It just gets absorbed into some cultural narrative, and then you play that part, and then somebody else comes and plays that part, and then you just say things, the lines that you've been assigned.

Our culture is is is trying to teach us that there is no legitimate private space.

Everything ought to be public, and everything ought to be a public engagement.

There is a real private space.

And if you aren't able to be met there, if you aren't able to have a private personal experience of your faith, of Christ, of your Christianity, then you probably aren't able to make any macro level analyses because you don't have the wisdom.

You're only analyzing the world at one level, and so you aren't able to functionally participate in it.

In today's story, we see one of the clearest examples of Jesus interacting in the private space with somebody that he is healing.

And in that private space type of interaction, I want us to go through a sort of rehabilitation, a sort of therapy to remind ourselves Christ meets us in the private space so that we can once again be met there, know who Christ is there.

I want you to think of things.

I want you to have thoughts like this.

Not just what does Christ mean to our culture or to the world, but what does Jesus mean to me?

To be able to answer questions like that, participate in questions like that.

What does Jesus mean to me?

So let's begin to look at this story, how Jesus enters this private space.

Mark 7, 32.

And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him.

Okay, so the they who bring this man to Jesus, because we have this other bigger perspective that we get from Matthew 5 on this same event, we're able to know that this is one of the crowds that's gathering around Jesus.

And so the crowd gathers and they sort of push forward to the front of the crowd a man who is deaf and who has a speech impediment.

He can't speak.

And they're begging Jesus, lay your hands on him, lay your hands on him.

Now we should see that this is a prescription and it's a a it's a prescription to Jesus.

It's a description of what they want to see from Jesus.

They want to see Jesus lay his hands on them and then the man be healed.

They might have heard other stories of Jesus being uh encountered by a leper and reaching out, and rather than Jesus becoming leprous and contagious, instead Jesus' own health and purity was contagious for the leper, just by Jesus laying his hands on them.

And so they might think, okay, well, this is how the power of this man is distributed.

It's distributed through this means and practice of laying on hands.

But in the story that we looked at just last week, where the woman comes and begs Jesus regarding her daughter who had a demon, Jesus is able to cast out that demon without ever seeing the daughter, without ever being present to the one who needed healing.

He just says, Go, you can go now, your daughter is well.

And she goes home and her daughter was well.

So we know that Jesus does not need to touch someone to heal them, nor does he even need to be in the vicinity of somebody in order to heal them.

So they're begging for a particular thing that they want to see.

But we understand that Jesus doesn't need to perform that in order to heal the man.

Knowing that, it makes it all the more interesting how Jesus actually heals the man.

733 to 35, we'll just get the whole story.

And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears.

And after spitting, touched his tongue.

Okay, now everyone turn to your neighbor.

And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, Efasa.

That is, be opened.

And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

Strange.

You know, if you were if you were to just look on and think like this is the only type of healing that we've seen Jesus do, then Jesus would look more like something like a witch doctor, right?

Like, let me um perform this ritual, cast these spells, like Miracle Max.

You know.

And that is what conjures up this healing in Jesus or in the man.

But we know too much about Jesus.

Which means we know that this was not a pattern or a ritual that Jesus needed in order to conjure up enough power to heal the man.

Instead, this is something that was just attuned to the needs of the man, attuned to the particulars of the man who was being healed.

This is for the man who's being healed.

It's not for Jesus.

It's for the man who's being healed.

So from that perspective, let's look at what Jesus does.

He does six actions.

First thing he does is he brings him aside from the crowd and he brings him into a private space.

Now we've seen people put forward by others in order to be healed.

In the beginning of this gospel, we saw the four friends who bring their paralyzed friend on a mat, and they can't get to Jesus, but they're so determined to see their friend healed that they climb onto the roof of where Jesus is speaking and they dig down through the roof and lower him down on a mat.

So determined were they to see their friend healed.

This doesn't have that flavor.

What we see here is more something more like a crowd desiring to witness a spectacle.

They're pushing him forward.

There's no description of any sort of relationship between the people who are pushing him forward and the crowd, and they're describing the event that they want to see.

There's this healer, we want to see a healing.

Let's bring forward this man who's deaf and mute and say, lay your hands on him.

Let's see the magic happen.

They're desiring to see a spectacle.

Jesus does not allow the spectacle to take place.

He doesn't allow the man's healing to become a public spectacle.

He's not like Tony Robbins.

Instead, he brings him into a private space where it would be just between them.

Just between them.

The next thing he does is he puts his fingers into his ears.

Put his fingers into his ears.

You know, like this.

Why does he do that?

Well, what should he have done?

I'm gonna make you hear now.

I'll describe what that would have looked like from the man's perspective.

So how do you communicate?

You touch his ears.

You touch him.

You know, so that he can know here's what's coming.

This thing that's going to happen is from me, for you.

I'm touching you so that you might know that.

Look at how experiential this is, how inarticulate this is.

This level of knowing.

You know, how do you think peace, an interaction like that?

You you you can't really.

It it has to, you the man afterwards would have said something like, You would have, I don't know, honestly, you would have had to have been on the other side of this, having Jesus himself touch you to have known what that meant.

So what does that touch mean?

It's inarticulate.

He wets his fingers, he spits on his fingers, and then he touches the man's tongue.

I don't know, next.

Now, there's I I this is one where it's like, okay, what's going on here?

I have a couple of couple of first of all, we know that he's he wants the man to know that he's going to fix his speech.

Now, there's a couple of images that I think, well, really one image in particular that I think could be at play here.

The prophecies of the one who would come and who would, at the arrival of his kingdom, would make the deaf hear and the blind see.

These are described, this basically this instance is described in Isaiah 35.

And the next verse, after the deaf hearing, says, In the dry places there will be springs of water.

And, you know, this is a dry place.

Maybe he had a dry mouth.

We need a demonstration of there's going to be a return to life here.

That there's a there's a a return of of right operation, just like springs in a desert would just bring new life.

Jesus is is sort of don't here's a way to think of it.

He's taking that image, springs of water in the desert, and he's bringing it down to the scale of one man, one person, so that he can experience it.

A final thing on this, it's this certainly isn't stranger than Jesus saying, You must eat my flesh and drink my blood.

So if you think this is too strange, think of what you normally think of Christianity, right?

Next, he looks up to heaven.

He shows with his posture to the man the source of his power.

He's also bringing him into this understanding of what exactly Jesus is doing here.

What do we pray at church every Sunday to begin our service?

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Christ is the answer to this prayer.

So Jesus looks up to heaven.

This is the way things ought to be.

The pattern of the way that uh man was meant to hear and speech was meant to flow from a man's mouth.

And Jesus is joining that pattern with this man's life.

He is the one who can make it on earth as it is in heaven.

And we see this in Jesus' look.

We're going to join these things together here in this place where it is not on earth as it is in heaven, we will make it on earth as it is in heaven.

And then Jesus sighs.

What's that sigh?

What is it when you look at someone and you sigh for their pain?

What does what does sigh mean?

You know, it it you know what it means.

You might not know how to say it, but you know what it means to receive it.

You know when you share bad news with a friend and then they sigh for the news that you've shared?

Someone's in this with me.

Someone actually took a moment to consider this in though in the way that it might actually I might actually be experiencing it.

It's compassion.

They're really, they're really seeing the turmoil that I'm experiencing.

Now in that context, the touching, the spitting, the touching the tongue, the looking up, the sighing, in this private space, the next thing that Jesus does is he speaks.

He says, Efatha.

It's a uh Aramaic word that is uh sort of that's transliterated into the Greek so that the Greek reading audience would be able to hear the sound, the precise sound that Jesus made.

So we can now hear that precise sound, sound something like ephasha.

That would have been the first sound this man heard.

What a surprise.

Jesus speaks, he hears.

He hears him.

And then the man spoke plainly to Jesus.

This private space, these all these inarticulate ways of being known, the sigh of compassion for what it must be like to not be able to hear nor communicate yourself to others, to be in a not made a spectacle of, perhaps he had felt like a spectacle his whole life, but to be in just this private space, touched and seen and understood, and then healed by Jesus himself in that way.

Don't you see how this thing which we are scandalized by, which is the particularity of Christ, is precisely the thing that our hearts might long for most in the world?

For someone with the authority to say so, to actually speak to us, for somebody who might know the depths of the particulars of the shapes of the pains that we feel, to actually offer healing into that place and to see us when he does it, the scandal of particularity, of the particularity of Christ, this is the glory of Christ.

Can you be met there?

Can you be met in that place?

I've been reading this book for so long, called Loving to Know by this Christian philosopher.

Her name is Esther Meek.

She's living, which is great.

I'd love to meet her one day.

Um and I think it's the type of person that I could probably write to and actually meet because I don't think there's like a line.

Sir, you know.

But I'll finish the book first.

She describes uh this book is an epistemology, which means it has to do with knowing and what knowing is.

And she's providing this theory of knowledge, uh, which she calls covenant epistemology, which describes the context in which true knowing takes place, or we can actually say we know something.

And in the book, she has these little asides that are in a different font and uh written in a very non-academic way that just sort of relays the personal experience of these types of principles, which is really cool in a philosophy book.

Uh I haven't seen that before.

She describes her childhood in one of them, and she she says that she grew up in an environment where she was by far the youngest person in her family.

She doesn't say by how much.

And she said that uh the rest of her family was populated who by people who she describes as either grandly good or grandly bad.

And that to her meant that it was her job to just disappear and to not be seen in this type of environment.

So she describes that as it was her job to keep her head down and not be noticed, all the while craving that notice.

Now, later on, she uh becomes interested in philosophy, uh, which is well, that's a great interest if you have a lot of time to yourself.

And she says, she later wrote a wrote a book called Longing to Know.

And the book was really well received.

And she started to experience, she says, for the first time in her life, this regard or recognition of people that she was interacting with.

She says this of that experience.

She says, this noticing regard, it was palpable in my bodily experience.

It began to fill in the hole inside me.

I felt as if for the first time that I was there, present to myself.

Okay, look at the shape that she's describing.

The regard of others filled in a presence to herself, so that she began to experience herself as a real person, you know, who took up some space and had some things to say.

She goes on to say that because of that experience, she went into this interview for an academic job and she felt like she was such a solid person that she was able to advocate for herself and then she received the job.

Now, in our culture, we might say something like, Oh, this story is backwards.

Because it's wrong to receive your identity from the world around you.

If you receive your identity from the world around you, uh, then you're being disingenuous to who you are as a person.

Who you are is innate and intrinsic and is available only to self-reflective discovery.

And then once you understand who you are as a person, the rest of the world is merely your stage of self-expression.

And this stage of self-expression is the public space where you go to show the world who you are inside.

And if you're strong enough, you will conform the world to that image.

Meek writes this: Scripture indicates that God intended, that's the scripture indicates something, it's the opposite, that God intended palpable, touchable human faces and gazes in each person's life to prototype his own, his own face, and most readily convey what scripture indicates about the face of God.

We are meant to receive a prototype of the face of God from the faces of those around us.

Think of what the face of a parent means to the child.

Part of what she's doing in the book is describing that our patterns of knowing that we see demonstrated in the way that humans learn to know to know, particularly in the parent-child relationship, that those are the actual patterns of knowing in the world.

And we forget those.

We need those to be rehabilitated.

Look, we are meant to know who we are by the faces that reflect ourselves back to us.

You cannot be known to yourself in a mirror.

A mirror, no matter what you look like, a mirror cannot make you beautiful.

The only thing that manifests beauty in you, that bestows beauty onto you, so that you, it's something that you could perhaps even possess, are the looks of others.

So Jesus.

Now that principle, that's a scary thing.

And I understand why our culture would see a principle like that and be like, no way, too dangerous.

Get rid of those looks of others.

Your soul should not be porous to the world around you.

It should be sturdy and impermeable to the looks of others around you.

Because what are the looks of others around us?

Are they conveying beauty?

Yeah, sometimes.

Are they conveying shame and jealousy and despair and showing us uh by revealing to us things in ourselves which we know to be true and wicked, we see reflected back in the faces that behold us.

And so it is a dangerous game that we receive who we are from the world around us.

And yet it is the reality.

So, what is the news of Christ?

Well, let's consider it in our story.

The deaf man with a speech impediment, ushered to the front of the crowd, being made a spectacle once again, what do the gazes of the world around him reinforce that he is?

We can't know for sure, but we can imagine that.

Okay, now what does the gaze of Christ make him to be?

In the gaze of Christ, if he had been healed, not outside of the public space, if he had been not healed in the private space, the man could have considered, here I am, once again, Jesus, yes, he healed me.

That's wonderful.

But but still, wasn't it just in the service of him?

I was a prop in the manufacturing of his spectacle, once again.

Well, the man couldn't think that.

Because he was met and brought into the most private space by Jesus.

So he would consider I'm not just a spectacle.

I am someone who can be really seen.

There's a person here that could be empathized with, that could be understood and known, and then I could be by that look, by the power of that notice and that regard, it could heal me and transform me.

That's what Christ does.

She goes on in this passage, Esther Meek does, she says, a sense of personal beauty is nevertheless accessible to all in the life-giving notice.

Excuse me, in the life-giving, noticing regard of Jesus Christ.

We have to be met by Jesus there.

I want you to particularize yourself.

Think of you.

Think of I, me, in your head.

What does it mean that Jesus would know you?

Not just that Jesus saves, but that he saves you.

Not that he died for sin, but your sins, those ones.

Not that he seeks to heal, but that he seeks to heal your wounds, knowing those in particular, the particulars of those.

It starts to unpack and gives us an understanding of when Paul in Galatians he would write something like, having known God, or rather been known by him.

Do you see how you can't know God, who Jesus is, without having been known by him?

They go in that order.

You have to have been known by him in order to know him.

Because how can you know his compassionate heart if you don't see it attuned to you?

How can you say he's compassionate, he's patient, loving?

And then in that establishment, this is, you know, we we love to talk about how our identity is in Christ in modern evangelicalism, which is what we call this.

This is modern evangelicalism.

We love to talk about identity in Christ.

Well, what does that mean?

It means that he knows you.

You have to be known by him in order for him, in order to have established in you, I'm a person who can be known.

This is the order of our knowing Christ.

In Mark 7, 36 through 37, Jesus charges the crowd, don't tell anyone about this.

But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.

We thought perhaps this pattern of Jesus warning the crowd to not speak about his miracles was just for Jewish communities.

But as his fame has grown, we see that when Jesus presses in with his goodness, when he presses in with his light, then it exposes and shows a greater and greater resistance to him.

And so this spectacle of Jesus is something that the crowds desire to gather and enjoy, looking at, but the honoring of Jesus as Lord is not something that's taking place in these crowds.

Yet, into the mouth of these crowds, Mark relays this astonishment in how they were saying, He has done all things well.

He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.

Now, this is a simple revelation.

But what they're the language that they're using and that Mark is showing us that they're using, this is the language of God after creation, stepping back from his world and saying, It is good.

I have done all things well.

Because what they're recognizing is that Jesus is turning his noticing regard to the broken creation.

And he is recreating it, restoring it, so that once again of his world, he will say, I've made all things well.

What I made well and they broke, I restored so that it is well again.

We must see.

We must, you know, I'm discussing an interpersonal thing, right?

So don't think C like you look at an object.

Think C like eye contact.

You must see Jesus looking back at you in order to know him.

In order to know Christ, you must know his knowledge of you.

Now, how do we do that?

One way we practice each Sunday, it's by confession and repentance.

By confession, we're inviting Christ into to see the places in which we would most seek to desire to hide from ourselves.

And then we allow him to see us there.

And this is an act of trust.

When we confess to him, we're saying, Lord, you must be compassionate.

You must be kind here, your grace must flow towards me here.

And then we see him behold us as we are.

We experience his forgiveness, his kindness, his mercy in those real ways.

We look with compassion on one another.

I want you to think when I show up to church, who can I see today?

Who can I behold today?

When you go into your office, who can you look at and offer that recognition, that noticing regard?

Consider the pattern of the good Samaritan, the uh priest that walks by, this the Pharisee that walks by.

Uh and nobody's nobody sees the wounded man.

But the Samaritan just turns his gaze, and instead of seeing just a crumple of person, he sees a person.

And that sets the whole ball rolling.

All the rest of it takes place.

It's it's just downstream of that that regard, that recognition.

What can you do with your eyes?

How can you see with your eyes?

Those are practices of receiving the knowing, Christ's knowing of you, and then seeking to participate that in that in the way that he calls us to love one another by giving noticing regard to each other.

In a world that has been utterly deprived of a private space, that seeks to only be known at a public macro level.

What could that that could be like streams in the desert for someone to be seen?

I want to finish with this quote.

Uh, and this is from that Esther Meek book, uh, but it's a Tony Morrison quote, uh, the writer, uh, the bluest eye, the color purple, the most dangerous yellow.

The last one's fake.

Just wanted them all to be colors.

Umce asked, what course of study did she owe her literary prowess?

And this was her response.

She says, Oh, there's no course.

I owe it to the fact that when I was a child, whenever I walked into the room where my father was, his face lit up.

One more time.

Oh, there is no course.

I owe it to the fact that when I was a child, whenever I walked into the room where my father was, his face lit up.

Where did her person come from?

Did you know?

Perhaps for you.

What we see in the story, what does it mean for Christ to see you?

His face lights up.

This is the recreative, the creational act of Christ in the world.

What does it look like when God becomes a man and he goes out to re-establish his creation and to recreate the one who spoke it all into existence?

The one who seeks to change and shape the hearts of his children so that they're transformed.

That Paul will write elsewhere of that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old things have passed.

Behold, new things have come.

Well, what is the mechanism that Jesus does that?

Part of it, he delights.

He purifies you with his own blood, washes you, the regeneration of his Holy Spirit.

He looks at you, and it is his gaze that makes you beautiful.

You can receive it from him in truth, because it is the gaze of God, the face of God.

That's what recreates our hearts.

It is my hope that you might create a private space to practice receiving the delighted gaze of God.

All right, are there any questions today?

What does it look feel like to have God know you, especially in a life that has a lot of pain and difficulty?

Find a scripture kind of quickly.

One day I'll just get a paper Bible.

Okay, so first of all, I I wanna I wanna limit my ability to answer this.

Because what did it feel like when Jesus put his fingers in the man's ears?

What did it feel like when he took him into a private space?

What did it feel like when he wet his tongue and he touched and he touched his when he wet his fingers and he touched the man's tongue?

He spoke and he heard.

Those things are inarticulate.

And so what that feels like for you is is yours.

What did it feel like when John, when they were eating together, when John leans up against Jesus because they they were so close that they were just touching, they're like best friends.

What did that what is the word for that?

The Germans probably have one.

We don't.

I don't know what the I don't I don't know what the articulation of those things of those things are.

There's this pattern of knowledge that John Frame articulates.

I'm making a triangle, you'll see why.

But he it's he calls it tri-perspectivalism.

I apologize.

And he says that true knowledge is made up of these three components: the normative, that is what's true, like things that we could find written in scripture, the existential, that's something that we would emotionally experience, and the situational, that is, this could be lived in and applied in life.

And he says that uh we often in the West think of knowledge as in a in a line.

It goes normative, the facts of the matter, the true things, which will inform the uh existential, which will inform the situational.

Frame says we shouldn't think of it as linear, we should think of them as different perspectives on the same thing.

That true knowing for a human always requires all three.

It doesn't matter how matter of fact you might perceive the thing you're dealing with to be.

It always requires all three: the normative, the existential, and the situational.

That's a very dull, very dry way to try and compel you to try and to try and say to you, I don't know.

Try and find out what it looks and feels like to have Christ meet you in the particulars of those places.

Seek sit before his gaze.

Pray things like David.

Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I rise up and when I sit down, seek those things.

Uh, seek his presence.

It'll take a private space and it'll likely take time to learn how to receive that.

It's a practice.

It's a therapy, even.

This this aspect of our faith is under attack, almost dead.

So let's see the gaze of Christ.

Uh, do we have communion?

Did that work?

I think they're bringing it in.

Okay.

Let's go ahead and bring that in.

Now applaud.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, for I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

I would like you to approach this meal as though it were for you, specifically for you.

That Jesus was offering himself to you for the sins that you have committed, for the healing of our broken souls, though healing isn't even strong enough, the quickening of our dead souls, that this might be offered to you by him, that you might be able to have add some touch to this experience.

Holy Father, I pray that in these practices that you call us to in the sacraments, that you would meet us in them.

Lord, I pray that you would give us an imagination to understand what it means to be seen by you and known by you, that that might become the central fact of who we are.

Lord, let us see you in the way that you interacted with this man and consider perhaps you would interact with us in that very way.

Pray that you would meet us in that space.

Lift us up in Jesus' name.

Amen.