We’re all familiar with the saying, “God works in mysterious ways.” Well, though this saying isn’t Scripture, Scripture supports it. Take, for example, the words of the Apostle Paul: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!” The ways of the Lord are inscrutable (or mysterious) to us, because God’s ways are contrary to our ways. God doesn’t color within the lines; He doesn’t stay within the box. And this drives us crazy. The issue is, whether our faith will be shaken when God acts in mysterious ways, or whether we’ll cling to His words and promises in spite of His mysterious ways. And here in today’s Gospel text we have a case in point. Here St. Mark records three instances in which Jesus acts in totally unexpected and strange ways, not, however, in order to shake our faith, but to strengthen it, so that we might trust in Him regardless of His odd behavior.
The first of these three mysterious ways of Jesus involves His interaction with a Gentile, a non-Jew, a woman from Syrophoenicia whose daughter was demon-possessed. She had “heard of Him,” heard of His miraculous powers and His authority over unclean spirits, and so she came to Him begging Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. What we would expect from Jesus is for Him to grant her request immediately and cast the demon out. Wasn’t this why He came? Didn’t He come to deliver His people from their captivity to sin and the devil? And even though this woman was a Gentile and not a Jew, wasn’t Jesus the Savior of the world? To do anything less than what she was asking of Him would call into question the fact that He loved and cared for His fallen creatures.
But Jesus doesn’t always do what we expect of Him. And here He does something mysterious when He practically implies that He is not this woman’s Savior. She is not one of God’s children, who are invited to sit at His table and eat His food. Rather, she’s a dog, which, according to O.T. law, was an unclean animal. (The Apostle Peter makes use of a not-so-nice proverb about dogs returning to their vomit in describing those people who fall away from the Christian faith.) And so here’s this poor woman who’s only hope of healing for her daughter seems to have been dashed by no less than the Savior of the world, God in the flesh. Jesus truly acts in a mysterious way here.
But He doesn’t act this way in order to destroy this woman’s faith, but to test it. When God acts in mysterious ways, ways that we can’t understand, that’s when we must cling to His revealed word and promises. Would this woman walk away defeated, or would she cling to what she had heard and seen of Jesus’ mercy in the ways He’d acted before? She seems to have been aware that Jesus had helped others of her kind who suffered under similar circumstances. Mark reports that Jesus had earlier healed a multitude of sick people in Gennesaret, an area located in the region of Galilee, Galilee of the Gentiles, as the prophet Isaiah refers to it: “...in the latter time He has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.” So the woman doesn’t despair. Instead, she traps Jesus in His own words, saying, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” The woman ignores the mysterious way in which the Lord is speaking and behaving, which suggests that He is not her Savior, and instead she clings to the report that He is merciful. In doing so, she gets what she counted on. Jesus pulls back the veil of mystery behind which He was hiding and shows Himself to be the merciful Savior of the world that He is. He grants her request, and her daughter is healed.
Mystery #1: When the Lord seems to act contrary to His Word, continue to hold to that Word no matter what. Though many of His ways may seem strange, He’s bound Himself to keep His Word. Though it may seem like He ignores you when you call upon Him, He has redeemed you with His blood. He is your Savior, you are His child. You don’t eat from the crumbs that fall from the table, but from the Bread of Life at the Table itself. And you have the Lord’s promise that when you pray according to His Word He hears you and will grant you what you ask for, even if He grants it not in this life but in the next. In this life you live by faith in the promise of eternal life and the forgiveness of your sins for Christ’s sake, even while you suffer many ailments that the Lord does not remove here and now. But at the resurrection you will be perfectly healed of all harms and you will sit at table face to face with the Lord and eat of His bread in His heavenly kingdom forever.
The second of the mysterious ways of the Lord that Mark records in today’s text involves the healing of a deaf man. Here again Jesus is in Galilee of the Gentiles, and some people bring this deaf man to Him begging Him to lay His hand on him. Here the mystery concerns the way Jesus decides to heal this man. While the people expect Him to act in a way in which they’ve seen Him act before (laying His hands on the sick), Jesus does something different. He doesn’t do it their way (or the way He’s done it before), but in a new way, a way in which He wants to do it. He takes the man away privately by himself, away from the crowd, and then does a couple of very strange things to him: He puts His fingers into his ears and applies His own spit to the man’s tongue. Then, after saying “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened,” the man can both hear and speak.
Now, one of the first questions that arises in our minds is, “Why did Jesus do it this way?” Another question might be, “How can spittle do such great things?” Well, to answer the first question, we aren’t given the reason why Jesus does what He does. He just does it, and the result is that the man is healed. Regarding the second question, “How can spittle do such great things?” we might answer something like, “It is not the spit in fact that does it, but the Word of God which is in and with the spit, and faith, which trusts such Word of God in the spit,” which, by the way, is the way we talk about God’s mysterious work through the waters of Baptism. That Sacrament as well as the Sacrament of the Altar, or the Lord’s Supper, are both what are called mysteries, or strange ways in which God works. Like healing this deaf man by applying His fingers and His spit to him, Jesus heals us by applying His blood to us in our baptismal waters and by feeding us on His body and blood in His holy Supper. But if we were to look no further than the instruments He uses - fingers, spit, water, bread and wine - we would take offense at such things and stumble in unbelief. “What silly and foolish looking things these so-called Sacraments are!” we might say. But here again the test is to hold to the Word and promises of God, which He attaches to these silly and foolish looking things, and to trust in those words, in spite of the fact that it’s a mystery why God does it this way. The Gospel of Christ crucified is itself a mystery and foolishness to those who don’t believe it. “But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Mystery #2: When God acts in mysterious ways, continue to cling to His Word. Don’t let what you see with your eyes mislead you or cause you to disbelieve. Use the ears that the Lord has opened for you to listen to His Word. Then, the mystery will be revealed, and you won’t take offense at the strange ways in which the Lord works. He doesn’t work in mysterious ways to destroy your faith, but to strengthen it.
The third of the three mysterious ways of the Lord which Mark records here involves the proclamation of the Lord’s ways. Oddly enough, after He healed the deaf man, He commanded him and his friends not to tell anyone about it. In fact, Jesus did this a number of times during His earthly ministry. On another occasion, after healing a man of leprosy, Jesus told him not to broadcast it. And after His transfiguration, Jesus told His disciples not to tell anyone about that event until He had risen from the dead. It’s seems strange to us that Jesus would command people to keep silent about what He had done for them. Shouldn’t He want His works proclaimed? Ours, however, is not to question the Lord’s commands, but simply to obey them, no matter how odd they sound. Whatever the Lord’s reasons were at that time, He didn’t want the news about what He had done to be proclaimed. The fact that the man disobeyed the Lord and went out and spread the word about his healing anyway shows our propensity towards disobeying all of God’s commandments. For such disobedience we are worthy of both God’s temporal and eternal punishment. But since God does not want that for us, He sent His Son in the flesh to give His life on the cross as the sacrifice for our disobedience. For His sake, we now enjoy not only the spiritual healing He brings us through the forgiveness of our sins, but we also have His promise of the resurrection of our bodies and the life everlasting to look forward to in God’s kingdom of glory when Jesus returns for us.
This message He wants proclaimed, just as He commands His disciples at the end of the Gospel of Mark: “Go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel to the whole creation.” It’s a mystery to us, but God saves people from their sins through the preaching of Christ crucified for their salvation. As the Apostle Paul writes, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the Word about Christ.” Again, this message is going to come across as foolishness to unbelievers. It came across as foolishness to us, before the Holy Spirit worked the faith in our hearts to believe it. But as the Apostle John proclaims, “To all who received [the Son], to those who believed in His Name, He gave the right to become children of God...”
And so God works in mysterious ways. There are some mysterious ways about Him that we’ll never be able to understand, while in other cases He pulls back the veil with His Word and reveals to us what He’s doing. As Moses writes, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this Law.” In all cases God is working to strengthen our faith in our Savior Jesus Christ. He is the key to understanding all God’s mysteries. Turn to Him and His promises when God works in ways that are beyond your understanding. If God seems to ignore you and treat you like a dog, remind Him that you’re a child of His, purchased with the blood of His Son. When the ways of God seem foolish and weak to you, remind yourself of His promises connected to His Word and Sacraments, and remember that God has bound Himself to His Word to keep it. And when you doubt whether the proclamation of the Gospel has any effect at all and think that it’s all in vain, remember that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is “God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes it, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” Amen.