It’s not been a good week for Jesus.  It began last Sunday when a couple of Temple big-wigs came up from Jerusalem to the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, near Gennesaret, where Jesus was telling about the glorious immanence of God’s royal Presence, . . . and these Temple big-wigs derailed Him with purification issues.  Saint Mark tells us that Jesus was so rattled by the experience that He left off preaching and “went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon [where] he entered a house, and would not have any one know it.”  . . . Jesus was so taken aback by the adversarial nature of His encounter with the pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem and so full of remorse and self-doubt from the rage He felt in response to their smug reproof . . . that He went to a city repugnant to pharisees and scribes, so that they wouldn’t pester Him, . . . and He shut Himself up in a house to be alone and to sulk . . . and to meditate . . . and to pray.  And “yet,” Mark says, . . . and “yet He could not be hid.”  Because a Greek, a Syrophoenician woman, comes to the house where Jesus is, and she asks for Him.  . . . And she tells Jesus that her little daughter is possessed by an unclean spirit and asks Him to drive it away.  . . . And Jesus says a very unkind thing.  He says it not so much to the woman as to His heavenly Father.  Jesus says, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”  Jesus says to His heavenly Father (by way of the Syrophoenician woman); Jesus says that He should not be doing Heaven’s work for a woman and her daughter who are outside the Covenant, . . . when the children of Abraham must be fed, . . . and God allows them to resist, as happened at Gennesaret.  . . . Jesus is in an ugly mood, and so He says to the Syrophoenician woman, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”  . . . But the woman says, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  . . . And Jesus stares at her.  He stares at her for a very long while, . . . astonished to hear His heavenly Father speak with the lips of a woman who is not Jewish.  . . . And, nearly sobbing, Jesus says to her, “For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.”  And Jesus immediately picks up, Mark tells us; . . . Jesus immediately picks up, leaves the house where He has been staying, and begins to walk.  He walks further north up the coast some twenty miles to Sidon, and then He heads somewhat southeast to eventually arrive in the vicinity of the cities of Decapolis, circling aimlessly until He is stopped by the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.  . . . And in all that time, perhaps a week or so; . . . in all that time, it would seem that Jesus has avoided any contact with the general public.  He took no opportunity to preach, nor did He publicly manifest a single sign of God’s Kingdom.  . . . It’s not been a good week for Jesus; . . . it’s made Him silent and withdrawn.

    But by the Sea of Galilee . . . Jesus is recognized.  And a man is brought to Him:  a man who is deaf and who has an impediment of speech.  And Jesus is asked to heal him.  . . . Still wary of public notice, however, Jesus takes the man apart from the multitude privately, Mark says.  And Jesus looks at the man and envies him.  No one argues with a deaf person.  They avoid him.  And even God would not expect a deaf man to speak gracious words to ungrateful ears.  . . . Jesus finally sighs deeply, and He says to the deaf man, “Well, friend, the Father sent you to me so that you might hear and so that you might speak.  He scolded me with a Syrophoenician woman.  What has He sent you to tell me?”  . . . And Christ touches the man’s tongue and places His fingers into the man’s ears, and He says “Ephphatha.”  . . . “Be opened.”  . . . And in the act of healing, Christ Himself is healed; for, Jesus is as astonished as the crowd to understand that the words of the prophet Isaiah are being fulfilled:

Behold, your God . . . will come and save you.  Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy.

    That’s how Chapter 7 of Mark’s Gospel ends.  . . . And in the very next chapter, . . . Chapter 8, Jesus begins to teach His disciples . . . plainly,

that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Do you see what Saint Mark is telling us?  In the portion of his Gospel appointed for you to hear today, Mark gives us an account of an important moment in the journey of Christ’s vocation.  You see, when we confess in the Creed that the Son of God “became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man”, we mean exactly that.  We mean that Christ’s fulfillment of God’s Providence required faith and prayer and attention, . . . just like that of any other man or woman.  Jesus did not come up out of the water of His Baptism and say, “Right then, let’s pop over to Jerusalem for my crucifixion and the world’s salvation.”  Oh no.  The thing to which God called His Son -- Christ’s vocation -- wasn’t something that appeared to Him in an instant, in full flower.  Christ’s vocation was a journey.  It was a journey from freshness and purpose . . . to discomfort and doubt . . . on into aridity . . . and out again by God’s grace.  God’s call for Christ to receive the Cross was a journey; . . . just as our own fulfillment of the purpose God has for each of our lives is a journey.  . . . The Lord God Almighty has a purpose for your life; . . . He intends for your life to convey some aspect of His grace and mercy and forgiveness, just as He intended for Jesus.  . . . Not so high a thing as Jesus was given to do, perhaps; but the Lord God Almighty intends that your life be sacred.  . . . And in order to cooperate with the Father’s purpose, . . . it is necessary for each one of us to be like Christ; . . . to not become lapsed Christians when our spiritual journey brings us into discomfort and doubt and aridity; . . . when our spiritual journey brings us to a place where we are certain that God is indifferent to our prayer; . . . it is necessary for us to follow the example Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel; . . . it is necessary for each of us to “be opened” to the next direction our heavenly Father desires to take us in our journey.

    You heard the Apostle James exhort all of us this morning, in his Epistle, to

put away all filthiness and rank growth of wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

Where the Revised Standard Version Bible translates the Greek text to read “the implanted word”, . . . the King James Bible urges us to “receive with meekness the engrafted word”.  The King James translation of Holy Scripture uses an orchard/vineyard image of the art of grafting one kind of plant to another to describe how God’s Holy Word has been imparted to us.  . . . The image  captivates me.  It’s as if James is telling us that at our Baptism our heavenly Father cut back the rank growth of wild and disordered human affections, . . . cut back our humanity to its very stub, . . . and then sliced a gash down its center into which He placed the flayed flesh of Jesus and then bound us tight with the wax and cord of the Holy Spirit.  . . . It’s as if Saint James is telling us that at our Baptism God has cut away what is worthless, and wounded us so that we might be joined to something which . . . while it’s not exactly natural to us, . . . it isn’t alien either.  For, we were created to be the very Image of God to Creation, . . . and for us and for our salvation -- for the fulfillment of God’s gracious and ineffably happy Providence -- our heavenly Father has bound His Word to us with His tender grace so that we might be fused to Christ . . . and so that the intermingling of our life in His flesh might yield, not sin, but the fruit of a sacred life; . . . might bestow the health of Heaven upon the world.  . . . All that is necessary for each of us to fulfill this vocation in our own unique way; . . . all that is necessary is that we “be opened”; all that is necessary is that we embrace and cling to the Word Who has been engrafted to us.

    In a moment the very flesh of Jesus will touch your tongue.  In a moment the very Life of the Word will mingle with -- will be engrafted to -- your own life.  … “Ephphatha!” Jesus tells us.  . . . Be opened.