James Nisbet Commentary - Mark 7:34 - 7:34

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James Nisbet Commentary - Mark 7:34 - 7:34


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WHY DID CHRIST SIGH?

‘Looking up to heaven, He sighed.’

Mar_7:34

It may be that Christ sighed because there was some struggle or exhaustion in His human nature, and whenever He exerted His omnipotence He felt the virtue to go out of Him. But, passing by this consideration, may we not suppose that the sigh was occasioned by His foreknowledge of the abuse of that good gift He was about to bestow—an abuse which could scarcely fail to happen when the blessing was conferred upon a fallen man?

I. Good clogged with evil.—It is a cause of sadness at all times that no good can be done without its being mingled and clogged with evil. When, for instance, a child is baptized, there is joy and gladness in the Church. But, alas! that very child may, in after years, sin away baptismal grace, may crucify afresh the Lord of Life, and become twofold more the child of hell than before. This man had an impediment in his speech; not that which afflicts stammerers, but such as prevented him from uttering articulate sounds, so that he was, in effect, ‘dumb’; and our Lord was about to give him the gift of speech.

II. Precious and perilous.—And what a precious gift is this; but yet what a perilous gift! Is there any one here present who has thought earnestly of the Day of Judgment, and reckoned at all the account he will have to render, and not felt his heart sink within him, as he recalls the solemn text, ‘By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned’? I speak not of the liar. Neither will I pause to consider profane swearing, licentious jests, filthy conversation. But setting these aside, the awful text recurs, ‘Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account thereof in the Day of Judgment.’ Alas! how often do we find honourable business men still acting dishonestly with their tongues; robbing their neighbour of that good name which is dearer to him than the property of his calumniators.

III. Out of the abundance of the heart.—Here, then, we come to the point: ‘Out of the abundance of the heart,’ saith He Who made the heart, ‘the mouth speaketh.’ ‘A good man bringeth forth good things’ (Mat_12:34-35). And is it not so? Do we not see this exemplified whenever we look into our own hearts, or make inquiry into the spiritual condition of others? What says the heart of the blasphemer, of the filthy jester, of the scandalmonger? What—but this—that not only has he not the love of God within him, but that he has altogether ceased to fear God. Never forget that for our words, as well as for our works, we shall have to give an account at the Day of Judgment. The thought is one which may well solemnise the best of us.

Our Saviour sighed, then, to think how the gift He was conferring might be abused. But He looked to Heaven, to have the comfort of seeing there the joys awaiting all the blessed, who, having been redeemed by His blood, shall have passed faithfully the time of their probation here, and so, through much tribulation, have entered into glory.

Dean Hook.

Illustration

‘Mr. Ruskin has spoken of truth as “that golden and narrow line which the very powers and virtues that lean upon it bend, which policy and prudence conceal, which kindness and courtesy modify, which courage overshadows with its shield, imagination covers with her wings, and charity dims with her tears.… There are some faults slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the estimate of wisdom; but truth forgives no insult, and endures no stain.” Lord Bacon, on the other hand, speaks quaintly of the indignity of falsehood: “There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious, and therefore Montaigne said prettily, when he inquires the reason why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace and such an odious charge, saith he, ‘If it be well weighed to say that a man lieth is as much as to say as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men. For a lie faces God and shrinks from man.’ ” ’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE SIGH OF SYMPATHY

There was something in the sigh of Christ profoundly significant in its meaning, inexpressibly touching in its character.

I. The sigh of compassion.—Why did Christ sigh? It was an outgush of sympathy bursting from a humanity kindred to our own. It was a sigh of compassion. As He benignantly bent over this suffering form, the hidden spring of emotion was moved, and it gave vent in a deep upbreathed sigh.

II. The sigh of sorrow.—The sigh of Jesus was awakened, too, by a view of the ravages of sin. In that spectacle He beheld the humanity He had originally cast into a perfect, peerless mould, and had pronounced ‘very good,’ bruised and crushed—its organs impaired, its beauty marred, its nature tainted—and, Himself lovely and sinless, He could not look upon that wretched, defaced, paralysed specimen of our nature without emotion—without a sigh.

III. The sigh of practical benevolence.—Have we not remarked upon the hollow, vapid nature of human pity and compassion? How much of it evaporates in thin air! Not so was the emotion of Christ. His was a real, tangible, practical principle. It was always connected with some sorrow comforted, some want supplied, some burden unclasped, some help needed, some blessing bestowed.

Rev. Octavius Winslow, d.d.

Illustration

‘Learn from this what should be your true attitude when the pressure upon your emotional nature forces the deep-drawn sigh from your lips. We sigh, and look within—Jesus sighed, and looked without. We sigh, and look down—Jesus sighed, and looked up. We sigh, and look to earth—Jesus sighed, and looked to heaven. We sigh, and look to man—Jesus sighed, and looked to God!’

(THIRD OUTLINE)

THE SIGH INTERPRETED

The sigh of Jesus has been made to speak many languages. I will arrange them under four heads.

I. The sigh of earnestness.—Because it says that ‘looking up to heaven, He sighed,’ some connect the two words, and account that the sigh is a part of the prayer. If the Son of God sighed when He prayed, surely they have most of the spirit of adoption—not who offer up an apathetic form, but they who have such a sense of what communion with God is, that they bring their whole concentrated powers to the great work.

II. The sigh of beneficence.—But it has been said again, that He who never gave us anything but what was bought by His own suffering—so that every pleasure is a spoil purchased by His blood—did now by the sigh, and under the feeling that He sighed, indicate that He purchased the privilege to restore to that poor man the senses he had lost.

III. The sigh of brotherhood.—The scene before our Lord would be to His mind but a representative of thousands of thousands. And yet He did not do (as we too often act)—He did not do nothing, because He could not do all. He sighed—and He saved one. That is true brotherhood.

IV. The sigh of holiness.—All this still lay on the surface. Do you suppose that our Saviour’s mind could think of all the physical evil, and not go on to the deeper moral causes from which it sprang?

Illustration

‘How much of the real force of prayer was concentrated in this one sigh! Let us not measure the power of prayer by the time it occupies, or by the noise it makes. Sad to see the liberties which some take with the great God in prayer. They pray as though they imagined He was to be influenced by happy turns of thought, by fine rhetorical periods, or by loud, boisterous, or chattering appeal! How different from all this that gentle sigh of Christ’s!’

(FOURTH OUTLINE)

THE SYMPATHIES OF CHRIST

The sigh of Christ is full of sacred and instructive meaning.

I. It reveals the reality and intensity of the Saviour’s love to individual sufferers.—There are many philanthropists whose benevolence takes the form of liberal money-giving, but which never comes into direct contact with the suffering it is intended to relieve.

II. It shows the keenness with which the Saviour felt the evil of sin.—He could not be called upon to do even a small service to an individual sufferer without finding Himself face to face with the universal curse.

III. The sigh reminds us of the essential central principle of ‘the philosophy of salvation.’—Christ never relieves a man of any curse the misery of which He does not appropriate to Himself. ‘In all our afflictions, He is afflicted.’ He takes the affliction in order the more effectually to work the cure.

IV. That sigh may well suggest to us the holy sadness of doing good.—The law of Christ’s life ought, as far as possible, to be the law of ours—the genius of His experience that of ours.

Illustration

‘Some professors of Christ’s religion can only be stigmatised as lackadaisical, epicurean, luxurious people. They like to lap themselves up in spiritual blankets, and to loll themselves to sleep on spiritual feather beds. What know they, what care they about the sublime solicitudes which moved the heart of Him Whom they call Saviour and Lord, but of Whom they forget that He “suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow in His steps”?’



EPHPHATHA!’

‘He sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.’

Mar_7:34

I. The hearing ear.—It is certain that an important part of the work of Divine grace is to give to the soul a power of ‘hearing’ effectually; that is, receiving and accepting the Divine truth. It is by this inward ‘hearing’ that faith, which is itself the ‘gift of God,’ comes. It is a great grace, this readiness to hear with the inward ear, and with conviction of its absolute truth, the teaching of Jesus—to distinguish and readily follow His voice. And very specially through the conscience. It is a great thing to have a conscience that speaks clearly and distinctly; it is yet more important to have the ear of our soul trained to catch its least and softest whispers, and to recognise in it the voice of the Good Shepherd.

II. Spiritual speech.—Then there is what we may call our spiritual speech, that ‘utterance’ which St. Paul twice refers to as coupled with ‘faith’ or ‘knowledge,’ a cause for thankfulness and a thing for us to ‘abound’ in (1Co_1:5; 2Co_8:7), something, indeed, which does not stop short at the inward assent to what we believe, but finds expression in the outward profession of our faith at all times and on all occasions when we are called upon to profess it.

Only once let us feel our real need of the Divine Healer of our infirmities, and we shall be on the high-road to health and hearing and speech. Our prayer may well be: ‘Lord, speak to me that I may speak’; and, ‘Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.’

Rev. C. F. G. Turner.

Illustration

‘I once passed the night with a brother clergyman whose house stood between and close to two of the great main lines of railway that run out of London, and throughout the night I could not sleep for the thundering traffic within a stone’s throw of my room. Neither my host nor his servants were in the least disturbed. They had long been used to it, and slumbered peacefully in spite of it. So surely it is with the voice of conscience.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

DUMB BECAUSE DEAF

What are spiritual deafness and spiritual dumbness?

I. Dumbness the result of deafness.—In the physical order there is hardly any such thing as dumbness, except as the result of having been born deaf. If by a miracle the deaf mute could be made to hear, he would soon speak as well as other people. This is, generally, though not quite always, true in the spiritual life. We are apt to deceive ourselves on this point. A great many people are dumb about religion. ‘We also believe, and therefore speak.’ Since we do not speak, do we believe? On other matters, if we have strong convictions, they generally come out. Our friends cannot be with us long without discovering whether we are Liberals or Conservatives, and what our chief likes and dislikes are. If we keep our religious convictions to ourselves, is it that we are afraid of being thought insincere, or that we never think about them?

II. The cause of deafness.—And, if so, what is the cause of our spiritual deafness? Why do we not hear God speaking to our hearts? Why are we not continually, or frequently, conscious of His presence? It is not a congenital infirmity. We could hear God’s voice if we listened for it. I do not say that it is equally easy for all, and I do not think it is. But though there are degrees of acuteness in spiritual hearing, I do not think that any one is destitute of the sense, except through his own fault. And what we have to ask ourselves is whether we have listened and wished to hear.

III. Jesus Christ can heal this spiritual deafness even now, though His bodily presence is withdrawn. If we believe His promise, ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world,’ and pray that He will give us tokens of His presence; if we meditate upon His life, and resolve to make Him our standard and our pattern, we shall not have to wait long before He begins to speak to us. If we are rather tongue-tied with our friends, let us not be tongue-tied with God.

Rev. Professor W. R. Inge.

Illustration

‘If we set an alarum to wake us at a certain hour, and if we always get up when we hear it, there is no danger of our sleeping through it. But if when we hear it we turn over and go to sleep again, in a few days we shall sleep on and not hear it. So when we hear the voice of God saying to us, “This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand and when ye turn to the left”—if we at once obey and follow the path indicated by conscience, we shall go on hearing our inward mentor till it may become almost an instinct with us to take the straightest and most disinterested line whenever a question comes before us to decide. But if we pay no attention, we shall soon hear it no more than a family who live by the side of a cataract hear the continuous noise of the falling water.’

(THIRD OUTLINE)

THE TWO EPHPHATHAS

To deny powers or privileges, or the free exercise of rights and faculties, on the ground that they may be abused, is to act according to the dictates of expediency, not of right. Christ, while He teaches us that the remedy is not to be sought in depriving the man of the gift, points by His conduct to where the real remedy is to be sought. It is by conferring an additional and guiding gift. There is another ‘Ephphatha.’ He speaks, ‘Be opened,’ and the tongue is loosed; but the ear is unstopped also. While, therefore. He bestows the faculty of speech, He bestows the opportunity of hearing those glad and soul-elevating principles of righteousness, and forgiveness, and love, which will fill the loosened tongue with joy and put a new song of praise in that long-silent mouth. The Ephphatha of gift and the Ephphatha of new opportunities for good go hand in hand.

I. A like correspondence may be observed in history.—A wise and watchful Providence seems to unseal the closed ear of human kind at eras when He gives them new-found powers of speech.

II. The era of the Gospel was preceded by those marked changes in the political world which centralised the civilisation of mankind under the imperial sway of Rome. The gift of the Gospel and of the Spirit came when the gift of administration bestowed on Rome had prepared the great fabric of imperialism in which the apostles found facilities of transit, protection, etc.

III. Later the same principle appears.—There came the epoch of intellectual revival after the long slumber of the Middle Ages; the sleeping genius of European thought awoke: the printing-press carried truth and knowledge far and wide; the age became one of mental activity. But with the gift of the unloosened tongue Christ bestowed the gift of revived Gospel truth.

IV. Nearer our own day came an epoch of new thought.—A spirit of political freedom rose and shook the thrones of Europe, and, in its striving after an unrealised ideal, deluged France with blood. The period when the tongue of new-sought liberty found utterance was the time of evangelistic effort, and of the revival of missionary enterprise.

This is the true Christian method: to meet the widespread evil of the world, not by degrading human intelligence, or enslaving human thought, but by directing it. ‘Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.’ If we are wise and humble, we shall not merely ‘covet earnestly the best gifts,’ but we shall also pray for grace to use them lawfully and lovingly.

Bishop W. Boyd Carpenter.