Episode Transcript
CONSECRATE
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
HEAR
Mark 7:33–37 NIV
After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue. He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means “Be opened!”). At this, the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.
Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it. People were overwhelmed with amazement. “He has done everything well,” they said. “He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
CONSIDER
I credit my awakening to real faith to the Gospel of Mark. I was a law student at the University of Arkansas, a.k.a. the Harvard of the Ozarks. Oddly enough, I had been hired on at a local church as the security guard. For reasons known only to God, I decided to volunteer as a counselor in the youth ministry. Even more surprising, I found myself elevated to leading a summer teaching series with the high school students. Though I had been in church all my life, all of a sudden I knew nothing.
I picked up my Bible when a flash of genius struck me. We would read one of the Gospels together and I would stumble my way through it as the summer series leader. My first question: What was the shortest Gospel? Mark! I issued what came to be known as the Mark Pizza Challenge. The challenge was to read the sixteen chapters of Mark one chapter a day for sixteen successive days—without missing a day. If you missed a day you had to go back to the beginning and start again. None of us had any idea how much this summer in Mark would change all of our lives—especially mine. A particular phrase from today's text captures what happened:
People were overwhelmed with amazement.
The Greek word for amazement is ἐκπλήσσω (pronounced es-plays-so).
We see the word a full thirteen times in the New Testament; twelve in the Gospels and once in Acts. We see it used to describe the peoples' response to Jesus's teaching, his miraculous works, and his incredibly counterintuitive upside-down flipping of the script on salvation.
People were overwhelmed with amazement.
It means something like to be struck out of one's senses—to be utterly dumbfounded in astonishment.
People were overwhelmed with amazement.
And if that weren't enough, in this particular sentence the author increases the sense of it by another order of magnitude with the addition of the word "overwhelmed." The term there is ὑπερπερισσός (pronounced hoo-per-per-is-SOS). This is the only appearance of the word in the Bible. It means something like, "super-abundance."
“He has done everything well,” they said.
Remember our entry from a few days back—the one where we came to the conclusion that Jesus is the gospel.
People were overwhelmed with amazement.
This describes what happened to me and those teenagers during the Mark Pizza Challenge in that summer long ago. I had a generic appreciation of Jesus from my passive and inattentive prior reading of the Gospels. Maybe it was finally getting out of the bleachers and down on the ground-level field with Jesus and those kids—reading the Gospels up close and personal, from the inside—that finally woke me up. I became overwhelmed with amazement and astonishment.
And you know what? I still am.
PRAY
Lord Jesus, you are amazement and astonishment, and I am overwhelmed. We are so thankful for these documents we call "the Gospels," which transport us by the Holy Spirit into the scene. Lead us deeper into the overwhelming astonishment of an ever-deepening awakening to the person of Jesus. Praying in his name, amen.
