WITWpt2 (shorts!): Being Spit on by Jesus

by Aaron

What in the World? Part 2 SHORTS!

We are currently doing a sermon series at Element where we are answering some questions you asked about the Bible. I mentioned last Sunday how some of the What in the World Part 2 questions that you have asked are too short for a full sermon, so we are answering them in blog form. Today’s question and answer is going to be very short, as no one knows the full answer except for Jesus. The question was: In Mark 31-37, Jesus spits on a man’s tongue to heal him. Why the spit? Wouldn’t people have thought that was gross?
 
The first thing I think we can do, as always, is remember the character of God or who Jesus is. Throughout His ministry, Jesus never met a disease He couldn’t heal. As we look through the Biblical accounts, it’s interesting to see that Jesus never healed the same way twice. This has caused many Bible commentators to think that Jesus was trying to get people to move away from superstitions associated with certain techniques.
 
Some people, even today, believe amulets, trinkets, and magical words are all effectual for healing to some degree. When my wife and I were trying to get pregnant, a Christian man gave her some earrings saying that if she wore them while trying to conceive, we would have a baby. (Yes, it was a little creepy and no, we never tried it.) By Jesus healing in the various ways He did, He emphasized trust in the power of God over some superstition or trinket.
 
But why the spit? Mark 7:32-33: 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. Jesus actually uses spit three different times in the Gospel accounts when healing (Mark 7, Mark 8, and John 9). In John 9, most commentators assume Jesus makes and uses mud to refer to the creation account; He was making new eyes from the dust in the ground, as Adam was made from dust.
 
But…that doesn’t help answer the question about Mark 7. Would people think it was gross? Not necessarily. During this time, spit was part of common remedies employed by physicians for different illnesses. In the Greek text, it is implied that Jesus spit on his own finger, or simply got saliva on His own finger (He wasn’t hawking up a gigantic loogie). This could have signaled to the man that healing was coming and he needed to calm down and trust what Jesus was about to do.
 
Honestly, it is all just speculation. What it should remind us of in our daily lives is the old adage that “God works in mysterious ways” and we don’t always need to understand everything He is doing to live our lives in consistent and constant trust.  We should be humbled when we come to the limits of our understanding, and there will be lots of questions we get to ask Jesus when we see Him face to face. Mark D. Roberts once wrote, “May God protect me from pretending to know what I don’t know, or what cannot be known this side of heaven.”
 
We can know that Jesus has authority to heal, but how He does it, when He does it, and why He does it are all up to Him.