Be Opened

There is a prayer you used to say out loud. You do not say it anymore. You still think it, probably more often than you would admit, but you stopped saying it out loud, because the silence on the other side kept getting louder.

The Conclusion That Does the Real Damage

Most of us can survive a shut door. What finishes people off is what they decide the shut door means.

The conclusion usually sounds something like this: maybe I am not the kind of person this works on. Maybe there is a category of people God does this for, and I am not in it.

Mark wrote fourteen verses for exactly that thought. In Mark 7:24-37 he tells two stories back to back, and both are about people who were, by every visible measure, the wrong kind of person.

The first is a Gentile mother in the pagan port city of Tyre, with a daughter tormented by an unclean spirit. The second is a man who could not hear and could barely speak, carried to Jesus by friends because he could not ask for himself.

Neither of them qualified. Both of them went home whole.

"First" Is Not "Never"

When the mother asks Jesus to free her daughter, he gives her the hardest answer in the chapter. Let the children be fed first, he says. It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs (Mark 7:27).

That stings, and it is meant to. But read the sentence again slowly, because there is a word in it that almost everyone skips.

**First.**

Not *only*. Not *never*. *First*. And "first" is a word that cannot survive without a second. Before this woman has said a syllable, Jesus has already conceded that her turn is coming.

We are remarkably bad at hearing the second half of a sentence. Tell a four-year-old "after dinner" and watch the collapse onto the kitchen floor, because to a four-year-old, waiting and never are the same country.

We do not grow out of that. We just get better vocabulary for it. Most of us have received a letter that said "we are not able to move forward at this time," and the only words that actually registered were "not able to."

You filed it under *rejected*. You have carried it as rejected for years. It did not say rejected. It said *at this time*.

Some of us are living under a "never" that God never said.

She Was Not Asking God to Be Fair

Her reply is the turning point of the passage, and it is not what anyone expects. She does not argue. She does not tell him it is unfair. She says, "Yes, Lord," and agrees with every term he just laid down (Mark 7:28).

Then she finds the door inside his own picture. Even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs. If there is a table, there are crumbs. If the children eat first, then somebody eats next.

**She is not saying she deserves more. She is saying he has more.**

Those are two completely different prayers. One is a lawsuit, assembled from a record: the attendance, the giving, the years, the fact that we are not like certain other people. The other one is faith.

Do not ask God to be fair to you. Fair is a poor arrangement for people like us. Ask him to be generous, because generous is what he actually is.

Jesus grants it immediately, and he does it without traveling, without touching the girl, without ever laying eyes on her. Thirty miles away, a child is set free by a sentence.

You Do Not Have to Be Eloquent

That woman says the most remarkable thing anyone says in Mark's Gospel. If your honest reaction is "I could never have said that," then the second story is for you.

The deaf man brings nothing. No name, no words, no recorded faith, no request of his own. He cannot even hear the conversation happening about him. Friends carry him in and do the asking.

Jesus takes him away from the staring crowd before he touches him. Then, in a Gospel that races, Mark slows down and describes five separate actions in a verse and a half: fingers in the ears, spit, a touch on the tongue, a look toward heaven, and a groan.

Then one word, which Mark preserved in the original language so readers could hear how it sounded. *Ephphatha.* Be opened (Mark 7:34).

Helen Keller once described the morning at the well-house when Anne Sullivan spelled *water* into her palm: "That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free." She was six years old. She had no language. She could not have asked for that.

A word came from outside her and opened her. The man in Mark 7 had never heard a human voice, and the first one he ever heard said, "Be opened."

Notice what this passage never claims. It never says the deaf man's faith is what opened him. He had none on record, and he could not hear the offer. Whatever your long delay is about, it is not a verdict on the quality of your believing.

The Word That Cost Him Everything

When the crowd finally reacts, they say, "He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak" (Mark 7:37). They are quoting Isaiah 35 without realizing it, the chapter that promised God himself would come and the desert would bloom.

But there is a harder thing underneath the wonder. The same Jesus who opened these two was later shut out himself, crying out to a silent heaven. At that exact moment the temple curtain tore in two, from top to bottom (Mark 15:37-38).

He was shut out so that we could be opened.

The entrance requirement in this passage is not eloquence. It is not a technique, a streak, or the right words in the right order. It is being shut, and most of us already qualify.

So before you close this tab, say the prayer you stopped saying out loud. Say it out loud. Not a better version of it, the same one, with the same silence afterward if that is what comes.

And if you are not the one who is shut right now, you are the friend. Someone near you cannot carry themselves at the moment, and most of us got here that way ourselves.

Nothing is shut so tight that a word from Jesus cannot open it.