Elaborate Healing (Mark 7: 31-37)

The memorable word for today's Gospel is Ephphatha. Jesus is in another place which I assume is filled with Gentiles (Decapolis) and a man was brought to him who had a speech impediment.

What amazes me about this particular healing (and the one involving a blind man and mud) is that Jesus does quite a bit to heal this fellow. He puts a finger in the man's ear, spit, touched his tongue, looked up to heaven, groaned, and shouted Ephphatha!

I seriously doubt that all of that was necessary. As we read in yesterday's Gospel, Jesus could heal from a distance. So all Jesus had to do was will it and the man would have been healed. No touching needed.

Of course it could be argued that Jesus healed from a distance when the ill person was not around and someone just came to Jesus with a request. When the person was right in front of Jesus, he tended to touch them. But in most cases, all Jesus had to do was to touch (or be touched by) someone and they would be healed. So all he had to do was to touch this person with a speech defect.

Re-reading the passage, I'm thinking now that Jesus did everything he did because he felt he was expected to do something like this. The passage notes that some people brought the man with a speech impairment to Jesus and asked Jesus to lay his hand on him. If he were just asked to heal the man, then maybe no touching was required. But he was asked to lay his hands on the man. So he laid his hands on the man and then some.

I guess Jesus heals us in the way we expect to be healed, even if that method is not absolutely necessary.
Or maybe it's the miracle equivalent of speaking in parables.