The Things He Heard

Remember it wasn’t that long before that Peter had vowed that he would be willing to die for Christ.

But it is only in the Gospel of Luke that we read: Luke 22:50-51 And one of them struck at the high priest’s slave, slashing off his right ear. But Jesus said, “No more of this.” And he touched the man’s ear and healed him. If you remember your Introduction to the New Testament than you will recall that Luke was said to be a doctor and so it would be fitting that they one who had dedicated his life to the healing arts would be the one who would record this act of healing.

Perhaps in the excitement of the moment Luke was the only one who actually saw what had happened, or perhaps in the scale of the story the other’s had simply relegated it to a needless detail, to them it just wasn’t important enough to mention. But I would expect it was important to Malchus, after all it was his ear. But at that point he just drops out of the story, he is mentioned once more in the scriptures and that is only incidental. We read in John 18:26 But one of the household slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Didn’t I see you out there in the olive grove with Jesus?”

And that was it, nada, zip, nothing. We don’t see him again and we don’t hear from him again. Nothing, zip, nada. Malchus has this incredible life changing encounter with Jesus Christ and yet for all practical accounts he disappears from the story.

I’m sure that you can connect the dots and you understand that Because He Had An Ear He Heard That Jesus Was Crucified. We don’t know how big of an impact the crucifixion of Jesus had on the city of Jerusalem. We see it as being this incredible event that involved the entire city but probably not. Remember the Romans crucified people on a regular basis. The two men next to Jesus were just thieves but they were sentenced to die. It really wasn’t that big of a deal and there were no newspapers or local television coverage to advise people outside the centre of the city. I would suspect that there were probably those who knew Jesus who weren’t aware of the entire drama taking place on Golgotha that day.

But Malchus knew, he was there for the arrest and you can be sure that he followed the rest of the story. The death of Christ wasn’t just a story for the slave, it involved people he knew. His boss had orchestrated the entire event and he had come face to face with the one who was sentenced to die.

For most of us we know that Jesus was crucified and some part of us knows that was a bad thing but I don’t think any person in this room can fully comprehend the horror of that actual event. But Malchus knew, I’m sure that his boss Caiaphas was in the crowd that day to make sure that things went according to plan and if Caiaphas was there then his slave was there as well. And he heard the curses and he heard the nails being hammered home and he heard the screams of the condemned and the weeping of their loved ones.