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September 9, 2018
Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Again Jesus left the district of Tyre and went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, into the district of the Decapolis. And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment and begged him to lay his hand on him.
He took him off by himself away from the crowd. He put his finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue; then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,“Ephphatha!”— that is, “Be opened!” — And immediately the man’s ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to tell anyone. But the more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it. They were exceedingly astonished and they said, “He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
To heal a man's deafness or give sight to the blind is a wonderful gift but it is not in itself the mission of Jeshua. Nowadays science, medicine and better living conditions have made great progress in providing these gifts; my own cataract surgery and hearing aids for example. Jeshua was ultimately concerned to find a way to break through our mental blindness and spiritual deafness. But how do you get people to see what they don't want to see and hear what is going to disturb ideas that they see as defining their identity?
The bruising encounter with the Pharisees and teachers of the Law at the start of this chapter 7 of Mark's gospel had shown again that some people will not listen. Perhaps it was just to get away from them that Jeshua went down to the coastal city of Tyre. During his stay a foreign woman taught him a lesson when she came begging for a blessing for her daughter.
'It's not right to give the children's food to dogs' had been his initial response, but her witty rejoinder: 'Yes, master, but even the puppies can pick up the crumbs that fall from the table' showed a humility, a desperate hope and a trust that he could not refuse. Even foreigners can have faith!
A lesson learned, he set off to travel further up the coast to Sidon, before they turned back, finally going right around Galilee to the colonising Greek settlements of the Decapolis. There some people brought a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, also wanting a blessing. We need to look at how he treated this man.
“He took him off by himself away from the crowd. He put his finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue; then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,“Ephphatha!”— that is, “Be opened!” — And immediately the man’s ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly.”
In this reflection I'd like to see if this episode contains a lesson about the way to heal a person who is spiritually deaf. Perhaps first we should try to identify the cause of this resistance that we all experience, whether to God's word or to advice and warnings from well-meaning family or friends. No doubt there will be many different causes. People who have been abused by indoctrination or bullying as children will resist simply to keep a grip on their selfhood. Those who have as adults given themselves totally to some idealistic view of life will fear that an open mind would shake their security to its foundations. On the other hand those who have forced their way up the ladder will have become hardened against any suggestion that they might not be in the right. I'm sure there are many other situations in which a person becomes deaf to the 'good news' that liberation is possible.
Going back to the gospel, I note first that Jeshua takes the man apart from the crowd. Evidently he does not want this to be a display of magical power, but needs some privacy to get close and personal with the deaf man in a one-to-one situation. The detailed description of a little ritual of touching leads me to ask whether the ritual is important, or something else? Common sense tells me that it's not the ritual, but it could be the personal contact that is indicated by the touching. People cannot be made to listen by yelling at them in a self-righteous dogmatic tone. We have to enter their world to understand their situation, and approach with compassion.
This closeness does not involve touching, as a rule. In fact many people who have suffered sexual abuse will say: 'Don't touch me!' It is a spiritual closeness of compassion. You allow yourself to feel the pain, recognising that what the victim feels is probably much worse than you can imagine because their sense of self-worth has been shaken to the core. Instead of shaking it off as we usually do, we allow the pain to go deep inside. W get to 'know' something of how the other feels. We used to call this 'sym-pathy' but these days this word seems to imply 'pity', and victims are not helped by patronising pity. To be close requires respect, concern, humility and practical generosity that is ready to do whatever is needed.
We need to remember that, since we are acting as 'ambassadors' of the Word, or if you like as 'instruments' of grace when we reach out with compassion to help someone find liberation from the prison of their deafness, then it is the power of the Spirit that touches and heals. It is not something we do but what God does. The whole idea of 'incarnation' is that the divine saving action comes in human form and through human giving by those who love with divine love reaching out to touch those still blind or deaf, still locked in the prison of darkness.
In his letter of August 20 to all the people of God, Pope Francis explained this principle in terms of solidarity. To heal the wound of those abused we need to be in solidarity with them.
'Today it is required of us as people of God to take on the pain of our brothers and sisters wounded in their flesh and in their spirit. If, in the past, omission could have been allowed as a form of response, today we want solidarity, in its deepest and most demanding meaning, to become our way of building the present and the future, within an environment where conflicts, tensions and above all the victims of every type of abuse can encounter a hand outstretched to protect them and rescue them from their pain (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 228).'
'...today we want solidarity to become our way of building the present and the future...' As I read it, this is an urgent call for everyone, from us ordinary folk right up to bishops and the pope himself, to adopt this way of helping, namely, to get close to the victims of abuse, with compassion, to feel their pain and, rather than telling them to get over it, to let them know that their cry is being heard.
The deafness of the Church can no longer be tolerated.
According to Matthew's gospel, when John the baptiser sent his disciples to find out whether Jeshua was the one they'd been waiting for, Jeshua replied by referring them to Isaiah's lovely poem:
1The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, 2it will burst into bloom;
it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,
the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord,
the splendor of our God.
3Strengthen the feeble hands,
steady the knees that give way;
4say to those with fearful hearts,
“Be strong, do not fear;
your God will come,
he will come with vengeance;
with divine retribution
he will come to save you.”
5Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
6Then will the lame leap like a deer,
and the mute tongue shout for joy.
Water will gush forth in the wilderness
and streams in the desert.
7The burning sand will become a pool,
the thirsty ground bubbling springs.
In the haunts where jackals once lay,
grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.
8And a highway will be there;
it will be called the Way of Holiness;
it will be for those who walk on that Way.
The unclean will not journey on it;
The gospel stories of healing people who were blind or deaf are not about physical miracle cures so much as signs of something much greater than good health or longevity. With today's awareness we see the big picture like this: the restoration of humankind to an unimaginable level of development, still within earth's evolving stream of life, and inevitably within the harsh conditions of a planet in process of continual change and readjustment.
The message is that our life is destined to reach a fullness, but this can only happen if we are cured of our deafness, if we learn to listen, and receive a gift of sight to see reality in a different way. Otherwise we will remain caught in a bind in which there is only frustration, fear and pointless in-fighting.
When the gospels say Jeshua comes to save us (a 'divine' work), what we have to be saved from is not captivity in Egypt but from the deafness and blindness in each of us. One of the most invigorating things about this Catholica Forum is that so many of us write with some wonderment that our eyes are only now being opened and that we are hearing messages that have been hidden from us, messages about truth and integrity, about love and trust and hope. And we are mostly oldies, senior citizens, with our journey nearly over.
'And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness; it will be for those who walk in that Way.' Jeshua's promise is not of the physical, but of the spiritual.
I say 'spiritual' because it is about healing our spirit. If physical blindness and deafness and lameness are serious disabilities, the limitations of our ability to see rightly, to learn and to understand are even more serious. And we're not talking about limited brain capacity but the resistance that we put up to learning.
Good teachers know how to work around this resistance by arousing curiosity, by illustrating their material in imaginative ways, by allowing their own enthusiasm to be seen without letting it be overpowering. But it's not easy.
Jeshua was a highly respected teacher, but still he had limited success. How do you get people to listen to the truth about things? How can you make them see what the situation really is - the situation of life? At one point Jeshua let his exasperation show, not only with the pharisees but with his disciples too (Mt 16:1-12).
In this forum we can see this resistance coming through every day in the way we prefer to highlight the negatives. Of course this is the journalist's way, for bad news beats good news every time when it comes to capturing our attention. And when it comes to a choice deep inside we are more inclined to hate than to love, to despair than to hope, to maintain our cynical doubting rather than take another's guidance that would help us see a way forward.
Last night we watched a film set in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1973. Racial tensions that burst out in violent hate when integration began to happen. There were three blacks in the college football team and they were being steadily destroyed by what today we'd call verbal, physical, emotional and social abuse from their teammates. A lay preacher, a man who had no accreditation from any church but who relied on his own faith conviction, presented himself one day and asked for five minutes with the team. When he eventually got his chance they sat entranced for an hour, and his message was based on this simple premise: It doesn't have to be so! Hate is not the only way.
That is the gospel message. We know how painful it is to be deaf - not to have hope because we can't hear the promise; to be blind - unable to see the goodness of life for all the dust that gets in our eyes; to be lame - to feel we can't take part in things because we don't want to be seen using crutches or leaning on someone else. Jeshua tells us it doesn't have to be this way - and we refuse to listen, to think outside our little box. We choose to look at how unfixable it is; we maintain we can't make a start because it's somebody else who's responsible and they have to make some radical changes first. No end of excuses.