Gospel Reflection 20060910
Be Opened!September 10, 2006Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mark 7:31-37Again 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."
Introductory Prayer: Lord Jesus, I come to you once again in prayer. Even though I cannot see you, my faith tells me that you are present. You are ready to listen and desire to speak with me. Your presence gives me hope because you are the all powerful God, the creator of heaven and earth. You are the source of all that is good in my life. Nothing happens to me without your knowing and permitting it. My hope leads me to love. I want to be one with you in mind and heart, identifying myself with your will and your standards. Lord, I want to draw closer to you through this meditation.
Petition: Lord, open my mind and my heart so that I might hear your word with clarity and speak your word with certainty.
1. Away from the Crowd. Why does Jesus take the deaf man off by himself away from the crowd? Jesus wants to be alone with him, away from the noise and activity of the crowd. He wants to be able to communicate with him in silence and solitude. Jesus invites me also to go away from the crowd, away from the activity and noise of life, away from other people and distractions, in order to pray. Jesus invites me to be alone with him so that he can reveal himself to my soul and heal the impediments that impede me from communicating his love and truth to others. 2. The Human Effort to Heal. Many times in the Gospel, Jesus works a miracle with a mere word. But sometimes he performs miracles with a physical act, as in this case, when he puts his finger into the man’s ears and touches his tongue with spittle. What are we to make of this? What can we learn from it? Many times, our healing requires a human effort. Action must be taken. We are not purely spiritual beings, but body and spirit woven into one. So our physical side plays a part. We kneel to pray. We go into the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. We make an effort to read Scripture. We do all of these physical things so that our entire being, both body and soul, can be healed of sin and grow closer to Christ.
3. To Speak Plainly. The fruit of this encounter with Christ and of the effort that Christ makes is clarity –– plain speech. The fog of imperfection is removed and the deaf-mute begins to speak with the clarity and the forcefulness of truth –– so much so that the people are astounded. If I have truly encountered Christ, the fog that veils my mind and muddles my speech will be removed. The double-edged sword of God’s truth will shine through my words and actions so much so that people will be astounded.
Dialogue with Christ: Lord, I want to be your disciple. I want your truth and love to shine in my life. Open my intellect so that I can perceive your truth as it really is. Soften my heart to love you with a pure love that overflows into the hearts of those around me. Take me away to a lonely place. Help me to make the effort that is needed to work the miracle of my transformation into you.
Resolution: I will make the effort today to set aside some time to pray away from the business of life.
REFLECTION
But the more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it.
It can be hard to keep an exciting secret. Think of how hard it is to plan a surprise party without the guest of honor finding out about it. Jesus did not need to touch the man to heal him, but He knew that people always expect some concrete visible behavior performed. He would have preferred that the people give praise to God instead of admiring His feats of healing. Jesus did not want to attract crowds merely to show off magic tricks. His mission was to save their souls, not amaze their minds.
A baby learns to speak by imitating the sounds heard in the family. Learning to speak, then, depends on good hearing. That is the reason it can be difficult to understand the oral speech of someone who has been deaf from birth but tries to speak like everyone else does. Not all deafness refers to total hearing loss. Most of us are practitioners of the phenomenon called selective deafness, meaning we do not “hear” things we do not want to hear. A child does not “hear” parents tell him to clean up his room. Many good people choose to not “hear” God’s laws about abortion and euthanasia; to not “hear” God’s laws against obscenity and pornography, or His laws against lying, cheating, hurting, stealing. The Ten Commandments have always been a complete guide to acceptable Christian behavior, but people choose to “hear” only the parts that are easy to follow.
Speech impediments, like hearing, are not limited to those with a physiological impairment. How often do we comment about someone who is “tongue-tied” in a crowd or in front of a celebrity? How many people get “tongue-tied” when asked to give a public talk? Many good people suffer from this impediment when our faith is criticized for its so-called rigid conservative views. Being “tongue-tied” keeps us from saying anything that will make us stand out in a crowd of critics. Being “tongue-tied” keeps us from showing publicly how little we actually know about the tenets and truths of Catholicism. Being “tongue-tied” keeps us from giving a clear explanation in defense of the way in which our Church adheres strongly and forever to the truths revealed to it by God’s Holy Spirit. For most of us our education is based upon our hearing as well as reading. The same is true of our religious education. If we do not “hear” what is taught to us, we will be very unprepared to discuss our religion with either side – Christian or anti-Christian.
God asks us to be open to learning about our faith, and to sharing that faith with others. It is the most important job He asks us to do because it means saving our own souls as well as those of others. Just before Jesus ascended back to his Father in Heaven to wait for us to join Him, He left the command to all of us to preach the Gospel to all nations. We do not have to be a professional bible-thumping preacher to do this work. We just have to be willing to “hear” all of what the Church teaches, and to fight against being “tongue-tied” when our beliefs need defending. We must be determined to live according to what the Church tells us about the full meaning of all of the Ten Commandments, and be willing to explain our faith to others when they ask. Our best learning tools are familiarity with Sacred Scripture, attention to the priest’s homily at Mass, and reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Fidelity to reading these sources are the magic tricks that will cure our deafness and loosen our tongues.
Total deafness is a terrible handicap. I work with many deaf people in my practice and, almost to a man and woman, they are many times frustrated beyond belief because they can’t communicate the way they’d like to. And, this leads to a feeling of isolation and exclusion.
The plight of a physical deaf-mute, as bad as it may be, is nothing when compared to a spiritual deaf-mute—someone who either can’t or won’t listen to God. I’m afraid that all of us fall into that category at one time or another during our lifetimes.
In the gospel which we heard today, it said that Jesus groaned. I’ve often asked myself why He did that. Well, Holy Scripture many times associates deafness with sin—especially the sin of pride. This man’s deafness reminded Jesus of how sin has spoiled His Father’s handiwork in creation. And, that’s why Jesus groaned.
And how He must groan when He sees what’s going on in our world today—how we have become deaf to what’s happening in the world around us. For example, just a few weeks ago, a female guest on one of the talk-shows apologized for being a virgin. In seems like our modern culture has imposed on us the idea that you can’t even speak about virginity without someone laughing or snickering. Fidelity to our spouses (and to God) has been replaced by the lifestyles of celebrities who flaunt their immorality.
I want to leave you with the actual answer to the girl who asked the man if he was Jesus. Yes, we actually are Jesus. That’s what you and I are all about and why we are here at Mass today. We are a powerful sign of Christ to everybody. Like Jesus and the deaf-mute, we’re here today at St. Bridget’s to get away from the crowds of unbelievers and be healed of our spiritual deafness. We are here to be reborn and renewed in this liturgy so that we, like Jesus, can lay our hands on those near and dear to us—so that we, like Jesus, can say, “be opened”—open to God, open to life, open to love. How great is that?!!
(1) will people be able to see that we are Catholic by the way we live?(2) If we were put on trial for being a Catholic would we be convicted ?(3) Do we have the "guts" to stand up for our faith in public?(4) Do we ignore the "unpopular" teachings of our church and still receive the Eucharist ?(5) Are all of our friends and relatives fully aware of our position on issues?(6) Do we fully share our God-given gifts with others? These and many others are quick tests to see if we are helping to complete God/s mission on earth!
Then as usual opu Gospel "fleshes-out" our message by telling us Jesus has gone to the area of Decapolis! This area was one of the most notorious in the world in our Lord/s day-it was a den for prostitutes and crooks.-it was the area that the "prodigal son" visited to squander his money on loose women!By our Lord doing this he is showing us how we also need to reach out to people of all walks of life not just the clean and nice people.So here again we are hearing our Lord/s message telling us how we are to helpfulfill his mission on earth.Our Lord is telling us that while our faith will save us he expects us to help complete his mission on earth!
He reminds us that we are the only minds, feet and hands he has on earth-IF WE DON'T DO IT WHO WILL?
In our Gospel Reading, Saint Mark tells us how Jesus left the territory of Tyre, which today is a city in southern Lebanon. He passed through Sidon, on his way to the Sea of Galilee, going through the region of Decapolis, which in Greek means, “ten towns.” It was called this because of the ten towns that were located in that area. He had previously distanced himself from Jewish territory because the Pharisees and the Jewish authorities were turning against him. We suppose that he also went to preach to the pagans who lived in this area. The regions surrounding Tyre, Sidon and Decapolis were inhabited mostly by pagans. Curiously, it was in this area that the Lord discovered pagans of great faith. They not only had faith in him, but also in his ministry.
In fact, Our Gospel Reading today tells us about the curing of a deaf man who had a speech impediment and who, because of his physical ailments, had to be taken to the Lord by other people. The people who accompanied this man were the ones who asked Jesus to “lay hands on him” and cure him. When Jesus saw the faith of the people who had brought the man to him, he took him aside and cured him. He then pleaded with the people not to talk to anyone about this cure. But Saint Mark tells us that the more that Jesus asked them to do so, the more they proclaimed it everywhere.
In his Gospel, each time that Saint Mark uses the word, “proclaim” in relation to Jesus and his disciples, it is to explain how they preached the Gospel. By using, on this occasion, the same word, it is as if Saint Mark wanted to tell us that by loudly proclaiming what had occurred, the pagans were actually proclaiming the Gospel, the salvific mission of Jesus. By curing the sick in this predominantly pagan region, Jesus clearly shows us that he not only came to save the Chosen People, the Jews, but all of humanity.
Today we know that people with hearing and speech impediments have many ways of being viable members of society. In Jesus times, they did not have that opportunity. It is also true that today there are many ways of reading and listening to the Word of God. Because of this, there need not be any people who are spiritually deaf or speechless. What we do know is that the worst type of deafness that anyone can suffer occurs when someone does not want to hear or read about God.
We probably have seen many times, in our relationships with family, friends, and even at work, that when we talk about God we are made to feel as if we had done something wrong. We feel as if people were attacking us and we can see that some people are infuriated by something. And we ask ourselves, “what did I say to make this people react this way, to anger him or her and make him or her attack me?” The reason that people like this get angry is that they do not want to hear anything about God. Just saying, “God” is enough to anger them. They live with their backs turned to God. We have to be prepared for these embarrassing situations. We should also understand, at the same time, that we can not hide, in any situation, anywhere, that, whether others like it or not, we have chosen to follow God and we talk about God, just as we talk about everyone we love. We should know, and try to prepare ourselves mentally for the fact that we will have to live through situations like this and that many times we will find people who contradict us. That should not stop us from talking about the Word and about our love of God, even though this may anger and even infuriate others, including those who are most loved by us. Since the beginnings of Christianity, we Christians have been looked down on, contradicted, and even persecuted for proclaiming our faith.
When we feel that we are under attack, let us not feel bad. Our reaction should be the following: love God even more and proclaim the Word even more.
Maybe it wasn't so easy to believe in Jesus, even though one personally experienced all of His miracles, such as the miracles of today's gospel. Maybe faith was more difficult back then than it is today. The truth is: no matter what age we live in faith is a gift from God. Jesus said very clearly in the parable of the vine and the branches (Jn 15,1): "without me you can do nothing." In other words, whether we were to live during the life of Jesus or in the twenty-first century, to have faith in Jesus and His teachings would be a grace, given by God Himself. As the Council of Trent has explained this matter as a doctrine of the Catholic Church: "the starting point of justification is the antecedent grace of God Himself." So, just as it is very difficult for us today, at times at least, to be truly faithful believers, so was it difficult for the early disciples to believe. In either case, at any time of history, faith is totally a gift of God.
So, today's gospel reading about the miracles of Jesus should elicit severalfeelings within us. Firstly, we should feel extremely grateful for the grace of faith. God has given us a tremendous grace for eternal salvation, and we should so cherish that gift that we respond fully in cooperating with it. Secondly, we should remember the words of Jesus to St. Thomas after His resurrection when He appeared a second time to the apostles in the upper room: "Blessed are they, Thomas, who have not seen and yet believe." We believe in the miracles of Jesus through the revelation of the New Testament. We have not been given the choice of living during the time of Jesus and actually seeing His divine power, or living today with the gift of faith in His revelation. Maybe we are more fortunate for being born when we were.
Sunday 23 (B): Read Mk 7, 31-37
Those of you who must listen to my Scottish accent week in and week out are probably wondering if the deaf man with the ligament in his speech in today’s Gospel is me! Yet both he and I have one thing in common: we did not choose to be born this way … Indeed, many of the characteristics with which we were all born were not chosen by us: they were given to us. This is also true of many of the wounds and hurts which we sustain in life. They are often gratuitous, not our fault.
Yet, strangely, equally gratuitous, and even fortuitous, can also be the healing of those very wounds. Had Jesus not gone to the Decapolis region, as is recounted at the beginning of today’s Gospel extract, the deaf and mute man would most probably have died while still being deaf and dumb. What made the difference? Both he and those who brought him to Jesus were sufficiently aware of, and distressed by, his condition, and they were also sufficiently alert to the visitation of Providence in Jesus, to turn a tragic situation into one of “astonishment”, of astounding joy. For His part, Jesus shares in their distress by Himself “groaning” at the man’s pain and in healing him; it was almost as if Jesus was absorbing the man’s speech impediment in Himself by groaning. Jesus also shares, albeit quietly, in their joy – not so much the psychological and human joy of the healing (though that too), as in their spiritual joy of coming to believe in Him as Healer, as Savior. It is the joy of salvation of which Isaiah sings with poetic beauty in the first reading of today.
In healing the deaf and dumb man, Jesus performs a little ritual which may seem distasteful to us today: He puts His fingers in the man’s ears and saliva on his tongue. It was commonplace in those times for healers to impart their healing power by touching the afflicted areas; saliva was considered as a life-giving element. But more important than anything is the prayer of Jesus, His prayer of groaning to the Father as He looks heavenwards and says: “Ephphathah! Be opened!” Perhaps some of you will recall that, during the rite of baptism, the priest or other minister still performs a version of that rite of Jesus when he blesses the ears and lips of the baby or adult, adding the prayer that the newly baptized might always have open ears to hear the Word of God and a loosened tongue to proclaim it plainly. What is now sought is the healing, not of the physical faculties of the baptized, but of the spiritual faculties of listening and speaking. The object of those faculties is Jesus Himself, the living and incarnate Word of God.
It is surely instructive that Jesus first, then the Church throughout the centuries in the baptismal rite, would use the word “ephphathah, be opened”. For it suggests that the real suffering of the human soul is somehow linked with being closed.
To close up, like a porcupine, is a natural reaction to feeling, or actually being, threatened or attacked. It can be the reaction therefore precisely to those gratuitous wounds I spoke of initially, inflicted on us by other human beings, sometimes even by those closest to us, without any fault on our part. I suppose that all of us have received such wounds in the fray of married, family, social and even Church life, and indeed from our most tender years. I also suppose that each of us, sometimes gratuitously, and other times out of anger or revenge, has in his or her turn, hurt those we love, and not just those we do not. One philosopher, whose name escapes me (either Hobbes or Voltaire), called this crazy tendency in the human being the syndrome of “homo homini lupus”, i.e. “man is a wolf to his fellow-man”. He concluded that society had to be organized on the basis of the principle of self-defense, so as to keep the “wolf” in the other at bay.
Such an approach may seem realistic, but it is certainly pessimistic, for such a society will remain essentially closed, as will its marriages and families, surviving only by a mutual contract not to kill one another!
How different is the vision of Jesus! He offers a whole new understanding of man and woman, individually, as married, as family, as society, as Church and as world. It is a vision contained as if by genetic code in His programmatic prayer: “Ephphathah! Be opened!” Naturally, this requires the difficult attitudes and virtues of courage and trust on the part of each and of all. But more importantly, it requires, and will receive, the power and grace of the visitations of Jesus in the lives of all these different components of the human community. If, on our side, we loosen the bonds which shackle us to our dysfunctionalities, and unleash the powers of our paining, hurting and groaning, Jesus will visit us and absorb our bleeding, and heal us from being closed in upon ourselves to being open to one another and to Him.
Undoubtedly, we must first recognize that indeed we do hurt. This is so often the basic problem. We will say all too quickly, “I have no real pain in my life”, even although our hearts are bleeding. We so easily bury our pain deep in our psyche and in our hearts, often precisely because it is so great. Think of a child who feels unloved by his parents: he will know it, but feel guilty and deny it, saying, “how can my parents not love me? How can I think such a thing? How ungrateful of me!” And so the pain of no love is made worse by the pain of denial and guilt. As the child grows, the pain grows too and expresses itself in any kind of problem, from addiction to murderous designs and in any of the other ills that afflict our families and society. And this is just one example of many, many more! Hence, since we so easily bury our wounds, we may need help to see them and help to feel distress over them, help to groan and grieve in them. Likewise, since we often do not remain alert to the presence or visitations of Jesus, we may need help to sense His loving power within us, to hear His groaning deep within us, for indeed our Jesus is a loving Savior who groans in empathy, sympathy and compassion for our pain. And what does He groan? “Ephphathah! Be opened, that I might heal you and make you whole!”
We need to encourage one another and to seek together the genetic code of openness. There are human and spiritual, Christian resources available, and we need to have the courage to prioritize them in time and money. For the healing of hearts, the opening of hearts will be the source for the healing of marriages, families, society and, indeed, those aspects of the Church’s life which seem not yet to have fully opened to the Savior.
Vulnerability is frightening. To be open and remain open, we must remain vulnerable. Unless we are prepared to stay vulnerable with each other, our fate will be the hurt and anger of isolation, even in the midst of a big family, a big city, a big Church.
In the Book of the Apocalypse, the wounds of the Lamb of God are seen glorified in heaven. Our wounds can kill us, but if we let them be opened to the Lamb, they too will become our glory.
Let us groan in prayer with Jesus, that the whole of our person, body and spirit, may be opened to His healing power, and that the isolation and imprisonment within which we are enclosed in ourselves, our marriage, our families, our society and even our Church and world, may be ended.
Lord Jesus, in Your great mercy, hear my groaning and cry out within my soul: “Ephphathah! Be opened!” Amen.
Msgr. Peter Magee
September 6th, Our Lady of the Presentation, Poolesville, Vigil Mass, 5.30 pm
posted by Mike Young @ 5:54 AM
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