Ordinary 23

The Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time

Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37

What was it like for Ludwig van Beethoven to compose and conduct his Ninth Symphony after he had become deaf? To never have heard the great “Ode to Joy,” except in his mind? Even for a composer, is it the same experience as physically hearing an orchestra and chorus in full flight?

What is the experience for many of you who have or are losing your hearing? Is the use of a hearing–aid the same?

Have you experienced laryngitis or been intubated and couldn’t speak for a period? What was your experience of not being able to directly communicate your thoughts?

The ability to hear and speak is essential for human interaction and how closely aligned are the two.

You may have had the experience of watching an older person – or maybe I’m describing you – become silent at a table conversation.  A mixture of hearing loss and the background noise in a restaurant overtakes the conversation and walls a person out. People nod and smile as if participating in the conversation but that is not the reality. I suppose it is the same experience if a conversation is being held in a language other than your own or using the technical vocabulary of a field you are not knowledgeable in. The inability to hear isolates us. It renders us mute.

So too, the ability to speak and hear is essential in the spiritual life.

In the liturgy, how often we sing Psalm 95, “If today you hear God’s voice, hearten not your hearts.”  I am always more concerned about the ‘if’ in that verse. The devote Jew daily prays, “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai elohenu…” – “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God…” How many psalms command us to shout and sing? As a boy the prophet Samuel called out, “Speak, O Lord, your servant is listening.”

So important is speaking and hearing in the spiritual life that the Sacrament of Baptism concludes with what is called the Ephphatha Rite.

The title of the rite taken from today’s Gospel using the same Aramaic word for, “be opened.” The rite blesses the ears and mouth of a person with the prayer:

The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak.

May he soon touch your ears to receive his word,

and your mouth to proclaim his faith,

to the praise and glory of God the Father.  Amen.

The priest, like Jesus with the man today, is to touch the ears and mouth of the newly baptized. Touch is also important in the spiritual life.

Today’s healing is quite earthy: fingers in the ears and mouth, Jesus’ saliva on the man’s tongue, groaning and commanding. Our culture is repelled by such primitive and coarse actions. We prefer and have graciously created for ourselves an antiseptic world on many levels. We don’t get too close to people both physically and metaphorically.

May the Lord Jesus soon touch your ears to receive his word,and [touch] your mouth to proclaim his faith…

To truly hear God’s voice a person must be willing to get involved in the richness of life which means risking relationship with other people, even the stranger; to, ‘ephphatha!’ “Be open!”

How many people really know you and me? Do you think other people really care to know us? How many people have ever taken the time to know us and we them? Relationship is demanding work; a work we are not often willing to engage.

Does God know you and me?

How do any of us live a full life without being our authentic selves? Isn’t that what is at the core of the cultural discussions in regard to gender, women, sexual orientation, race, and transgender? What it means to be masculine and feminine? How many of us are even honest with our self as to who we are and the questions and doubts that we harbor about ourselves?

How honest have we been with God?

I suppose it comes down to a matter of trust which in our polarized society is even more in want. What aspect of our life revealed on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram; what photo or off the cuff comment from cyberspace will be used against us now or in the future?

“Ephphatha!” – “Be open!” How does a person be open in a society like ours? How does a person be open with God?

To speak of God’s healing and miraculous actions, a person must speak from experience, do they not? How else is a person to be an authentic and genuine Christian?

Do you remember how Zechariah was struck mute for the nine months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy when he questioned the archangel Gabriel about the birth of a son who would be John the Baptist? Have you realized that Saint Joseph in a manner is mute? The Gospels record not one word of his.

As a Catholic Christian and a priest I have watched helplessly as people have seemingly and with ease walked away from the life of the church over the last half-century. In a manner, I have been rendered mute, even among my own Catholic sisters and brothers. Is it due, like Zechariah, to a pregnancy, a period in which God is bringing about new life within the Church and world? Is that new life a call to living an authentic Christianity, what the Second Vatican Council called us to live?

People brought to Jesus a man who was deaf. Might God be using the media as bringing us before Jesus for healing? It is the media which has uncovered our lack of authenticity in the sexual scandal, the Canadian and Irish residential schools, the financial improprieties, our past collegial entanglements with slavery and our present inability to treat women as equal partners.

Jesus took the man away from the crowd and touched his ears to receive his word and touched his mouth to proclaim his faith to the praise and glory of God the Father. Jesus made the man authentic. And when authentic, even Jesus cannot order us to stop telling others of what we have experienced, “Jesus has done all things well!”

“Freude, schöner Götterfunken…” Beethoven never heard his great choral symphony. What a loss for him. Have we deeply heard within us the words of Jesus? Are our ears open? Have we experienced this word as authentic life within us so as to proclaim our experience as genuine Christians of the glory of the eternal Father to others? Are our mouths open?

For this is what “Ephphatha!” means.