by CCW | 30 August 2009 15:39
Closed book, closed mind; open book, open mind. It seems simple and straightforward, almost obvious. But, of course, you might say that it depends on what you read; to which, I would add, and how you read.
We are only too well aware of the so-called fundamentalist approach to what are regarded as sacred texts that makes us altogether skeptical of religion in general and suspicious of sacred writings in particular. Sadly, we are largely ignorant of them as well. So open books seem to create closed minds while supposedly open minds are closed to those same books and ignorantly dismissive of them! Curious!
Allan Bloom’s provocative book, The Closing of the American Mind, written in 1987, brings out a further aspect of our paradoxical uncertainties. A cry against the moral and intellectual relativism then and now pervasive in the universities, he saw that the supposed openness of such relativism was really a closing of the mind to the formative and foundational texts of our intellectual culture. A closing of the mind to both the letter and the spirit.
St. Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, points out the dilemma. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.” What is at issue is what and how we read and, for the digito agitato culture, to coin a phrase, the culture of the digitally agitated that flits from one image to another with barely a pause to think, there is the further issue of whether we are really reading at all. The task, of course, lies in reading with the spirit, the spirit of understanding.
We forget that there was a time when the opening of the Scriptures to everyone was a cause of great interest and excitement. Part of the Reformation project and subsequently of the Counter-reformation as well, the translation of the Scriptures into the elevated forms of the vernacular languages of the newly emerging national cultures of western Europe, aided and abetted by the development of movable type, hence the printing press, was a momentous and culture-shifting event.
In the 16th century, Bibles in English were opened on the lecterns of the Churches where they had to be chained so that people would not take off with them, so great was the interest in being able to read the Scriptures in their entirety! And, of course, not only reading but hearing them read on Sundays in an ordered pattern became a significant feature of the Common Prayer tradition. Few churches provide so rich a way of reading the whole of the Scriptures than what the pattern of the daily office readings at Morning and Evening Prayer along with the pattern, too, of the Sunday Office readings, both of which are shaped and governed by the Eucharistic lectionary. Such is the great legacy of Archbishop Cranmer and one which we ignore, I fear, at our peril or damn with faint praise.
So what do these reflections have to do with today’s Gospel? They concern in some way or other the question in the Gospel about hearing and seeing and to what is meant by being opened.
Hearing and seeing are the biblical senses of understanding. It might seem, at first, that they are simply about what is received, that they are, as it were, ‘passive’ senses, the senses of reception. Something seen is received by the eye; something heard is received by the ear. But there is an activity as well, the activity of seeing, the activity of hearing.
What is seen and heard passively becomes by acting upon what is received something understood. There is something communicated, the meaning of which we enter into through the profounder activity of understanding. For it is not just the words which are heard or the vision which is seen that is received. What the words signify and what the vision reveals are given to be understood. The activities of seeing and hearing are about the understanding. In a way, we know this because it is part of our everyday experience. ‘I hear what you are saying’, we sometimes say. ‘I see what you mean’, we often say, and what we mean is that we understand. What has been passively received has been actively grasped by the understanding.
Our understanding is about our wrestling with the significance of things. It is a profoundly spiritual activity. It speaks to who we are in the sight of God – those to whom God would reveal himself and into whose presence he would have us come. Hearing and seeing as the senses of understanding mean that there is an acting upon what is received. There is a similar double character to our “being opened.”
In the Gospel for today, an unidentified “they” “bring unto [Jesus] one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech.” They beseech the healing touch of Jesus upon one who is deaf and, if not altogether dumb, at least impeded in his speech to the point that others must speak for him. There is, in response, the putting of his fingers into his ears, a spitting upon the ground, the touching of his tongue – all outward and tangible acts – but, as well, there is Jesus’ “looking up to heaven,” his sighing and his saying unto him “Ephphatha, be opened.” There is, in short, a healing: “and straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.”
As with all the healing miracles of the gospels, what is signified is the restoration of our humanity. What is wanted by God is not the deformity of our being but the perfection of our humanity. What is wanted is our being made totally and completely adequate to the truth of God; in short, our being opened to God, open to the transforming power of God’s grace revealed.
But we are opened, it seems to me, in two senses. There is our being opened to receive and there is our being opened to give. We are not just opened to receive; we are opened to give of ourselves out of what we have received. “Open your hearts,” St. Paul tells the Corinthians (2 Cor.7.2). He means that they are to give of themselves. They are to act upon what they have received.
What we are opened out to sets us in motion to open ourselves out to the needs of one another, to live sacrificial lives and to be giving of ourselves. It is only then that we are truly opened for only then are we acting in the image of the one who has opened his heart totally and completely to us in the sacrifice of the cross.
In this healing miracle, Christ “look[s] up to heaven.” There is, we may say, his openness to the Father out of which comes the healing grace in the form of the words “be opened.” The word is spoken in Aramaic – “Ephphatha” – but its meaning, its significance, is also opened to us by the Evangelist, St. Mark, in Greek. He gives the word and he gives the interpretation; “be opened,” is the further translation into English.
We are opened out to the truth of God so that we can enter into that truth, give ourselves to it, and offer our praises for it. For what do we give in the giving of ourselves? We give our praises, our praises to God, which must impel us towards one another in love. Our praises are never solitary. They always connect us to one another and to God, to a community in praise of God. And such is what the Church is to be and do. The Gospel signals this point: they “were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak.”
To be opened means equally to give as to receive. It is the strong counter to our contemporary ‘consumer’ culture which is all take and no give. It is not open but closed to the truth of God revealed. He would have us opened to himself and so to one another.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor
Trinity XII, ‘09
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/08/30/sermon-for-the-twelfth-sunday-after-trinity/
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