by CCW | 11 September 2011 16:18
It is a healing miracle and one which excited great wonder and astonishment, so much so that Jesus’ charge to “tell no man” gets completely ignored! We sense the power of the occasion. One who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech is brought before Jesus. Those who bring him to Jesus want him to lay his hands upon him – signifying a blessing and, perhaps, a healing.
Jesus’ response is intriguing. Curious actions and, then, a powerful word. The actions and the word go together. The healing is in some sense sacramental – words being used with the ordinary things of the world to effect something quite extraordinary, even supernatural or spiritual. What actions? Jesus takes the one who is afflicted aside, meaning away from the multitude – a bit like going into the privacy of a doctor’s office, I suppose. He examines him, physically it seems, putting his fingers into his ears which might seem a wee bit strange. Not so strange, though, as what he does next: he spit, and touched his tongue! Then there is one further gesture or action. Jesus looks up to heaven and sighs; only at that point does he speak, saying in Aramaic, “Ephphatha, that is, be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed and he spake plain.”
Ephphatha. It is one of the few places in the New Testament where we have an Aramaic word even though Aramaic was probably the actual language which Jesus spoke. Aramaic is a semitic language related to Hebrew. Mark transliterates the Aramaic word into Greek letters and then gives us the interpretation of the word in Greek. Be opened is the English translation of the Greek and the Aramaic.
Jesus the Son is defined by his relation to the will of God the Father. I love the picture here of Jesus looking up to heaven and sighing, especially after the intimate gestures of touching the ears and tongue with his fingers and spitting on the ground. There is something wonderfully hands-on about this entire scene, something empirical and tangible; in short, something quite real about Jesus’ engagement with our humanity. The spiritual is not something ethereal and remote but rather down to earth and ordinary. Paradoxically, that makes the scene all the more extraordinary and special.
The healing happens through word and actions that involve our humanity intimately and directly. Such is the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. God engages us completely in the intimacy of the humanity of Jesus Christ. There is no healing miracle which does not flow out of that intimacy. What heightens that sense of intimacy is the intimacy of the Son and the Father captured in that simple moment of looking upward and sighing.
Caught up in our selves, in our worries and concerns, in our anger and anguish, we are like the one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech. We can neither hear nor speak clearly and well. We are closed off from God and from one another, paralysed in our thoughts and actions; fearful and full of dread. We need exactly what God wills to give us in this Gospel; namely, to be opened to God and his healing love for us in Jesus Christ. It is, perhaps, what we most need as a people and a culture particularly in the wake of the devastating horror and destruction of September 11th, 2001, that has so shaken our sense of security and rendered uncertain all our former certainties.
Paul, in the Epistle, has put his finger on the human condition. It is about presuming too much of ourselves, forgetting, as he says, that we are not “sufficient of ourselves to think anything of ourselves.” We forget that “our sufficiency is from God”. Closed off from God we are closed in upon ourselves. It is, actually, the definition of sin: incurvatus se, turned in upon ourselves.
We cannot heal ourselves of our deafness, faulty speech and flawed thoughts and actions. We need the healing grace of Christ who opens us out to heavenly things through the simple things of the earth. He is the word made flesh whose presence with us is mercy and grace.
But how open are we to his presence? In the Gospel story, Jesus charged those who brought the man to him and who witnessed the healing, that “they should tell no man.” Jesus’ command is completely ignored. Curious are the ways in which we are open and yet not open to the things of God in our lives! We are understandably astonished by what had happened; yet Jesus charged them to tell no one. Why? Because Jesus is more than just some miracle-worker, however much that is what we may want him to be. Because the healing is really only a part of the larger recovery of what our humanity exists for, namely, God’s word and will. “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” is our constant prayer. It is a hard lesson to learn and often we ourselves are in the way – such are the realities of human sin. Which is why the story of Jesus necessarily leads us to the Cross! In other words, the full meaning of this healing is to be found in the redemption of our humanity in Christ crucified. It is part of something bigger than this event, wonderful as it is.
We are so excited with what Jesus did that we ignore what he said. It is a life-long lesson of learning to be defined by whole pageant of God’s word and will. “He hath done all things well,” they said, “he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.” True. But that wonder is the continuing work of God in us, opening our ears to ear and our lips to speak, but to speak at the right time and in the right way, to speak fitly, as Proverbs puts it, for “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver”(Proverbs 25.11).
The ultimate healing of our deaf and dumb humanity happens through our redemption accomplished on the Cross; everything else is simply prologue, a kind of beginning which points to the end. It is all about learning to be defined by God’s will and word. It is about being opened to the greater wonder of the redemption of our humanity in Christ crucified.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XII, September 11th, 2011
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