Year: 2011

“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.”

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.

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“By the grace of God, I am what I am”

“I am the least of the Apostles,” St. Paul declares and then goes on to say that “by the grace of God, I am what I am”. The phrase complements, it seems to me, the prayer of the humble publican, “God be merciful to me a sinner”.

What can it mean? Is it by the grace of God that Paul is a sinner? No. But it is by the grace of God that Paul can in all honesty know that he is a sinner. Why is he “the least of the Apostles”? In his eyes and in his words, “because I persecuted the Church of God.” It is all part of the story of how Saul the Persecutor became Paul the Apostle.

But do you and I do much better or any less when in our pride and arrogance, in our folly and deceit, we deny the very truth of God upon whom we so utterly depend? Are we not persecutors, too, when like the proud Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, we do nothing more than pray with ourselves, giving mere lip service to the presence of God? The odd nod to God, as it were, but where it is really all about us?

In a way it is the quintessential picture of pride. Jesus in the parable names it ever so clearly. “He prayed thus with himself”. Not to God, it seems. The consequences are wonderfully clear in the content of his prayer. He claims to be better than everyone else. “Thank God that I am not like them”. But that is no prayer.

There can be no prayer when we are not open to the otherness of God and so to one another. There can be no prayer when we are closed in upon ourselves, standing upon the ground of our own self-righteousness. There can be no prayer without the humility which alone is the counter to all pride.

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