Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
“He hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear
and the dumb to speak”
In the days of the closing down of summer, to use Alistair MacLeod’s compelling phrase and image, the title of his most reflective short story, we make a turn to new beginnings, to the renewal of patterns and programmes in our various lives. On the Sunday after Labour Day, in the Maritimes, at any rate, the cottages have begun to be closed down for the winter, schools and colleges have resumed, vacations are over and done, and even summer seems already a distant and nostalgic memory. We are back, it might seem, to our usual lives.
But are we? Is it really about merely returning to the drudgery and the boring sameness of week after week, day after day, even Sunday after Sunday? It needn’t be, it seems to me. Not only are there the beginning hints of changes in the air but there are the deeper challenges of the Scripture readings. This Sunday marks the notional mid-way point of the Trinity Season and it signals important things to us. We are being challenged to be open – “Ephphatha”, Jesus says, in one of those rare but precious moments where Aramaic appears in the Scripture and is immediately translated by the Evangelist, in this case Mark, into Greek. For us, of course, there is the further translation into English, yet the Aramaic word remains in our text, a quiet witness to another aspect of the reality of the Incarnate Christ. His spoken words were in all likelihood Aramaic, a variant of Hebrew, but we only know his words through the Greek and subsequent translations. His saving word for all humanity is revealed through a particular culture and language; the universal in and through the particular.
“He has done all things well”, Mark concludes, having detailed a healing miracle. What is that all about? In a way, we are being opened to the very thing that St. Paul is saying in the Epistle reading from 2nd Corinthians. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life”.
