Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.
It is an Aramaic word translated by Mark into Greek and by extension for us into English, all the while keeping before our hearts and minds the original word, Ephphatha. Aramaic was probably the language which Jesus himself spoke. The Christian Scriptures as a result retain a handful of Aramaicisms.
The story in which it occurs is unique to Mark, though the Greek word translated into English as “Be opened” is the same word used by the other Evangelists, especially by Luke in the Resurrection accounts about how Jesus opened the minds and opened the understanding of the Scriptures to the disciples. And so too something is being opened to us.
Guarda è escolta. Look and listen, Beatrice tells the pilgrim Dante in the poet’s great poem, the Purgatorio of the Divine Comedy. Look and listen to what? The pageant of Revelation in a sacramental form. It is not too much to say, perhaps, that Mark’s story here is the scriptural fons et origo of such imagery. For here is a story which speaks directly to the meaning of the Scriptures and in a way that is inescapably sacramental. In other words, we are being reminded of an essential feature of our own Catholic and Reformed Christian tradition, namely, the interplay between Word and Sacrament, the Word audible and the Word visible.
There is a kind of wonder in encountering this story in the midst of the Trinity season. It is one of the few Gospels from St. Mark in the classical eucharistic lectionary during the Trinity season; there are only three Gospel passages from Mark out of twenty-four or twenty-six Sundays. It speaks, I think, wonderfully and directly to our current confusions and uncertainties which are really about a kind of closing of our hearts and minds. “Ears have they and hear not; eyes have they and yet they see not.” Here we are being opened. Opened to what? What is it that we do not hear and see? What is it to which we are closed in our hearts and minds? To the presence and truth of God in our lives. We are closed to the very principle of all life, God. Here we have a powerful story about what God seeks and wants for us: our being opened to his transforming grace in our lives.
Here is a story, too, which reminds us of both the power and the limitations of language. You might say that the power and the truth of language actually is found in our recognition of its limits. Such is the meaning and nature of translation. Translation opens us out to the Word behind the words, if you will. It is an important feature of Judaism and Christianity that there can be and must be translation. And yet that doesn’t excuse us from appreciating and even learning other languages, even ancient languages. It means, however, that truth is not the sole property of any one language.
