Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity
Link to the Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for the 12th Sunday after Trinity
“Ephphatha”
This is one of two Gospel readings from Mark in the Trinity Season, one on Trinity 7 about the feeding in the wilderness, and this one today about the healing of “one that was deaf and had an impediment in his speech.” I know, one of you will remind me that there is another Gospel reading from Mark on the 18th Sunday after Trinity. That is true, but that was simply about substituting Matthew’s account with Mark’s in the modern Canadian Prayer Book of 1962, probably on the assumptions of biblical scholarship about Marcan priority, namely, the idea that Mark’s Gospel is the earliest of the four Gospels to be written. Such thinking came to influence preaching about that time. It is a modern concern which has very little to do with the way in which the Scriptures have come down to us, to what they mean theologically, and to how we read them. But never mind.
What is interesting about this Gospel reading is that it is entirely unique to Mark as is the word, “ephphatha”. It is an hapax legomenon, meaning that it is the only time the word appears in the Scriptures. It is an Aramaic word, one of a few Aramaisms that are found in the New Testament, and mostly in Mark’s Gospel. Aramaic is a Hebrew dialect which was probably spoken by Jesus. Here Mark gives us the Aramaic word and its Greek translation or transliteration, “be opened.” Words matter but in what way? Heidegger claimed that “language is the house of being” but as one of my mentors, James Doull noted, the ancients knew that “language is not the house of being but needs its own interpreter”, a reasoning mind. It is the meaning of words that matters most and that always requires thinking and interpretation.
It is an intriguing and touching story about the nature of our engagement with God, an engagement which is at once sacramental and healing. The lesson learned is that “he hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak.” We are the deaf and the dumb, deaf to the Word of God in the witness of the Scriptures proclaimed in the liturgy and life of the Church; dumb in our speech about the grace and glory of God at work in human lives. Our sufficiency is not in ourselves “to think anything as of ourselves” but in our openness to the grace of God whose glory is at work in us. “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” which is what we see in this story. Ephphatha is about our being opened to the life of God in us.
