“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”
It is one of a handful of ‘aramaisms’ in the New Testament, words in Aramaic, a northern semitic dialect used in Syria which became the lingua franca throughout the Near East, and thus common within the Hebrew world, too. In Mark’s Gospel the Greek translation of the Aramaic word is always provided, as it is here. “Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.”
What does it mean to be opened? The literal sense is obvious, it seems, in terms of the healing by Jesus of “one that was deaf and had an impediment in his speech.” His ears are opened to hear and his tongue loosened so that he can speak. Remarkable enough, but is that all there is to it? What does it say to us? “The letter killeth,” after all, as Paul reminds us, “but the spirit giveth life.”
Yet isn’t that really what the healing miracle is all about? “He hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.” “The spirit giveth life.” Intellectual and spiritual life is conveyed through physical and sacramental means. In other words, in Christ we are opened out to life in its fullness, life with God. “Our sufficiency is from God” and not “of ourselves.” The real miracle is life. God is essential life. Being opened here is about the “trust we have through Christ to Godward”; the opening is the orientation of our lives towards truth and life and light, to what is more than ourselves. It is not about trusting in ourselves for that is to be closed in upon ourselves in our current obsessions about the self and self-image.
This is largely negative because in the culture of outrage and antagonism the self is constructed in contrast to what is other than self in ways that are oppositional. The pronoun wars reveal the inherent ambiguity of third person pronouns which run the risk of turning one another into an object for others and even for oneself thus negating the self as subject. The same thing can be observed with the digital phenomenon of ‘selfies’. A ‘selfie’ is not you; it is only an image, partial and incomplete, a construct of you and sometimes curated by you. Yet you are more than your ‘selfie’ which becomes merely a projection of your self-image of how you want others to see you or, worse, how others want to persuade you about yourself; i.e. manipulate you. This is the toxicity of the social media world which reflects a sense of antagonism towards the world which is seen as fearful and threatening and in turn projects that sense of antagonism onto others. Things go viral in the social media world just like infectious diseases in the material world. Such is the madness of crowds.
There is such a thing as being so open-minded as to be closed to truth and especially to the larger discourses of spiritual meaning that the religious and philosophical traditions offer to us. Here in this marvelous gospel story we are being opened to the motions of grace that perfect our wounded and broken humanity and that awaken awe and wonder in us about the God who indeed is “always more ready to hear than we to pray.” Here are words and deeds that are spirit filled and which show us the dynamic nature of human redemption at work. God uses the things of creation to restore us to who we are in his sight. This is completely counter to our current self-obsessions which are destructive and divisive; in short, deadly. We are literally killing ourselves.
The healing scene is described in graphic detail. It is profoundly sacramental in character. Jesus takes the person aside, puts his fingers into his ears, spits, touches his tongue, and then “looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.” It is wonderfully hands-on, intimate and incarnational. It is an image of the radical meaning of God with us, dwelling in the very flesh of our humanity, engaged with the realities of our fallen world to restore and redeem. In a way, it is an image, too, of the truth of the healing professions about the nature of care.
Here is the picture of Jesus as doctor, we might say, healing through touch and attentive care, but, even more, healing through his “looking up to heaven and sighing and saying, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.” Heaven and earth, God and man, the outward senses and the inward feeling: together these all serve to restore and redeem but without negating the realities of creation and human suffering. It is a powerful image of the profound spiritual truth that “our sufficiency is from God.”
What does his looking up to heaven mean? It is simply prayer. It is the prayer of the Son to the Father which gathers our humanity into the life of the Spirit, to nothing less than the truth of ourselves as found in the truth of God. Prayer is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” the prayer that opens us out to God and to the motions of his grace in us. In prayer we place ourselves, our world, and one another in our being opened to God.
This story belongs to the central theme of Mark’s entire Gospel reduced to three short lines by the English preacher and theologian, Austin Farrer, in a kind of syllogism:
God gives you everything.
Give everything to God.
You can’t.
This is to know our insufficiency. Farrer adds a fourth line to this summary. “Christ will make you able, for he has risen from the dead” because “our sufficiency is from God.” But the emphasis throughout Mark’s Gospel is on the necessary distrust of ourselves even to the point of almost eclipsing our trust in Christ’s Resurrection! We learn from our failures and short-comings, and perhaps most of all from the experiences of desolation. Closed in on ourselves we are empty, and, yet, as Farrer puts it: “the more emptied out you are, the more hope there is of your learning to be a Christian. Now is the very moment … for you to put your trust in the God who makes something from nothing, who raises the dead.”
Such is the point here. “Ephphatha, that is, Be opened” to the fullness of God who “hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 12, 2022