Dear Friends,
Taking a fresh look at this Sunday’s readings, Joe Biden came to mind. Not Joe Biden the President, but Joe Biden with the speech impediment. He was a controlled stutterer, who nonetheless has achieved much in life. One of the incidents that I recall vividly was Joe meeting a boy, 7 or 8 years old, who revealed he was a stutterer too. Without hesitation, Joe interrupted his progress to another venue. He sat with the boy and gave him tips on living with this condition and growing through it. Joe wanted this boy to succeed in life. The boy needed a reversal of both thinking and acting. The readings from Isaiah and Mark today tell us that God brings about great reversals in life. They come from God through the healing attention of others.
Let’s go back to the pertinent lines in Isaiah:
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf be cleared. Then will the lame leap like a stag, and the tongue of the dumb will speak.
We might think of this as beautiful poetry, but only poetry.
But God, in the Scriptures, brought wholeness to people so they could see, hear, leap, sing.
We see in Jesus the primary example of one who makes great reversals happen. There is something especially poignant about the sensitivity of Jesus in healing the deaf-mute in today’s gospel:
Jesus drew him away from the crowd to save him embarrassment. As the deaf-mute watched, Jesus spat to communicate His intention to heal. Spittle was understood to be curative.
Then Jesus touched the person’s eyes and tongue to underline His intention. Jesus looked up to heaven to indicate that what He did, He did through prayer. The man – a foreigner, no less – was made whole.
Talking about deafness or blindness or any physical limitation of people is a delicate issue. Friends, like Father Ray Fleming, himself deaf, remind us that, for them, deafness is normal. For Joe Biden and the little boy, stuttering was normal. Jesus, in the Gospel, is not reported to have cured every sick person he met. Physical healing is not necessarily the goal. It is reversal that is important – and the gateway to reversal for everyone is in the phrase:
“Ephphata! Be opened.”
“Be opened!” are wise words for us in this post-Labor Day time, when we settle into a more patterned way of life than we experience in the summer season. Be opened to the deeper meaning of the stories that people tell us, more opened to the changes at in our society that we experience, so that we can support or challenge them, be opened to those who are rendered dumb because people in power refuse to listen.
Be opened, in our personal lives means that that we stop living on the surface of life and open ourselves to limitless hope, deep and compassionate love and the embrace of this God of ours who inspires great reversals in our lives.
~ Sister Joan Sobala
