Opening mouths and ears

Gospel
Mk 7:31-37

Again Jesus left the district of Tyre
and went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee,
into the district of the Decapolis.
And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment
and begged him to lay his hand on him.
He took him off by himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!”— that is, “Be opened!” —
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed,
and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to tell anyone.
But the more he ordered them not to,
the more they proclaimed it.
They were exceedingly astonished and they said,
“He has done all things well.
He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”

Dulverton Sermon

“He makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak”

This was another amazing healing miracle in which Jesus reveals his authority and his compassion but I do not want to treat this miracle at the literal physical level but rather at its representative spiritual level. Apart from Jesus and the Holy Spirit we are all deaf to God and tongue tied in our witness to the gospel. We all need our hears opened and our tongues loosed for the sake of the Kingdom.

First, if we are to hear God speaking to us we need to learn to listen and listening involves silence and it involves attentiveness. In other words we need to escape the noise of the world and the clamor of life to be prayerfully quiet where God speaks. That means scripture centered meditation.

Some of us are currently following a video course on ‘Listening to God’ in which our next session on Thursday is titled ‘Praying the Bible’. A summary introduction reads: “The word God speaks to us is Jesus, the Word. As we seek him he is already seeking us”. The video will encourage us to go to scripture and to sacrament with a receptive and attentive heart if we would meet God and hearing him speaking into our world and into our lives. This can only be achieved if we give time and priority to prayer. This is how to lose our deafness to the voice of God and hear from him words of hope and direction. The confirmation that it is he who has spoken to us will come in our obedience to what we hear and in our sharing it with others.

‘Sharing with others’ leads us on to the second part of today’s miracle. Our tongues need loosening as well as our ears unstopping. We need grace to become free and unafraid, indeed courageous and bold, in speaking for God and the gospel to others. Praying should lead naturally to prophecy or preaching, not necessarily in the liturgical sense but in the ordinary speech of every day conversations.

Think what happened at Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2. The post crucifixion and resurrection disciples huddled together in the upper room waiting and praying for God to reveal their future to them. Then it happened “they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech”. On this first occasion the circumstances and numbers were very dramatic but the pattern has been, and still is, repeated many many times in quieter mode in the lives of Christians who through the same Holy Spirit experience the miracle of ears that have been opened and mouths given words to speak. Catherine Doherty , the founder of the Madonna House Community, speaking out of her experience of poustinia from her Russian Orthodox background says: “when the Christian has ceased to pray it is time to go and prophesy, that is to say, to tell others that which God has imparted to him in the silence, making sure that all hearts understand that the words are not his words but the words that God has commissioned him to bring to the world”.

No wonder that when our Lord healed the deaf and dumb man in today’s gospel story

“the people were exceedingly astonished and said, ‘He has done all things well’ echoing the words of the teller of the creation story in Genesis “And behold God saw all that he had made and behold it was very good”. Who wouldn’t want to be a participator in that kind of spiritual miracle in their Christian experience.