23th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B: “He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak!”

JESUS HEALS OUR COMMUNICATION

“He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak!”
Mark 7:31-37

The episode of the healing of the deaf-mute narrated in today’s gospel is found only in the Gospel of Mark. It takes place outside the borders of Palestine, in the Decapolis, a pagan territory. The geographical note is a bit unusual because, to descend towards the Sea of Galilee, Jesus first moves north (from Tyre to Sidon, in present-day Lebanon) and then descends on the eastern side of the Jordan, in the territory of the Decapolis (in present-day Jordan). Jesus is a “boundary-crosser” and often does not follow the straight path because He wants to reach everyone on our winding roads and bring the gospel to the vast pagan territories of our lives.

The text states that the deaf-mute was “brought” to Jesus by other people who “begged Him to lay His hand on him.” There are other instances in the gospels where the initiative to seek healing for someone is taken by others. This occurs particularly when the sick person is unable to come to Jesus himself (see the paralytic of Capernaum: Mark 2:1-12; and the blind man of Bethsaida: Mark 8:22-26). But we all need to be “brought” by our brothers and the community. Jesus then “took him aside, away from the crowd,” not only to avoid publicity but to facilitate a personal encounter with this man.

The method of healing is quite unusual: Jesus “put His fingers into the man’s ears, and then He spit and touched the man’s tongue. He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ which means ‘Be opened!’” Usually, a gesture or a word from Jesus is enough to perform a healing. Here, the evangelist may be emphasizing our resistance, on one hand, and Jesus’ involvement in our situation, on the other. This account reminds us of the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida, in the territory of Galilee, which will occur later (Mark 8:22-26). Whether pagan or believer, we all need healing of our spiritual senses to have a new relationship with God and with our brothers. Thus, Isaiah’s prophecy in the first reading is fulfilled: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy.”

Points for Reflection

1. Everything Begins with Listening.

In Sacred Scripture, hearing is the privileged sense in the relationship with God. The verb “to listen” appears 1,159 times in the Old Testament, often with God as the subject (biblical scholar F. Armellini). That is why the first commandment is “Shema Israel,” Hear, O Israel (Deut. 6:4). Being deaf was a serious pathology, a punishment (see John 9:2), because it made one unable to hear the Torah. That is why the prophets announced for messianic times: “In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll” (Isaiah 29:18). In reality, the path of the believer is a progressive opening and sensitivity toward listening: “He wakens my ear to listen like those who are taught. The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears; I have not been rebellious” (Isaiah 50:4-5).

We live in an acoustically polluted society, with the risk of “otosclerosis,” the hardening of our ear, through habituation or defense. This “physical deafness” can have repercussions in the spiritual sphere. God’s voice becomes one among many and is even drowned out by other voices amplified by the media. The believer has an extreme need to be continuously healed of the deafness of the heart.

2. From Listening Comes the Word.

From listening comes true speech, authentic communication. The healing of the tongue follows the healing of the hearing: “His ears were opened, his tongue was loosened, and he began to speak plainly.”

In a hyper-connected world, the Babel of incommunicability grows, manifesting in false and manipulative language, bullying, and domination. Words are trivialized, diminished, and made insignificant, leading to communicative blocks, loneliness, and muteness. This situation affects not only the family environment and interpersonal relationships but also society and the Church.

We should be particularly concerned about the Church’s and the Christian’s aphonia. A mute Christian can hardly communicate the good news of the gospel. The Church’s aphonia erodes the prophetic dimension of faith, with the risk of making it complicit in the injustice that spreads throughout the world.

What can be done to “speak plainly” like the man in the gospel? How can we recover the prophetic voice of “the one crying out in the wilderness” to make the Word resound in the many deserts of today’s world?

Perhaps we lack that half-hour of silence mentioned in the Book of Revelation: “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” (8:1). Perhaps, in the Church, we are too accustomed to lecturing and less to being silent. Without silence: there is no discernment to grasp the “gravity” of the moment we are living; there is no sensitivity to open ourselves to the wonder of divine intervention; there is no enlightened word to interpret the present! Like the prophet Elijah, we need to frequent the Horeb of our faith, the cross of Christ, to grasp the new mode of God’s presence in the “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:12).

Perhaps we lack the morning hygiene of the soul. Every day, we carefully wash our ears and mouth, but we often neglect to cleanse the ears and mouth of the heart. We should remember, every morning, the event of our baptism and, dipping our hands into those waters, inwardly repeat in prayer the baptismal “Ephphatha”: “The Lord Jesus, who made the deaf hear and the mute speak, grant me to hear His word today and to profess my faith, to the praise and glory of God the Father!”

Fr. Manuel João Pereira Correia, MCCJ

Free to listen and to speak
A commentary on Mk 7, 31-37

Mark, in today’s reading, portrays Jesus in “pagan” country, where people were not following Jew religion. But, beyond the religious differences between those people and the people of Nazareth or Jerusalem, there it was a concrete, real man with a concrete, human problem, that is the same for believers and unbelievers, rich and poor, educated and illiterates. That man was deaf and could not speak properly, something that affected his human condition at a very fundamental level.

Moreover, it seems clear that what Mark intends with the narration of this experience is to explain to us what the real mission of Jesus is:

Jesus’ mission consists in using the power-love of God (symbolized by the continuous touching with fingers and hands) to liberate humanity, not so much from our physical deafness, but, more important, from our deep inability to understand God and our neighbors, closed up in our own sterile pride. From that deafness comes up also our inability to say meaningful words to others.

When I was a young priest, I have known a ten years old boy, whom everybody thought he was both deaf and mute, till young nun started to give attention to him, accompanying him with a great, continuous and constant love. After some time, she discovered that the child had a physical problem with his ear and took him to the doctors. Solved that problem, the child began to hear the words spoken to him and to repeat them, learning how to listen and how to speak. I was then very much impressed by the power of love, able to start off processes of liberation and healing.

Certainly, not always happens that way, rather in most cases deaf people have to learn how to do without spoken words. But, again, as in the Gospel, the reference is not so much the physical deafness, but that close heart that leads us to close the channels of communication and loving relationship with the members of our family or our community, with people of other cultures, political ideas or religious practices…

Quite often we become “deaf” and “mute” in the deepest side of our personality: we refuse to listen to what other people have to tell us… and for that same reason we are not able to say any “relevant” word to them or to others: we do not have a sincere, meaningful, liberating word to say, because we do not listen.

We remember the story of Emmaus: Jesus approaches the disciples, walks with them and listen to them. Afterwards he would say clarifying and meaningful words.

Sometimes, it seems that our Christian communities have become deaf and mute: They do not listen to the cries of our humanity (Migrants, refugees, young people, women…, nor to the prophets or our time, those people who can help us to understand God’s ways for today. And because of this deafness they become also “mute”, unable to announce any meaningful message to today’s humanity.

A missionary Church is a church that listens, free from the deafness of his pride and arrogance. Only after that liberation, can it become truly missionary, messenger of the good news of God’s love for people.

In the Eucharistic celebration, Jesus “touches” our body. Let us pray that He heals our deafness and liberates our tongues so that we can become true missionaries, healed and instruments of healing, while we continue walking in life towards a fuller communion with God and our fellow men and women.

Fr. Antonio Villarino, mccj

Ephphatha! Be opened!
Mark 7: 31-37
by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa

The passage of the Gospel refers us to a beautiful healing wrought by Jesus. “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” (Mark 7:32-35).

Jesus did not perform miracles as someone waving a magic wand or clicking his fingers. That sigh that escaped from him at the moment of touching the ears of the deaf man tells us that he identified with the people’s sufferings; he participated intensely in their misfortune, made it his burden. On one occasion, after Jesus had cured many sick people, the evangelist comments: “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases” (Matthew 8:17).

Christ’s miracles were never an end in themselves; they were signs. What Jesus once did for a person on the physical plane indicates what he wants to do every day for every person on the spiritual plane. The man cured by Jesus was deaf and dumb; he could not communicate with others, hear his voice and express his feelings and needs. If deafness and dumbness consist in the inability to communicate plainly with one’s neighbor, to have good and beautiful relationships, then we must acknowledge immediately that we are all more or less deaf and dumb, and this is why Jesus addressed to all that cry of his: Ephphatha, Be opened!

The difference is that physical deafness does not depend on the individual and he is altogether blameless, whereas moral deafness is blameworthy. Today the term “deaf” is avoided and we prefer to speak of “auditive disability,” precisely to distinguish the simple fact of not hearing about moral deafness. We are deaf, to give an example, when we do not hear the cry for help raised to us and we prefer to put between ourselves and our neighbor the “double glaze” of indifference. Parents are deaf when they do not understand that certain strange and disordered attitudes of their children hide a cry for attention and love.

A husband is deaf when he cannot see in his wife’s nervousness the sign of exhaustion or the need for a clarification. And the same applies to the wife. We are deaf when we shut ourselves in, out of pride, in an aloof and resentful silence, while perhaps with just one word of excuse or forgiveness we could return peace and serenity to the home. We men and women religious have times of silence in the day, and we sometimes accuse ourselves in confession, saying: “I have broken the silence.” I think that at times we should accuse ourselves of the opposite and say: “I have not broken the silence.”

What decides the quality of communication, however, is not simply to speak or not to speak, but to do so or not to do so out of love. St. Augustine said to people in an address: It is impossible to know in every circumstance exactly what should be done: to speak or to be silent, to correct or to let things go. Here is a rule that is valid for all cases: “Love and do what you will.” Be concerned to have love in your heart then, if you speak, it will be out of love, if you are silent it will be out of love, and everything will be alright because only good comes from love.

The Bible helps us to understand where the rupture of communication begins, where our difficulty originates to relate in a healthy and beautiful way to one another. While Adam and Eve were in good relations with God, their mutual relationship was also beautiful and ecstatic: “This is flesh of my flesh.” As soon as their relationship with God was interrupted, through disobedience, the mutual accusations began: “It was he, it was she …”

It is from there that one must begin again. Jesus came to “reconcile us with God” and thus to reconcile us with one another. He does so above all through the sacraments. The Church has always seen in the seemingly strange gestures that Jesus did with the deaf-mute (he put his fingers into his ears and touched his tongue) a symbol of the sacraments thanks to which he continues “touching” us physically to heal us spiritually.

That is why in baptism the minister carries out gestures on the one being baptized as Jesus did on the deaf-mute: He puts his fingers into his ears and touches the tip of his tongue, repeating Jesus’ word: “Ephphatha, Be opened!”

The sacrament of the Eucharist in particular helps us to overcome the inability to communicate with our neighbor, making us experience the most wonderful communion with God.
[Translation by ZENIT]
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