Open Your Ears & Loose Your Tongue!
Homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday of Year B – 8 September 2024
Fr Cyril Axelrod is a South African Redemptorist priest, known for his work with deaf and deafblind people. He was born profoundly deaf to hearing parents who were Orthodox Jewish. His grandfather was a rabbi and as a young man he planned to become a rabbi, but after a difficult spiritual journey, converted to Catholicism.
He decided to become a priest when he noticed fellow deaf people at Mass who could not understand what the priest was saying. As a priest, he worked to have schools, community centres, and homes built for deaf people in South Africa around the world. After completely losing his sight at the age of 59, he started using finger signing to communicate. He has been awarded honorary doctorate and the Order of the British Empire for his service to deaf people of the world.
In the account of Jesus healing a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, we see that he was a healer in real, physical terms. In fact, it can be said that one of the major reasons why Jesus gathered such crowds around him was because of his reputation for being a healer. But, as with all the Gospel stories, we need to look beneath the surface to identify deeper meanings. The Gospel writers, like Mark in today’s passage, in preserving stories like this, wanted us to appreciate that Jesus was a physical healer, but they also wanted to convey deeper spiritual truths about Jesus and his mission. There is a spiritual significance to this story as well as the obvious beauty of the compassion that Jesus shows for this man who was deaf and had a speech impediment.
The key to understanding the spiritual significance of this healing story is the symbolic meaning of the deafness and impediment of speech of the man that Jesus heals. The deaf man represents people over the centuries who are deaf to the Word of God. Human history is a litany of deafness to the Word of God. You see this right through the Old Testament. Think too of the deafness of our secularised culture to God and the things of God. If we are honest, we will admit that spiritual deafness is a recurring feature of our own lives too. And in the same way that often those who have a hearing disability are unable to speak clearly, spiritual deafness, not hearing the Word of God, results in us not being able to speak the Word of God with clarity and confidence.
The remedy for our spiritual deafness and spiritual impediment of speech is the word, Ephphata, which we hear in the Gospel today. This is one of only three times that the mother tongue of Jesus is recorded in the Gospel. The Aramaic word, “Ephphata,” meaning, “Be opened,” that Jesus spoke to the man who was deaf and dumb, strikes us because it reminds us of the name of the prayer that we use for baptisms and in the RCIA, when the ears and mouths of the child or the elect are blessed so they may hear the Word of God and profess it.
So, in the rite for the Baptism of Children there is a prayer and symbolic gesture where the priest touches the ears and mouth of the baby which has been baptized and says a prayer called the Ephphata Prayer. The prayer is as follows: The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak. May he soon touch your ears to receive his word, and your mouth to proclaim his faith, to the praise and glory of God the Father.
And in the RCIA, the Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults, for those who become Catholic Christians when they are adults, while the ears are being signed, the priest says: Receive the sign of the cross on your ears, that you may hear the voice of the Lord. And while the lips are being signed, the priest says: Receive the sign of the cross on your lips, that you may respond to the word of God.
In these prayers we not only see the beauty and richness of our liturgy and symbols; but we also understand that this Gospel that we have heard today, has from the earliest times been seen in a baptismal context, as having a spiritual meaning to do with Baptism. St Augustine in his beautiful prayer in his spiritual autobiography, lamented his lateness in coming to faith. The first line of the prayer is “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new. Further in the prayer he refers to the opening of his ears by Jesus. He says, “You called, shouted, broke through my deafness.” And then continues, “You flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
Mark records the words of the onlookers who speak about Jesus making the deaf hear and the dumb speak. This is a reference to the book of Isaiah and which are a prophecy of Israel’s glorious future. This passage from Isaiah is the first reading for today’s Mass. Mark wants to show that Israel’s glorious future is already present in Jesus’ ministry.
Apart from being a healing story, of which there are many in the Gospels, Mark is concerned with making Jesus’ true identity known. There are no spectacular signs associated with this miracle. Mark doesn’t want Jesus to be known merely as a great healer or a miracle-worker; he wants to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ.
If this Gospel is about Jesus’ identity, then it is also an occasion for us to consider our own identity. Our identity as baptized Christians is intimately linked to the identity of Jesus. For one thing, the symbolism and meaning of Baptism is that we are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are baptized into the death of Jesus and we rise out of the waters with the new life of Jesus. Through Baptism we are marked forever as followers of Jesus. We have a close identification with Jesus and we share in the mission of Jesus.
Notice Jesus’ compassion when healing the deaf and mute man. The text says he sighed with compassion for the man as he prayed for him. To avoid a spectacle, he took the man aside in private, and using sacramental actions and signs, he touched the man’s ears, and placed his saliva on the man’s tongue, and looked up to heaven as he sighed the prayer, Ephphata. Saliva was understood as carrying the very identity of a person. Jesus, as it were, plugged himself into the man’s ears that he would be sensitive to his healing word. In placing saliva on the man’s tongue, he shared his very identity and life with the man. Jesus does the same to us in Baptism.
Notice the unbounded admiration of the crowd after Jesus healed the man. They said: “He has done all things well”. What a remarkably beautiful way to sum Jesus up. As the baptized, we are called to a close, intimate relationship with Jesus. Our baptismal identity reaches its fullest expression when we know and love the Christ to whom we have been joined in Baptism. The words, “He has done all things well,” should be the words of praise constantly in our hearts and on our lips.
In this Gospel passage we hear that people brought this man who was deaf and had a speech impediment to Jesus, and begged him to lay his hands upon him. What was their relationship to this man? Were they family or friends of the man? We who are joined to Jesus in Baptism and who are in a living friendship with him, are also called to bring others to Jesus. Disciples of Jesus make disciples of others. Who are the people in our lives who need to hear the saving words of Jesus and experience his healing and forgiveness? We need to bring them to Jesus, through our words and actions, and beg him to lay his hands on them.
The readings for today challenge us to consider our baptismal identity. To be true to our baptism, means that we are sensitive to the Word of God. To be true to our baptismal integrity is to know the One with whom we are intimately connected. We should be able to pray the prayer of St Augustine, “You called, shouted, broke through my deafness, you flared, blazed, banished my blindness.”
Let us pray that Jesus may open our ears and loosen our tongues, so that we can hear, live and speak the Word of God. Let’s take inspiration from Fr Cyril Axelrod! Courage! Do not be afraid. We are united to Christ. We belong to Christ. He wants to open our ears and loose our tongues.