23rd. Sunday (Year B)
(Isaiah
35:4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37)
In our reading from the prophet Isaiah we heard:
Say to those whose hearts are
frightened, "Be strong, fear not!
Behold, here is your God, He comes with vindication; with divine
recompense He comes to save you."
For a small nation -- conscious of being God’s Chosen
People and, despite that, having a long history of suffering as a pawn in the
conflicting endeavours at empire building by the surrounding powers in the
Fertile Crescent -- such a prophecy of salvation became, as the years passed by
and the suffering and humiliation piled up, more and more commonly regarded as fighting
talk. That, certainly, was how many Jews
in the days of Jesus, experiencing a long-standing occupation by Roman forces, understood
them: they longed for, many even expected, their God to help them overthrow the
military might of their hated and despised oppressors. With such expectations they were pre-disposed
to see Jesus’ miracles -- such as His recent feeding the five thousand in the
desert -- as evidence that He, surely, was the one for whom they were looking.
However, the reaction of the religious authorities to
Jesus, especially that of the Pharisees who were most influential with the
people generally, was different. The
Pharisees thought they were well prepared for God’s judgment and the Messiah’s coming
thanks to their meticulous observance of God’s Law as laid down in the Torah
and as understood and interpreted for daily living by the many oral traditions
from their elders. They regarded the person of Jesus with
suspicion, despite His miracles, because He was not one of them, and quite
evidently did not consider Himself or His disciples to be bound by Pharisaic
traditions. Moe than that, however, was
the fact that He did not regard the
Pharisees themselves as being purified and justified by their meticulous
practices:
You nullify the word of God
in favour of your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many such things. (Mark 7:13)
And so, the prophecy from Isaiah with which we began our
readings today serves to highlight the mistaken aspirations of both the
ordinary people and of their religious leaders in Jesus’ times: the people,
frightened of Rome, were looking for a warrior Messiah, and the blind Pharisees
did not appreciate that they themselves needed a Messiah to heal them of a
sickness they could not, or would not, recognize:
Say to those whose hearts are
frightened, "Be strong, fear not!
Behold, here is your God, He comes with vindication; with divine recompense
He comes to save you. Then will the eyes
of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared; then will the lame
leap like a stag, then the tongue of the mute will sing.”
Jesus, journeying beyond the confines of Israel in today’s
Gospel reading, was teaching His disciples by His ordinary words and every-day
behaviour, gradually enlightening their minds and stirring their hearts by the
gentle inspiration of His Spirit:
And people brought to Him a
deaf man who had a speech impediment and begged Him to lay His hand on him.
Why did ‘people bring the man’ to Jesus? Were they perhaps Jewish people living
abroad, so to speak, and their friend a pagan whom they hoped might convert to
Judaism? Or did they perhaps bring him
because he was a fellow Jew who had not wanted to come to Jesus himself? Had he perhaps become bitter over the years
with this his trial and only came to Jesus ‘under pressure’, so to speak, from
good friends? Whatever the case, sensing His Father’s will
behind this unsolicited incident:
Jesus
took him off by himself away from the crowd.
The man was being given the opportunity through his experience
of personal closeness with Jesus to overcome his original difficulties or mistaken
apprehensions:
Jesus
put His finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue.
Jesus was calming down his possible anxieties and stirring
up any embers of confidence and trust by doing things not unexpected in those
days by one hoping to be healed.
Then Jesus looked up to
heaven, groaned, and said to him “Ephphatha! -- that is, ‘Be opened!”
That glance up to heaven by Jesus and His accompanying groan
or deep sigh may have constituted the irreligious man’s introduction to faith
in the goodness of Israel’s God or the saving suffering of Jesus, for:
Immediately the man’s ears
were opened, his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly.
Now, let us look yet more closely at Jesus as we see Him broadly
portrayed in this whole seventh chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel, for He has so
much to teach us: most eloquently by His words and most instructively by His
actions.
He had, recently, performed the miracle of feeding the five
thousand, and then He discomfited both the Pharisees and Scribes who had wanted
to confront Him and His disciples for failing to observe the traditions of
their elders. Jesus had been close, at
that time, to being hailed by the common people as the expected Messiah, the
longed-for and irresistibly victorious, leader. That seems to have been in the forefront of
His mind, for He went – straightway -- out of Israelite territory and entered
the region of Tyre and Sidon where Greek-speaking was prevalent and any worship was pagan.
There, as Jesus and His disciples were walking unnoticed
and free, they were suddenly accosted by a woman who began to pester Him and
His disciples to heal her daughter and provoked that memorable and, I think,
divinely beautiful, conversation:
Let the children be filled
first, for it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the
little dogs. Yes, Lord, yet even
the little dogs under the table eat from the children's crumbs. (Mark
7:27-28)
Jesus, habitually alive to His Father’s influence ,
immediately recognized that such an answer was way above the woman’s natural
capabilities:
He said to her, "For
this saying, go your way; the demon has gone out of your daughter."
He had not wanted to be lionized by over-enthusiastic
Israelites imagining the Lion of Juda crushing Israel’s oppressors, and therefore
He had entered this non-Jewish region. And
now, having encountered this Syro-Phoenecian woman so surprisingly gifted by
His Father, He decided to continue on His journey going
towards the Sea of Galilee indeed, but not directly, rather by a long,
circuitous route through further Decapolis territory: perhaps His Father might still
have some further purpose for Him there?
And such was indeed the case, because, in our Gospel
passage today, Jesus was invited by His Father, to perform yet another miracle:
this time upon a deaf-mute man, a providential miracle that would fulfil what
the prophet Isaiah had long foretold and would serve to emphasize the holiness
and sanctifying capacities of the sacred humanity with which Jesus had clothed
His divine nature:
Then will the eyes of the
blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared; then will the lame leap
like a stag, then the tongue of the mute will sing.
Jesus always walked before His Father, seeking to know and
do His Father’s will at all times and in all things, and during this relatively
short journey outside Israel He gave a priceless example for all future Christian
apostles, missionaries, and even ordinary, humble yet active, disciples –
including you and me hopefully -- to respect and sympathetically adapt
themselves to all who they might be privileged to meet, to evangelize, or just
spiritually help.
Jesus brought His immediate disciples back to Israel and
God’s Chosen People, inspired and better equipped to follow the example
of Him Who, it was said:
He Has done all things well!
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, let us now take part
in the Holy Sacrifice with like appreciation for what Our Blessed Lord
continues to do among us and in Mother Church in our deeply troubled times.
