INVADED BY THE LOGOS
23-B Sunday in OT
(Is 35:4-7a; Jas 2:1-5; Mk 7:31-37)
Witnessing Jesus’ magnificent healing activity in the regions of Tyre, Sidon, the Sea of Galilee and the territory of the Decapolis, the crowd in today’s gospel praises Jesus the Healer with this beautiful acclamation: He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak! The exultant acclamation echoes God’s own feeling of great satisfaction when, on the evening of the sixth day of the creation, the Lord contemplates all the works of his hands as a totality: And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good (Gen 1:31). Thus, in a certain way, the Gospel text equates the transformative, life-giving presence and actions of Jesus of Nazareth with those of the Creator God of Genesis.
The particular focus of the gospel today is the healing by Jesus of a speech-and-hearing impaired person. (Please forgive me if at times I use the simpler expression “deaf-mute man”. To be precise, the Greek says that he stammers.) The minute details of the narrative tell us that this is not just any miracle. After all, Jesus could have simply said to the man, “Your faith has healed you”, instead of producing a series of puzzling gestures, and the man’s friends had requested only that Jesus lay his hand on him. But, in fact, what we have is a detailed dramatization that seeks to unveil the archetypal encounter between needy creature and loving Creator, man clamoring for redemption and God eager to redeem. So I invite you to read the episode with me as a paradigm of our life of intimacy with God, which we properly call our mystical life.
The encounter with the Savior initiates the man into to the joy of salvation through intimacy with God in Christ. And this initiation occurs in five steps, which strongly suggest the so-called mystagogical catechesis of the early Church—the process by which catechumens, first enlightened by grace, were then gradually instructed in the truths of the Christian faith and thus introduced in orderly fashion (usually during Lent) into participation in the “mysteries” (or sacraments) of Christ.
- First Step. Jesus took the man aside from the crowd privately: The moment of essential encounter requires separation from the world so as to induce the experience of solitude with Jesus. Friends bring the man to Jesus, but only Jesus himself can make him his familiar by revealing to him the secrets of his divine Heart. The man can discover his personal truth only in the presence of Jesus, by looking at the Lord’s face and submitting in intimacy to his creative and purifying action. All else must be set aside. All worldly bonds must be severed at the beginning of conversion so that he can be totally plunged into the healing influence of divine love.
2. Second Step. Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears and after spitting touched his tongue: This is the most complex of the five steps. Jesus the Healer’s mysterious actions are more than oddly puzzling gestures. One commentator says, rather lamely, I think, that “these singular acts of Jesus” were probably meant “to rouse interest and aid faith in the dull soul of the sufferer”. To which I say: Is that all? Because I believe a lot is at stake here, really our whole understanding of salvation and how we view our relationship to Jesus as Savior! We can, in fact, unlock the meaning of “these singular acts” by reading them in the light of certain foundational moments and symbols elsewhere in Scripture, as any Jew of Jesus’ day would have done.
These “mysterial” (or, if you prefer, sacramental) gestures of the Redeemer seem to evoke, first of all, the creating movements of God in Genesis: Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature (Gen 2:7). Penetrating the man’s ears, Jesus’ fingers re-enact here-and-now God’s act of molding and quickening a new being as conceived by the divine wisdom and will. Jesus’ sacred gestures establish remarkable physical intimacy between his own holy body, from which divine power and love emanate, and the afflicted body of the deaf-mute.
Jesus’ action of graciously anointing the deaf-mute’s tongue with his own saliva may be seen to evoke the water that God made to flow in Eden to irrigate the garden and give all things life (cf Gen 2:10). For, is not the body of Jesus, in whom the Father is well-pleased, itself the personified Paradise of all the saints’ delight? The Letter of James today praises our Lord Jesus Christ as “the Lord of glory”, and John explicitly declares Jesus’ human body to be the definitive temple of God’s majesty (cf Jn 2:21). Consider, then, the convergence in this scene of 1. the temple of Jesus’ body, 2. the saliva flowing from his mouth, and 3. the river of life in Paradise. Together these references point to Ezekiel’s vision of the water issuing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east: Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live (Ez 47:1,9).
And remember the Samaritan woman, to whom Jesus likewise speaks of salvation and union with God in terms of water richly given from his own person: Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life (Jn 4:14). Finally, at the cross, Jesus would drench the earth with water from his pierced Heart, mingled with his blood (Jn 19:34). From the Body of the enfleshed Word, then, there come not only words of teaching and symbolic gestures but also water, saliva, and blood, sacred liquids that are bearers of his divine DNA, intended to communicate divine life to humankind.
All these biblical instances converge on the present scene and transform it into a powerful Eucharistic event. The man’s ingestion of Jesus’ saliva puts an end to all the metaphors, promises and symbols of the Old Testament, prophecies to be fulfilled in a distant future. Jesus’ multi-tiered action of lavishing intimate care on this man enacts, existentially and historically, the full reality of God’s gift of himself to us, in a concrete time and place. The actual, earth-shaking miracle that occurs in this episode is not, in fact, so much the physical healing as the opening of a gateway to intimate participation by man in God’s very life, to which the physical healing points.
Let us now look more briefly at the remaining three steps:
- Third Step. And looking up to heaven, Jesus sighed: This intense sigh, which comes from the very depths of Jesus’ soul, is at the same time an exorcism of the evil that afflicts man, an invocation of the heavenly Father, and, above all, the insufflation or “in-breathing” by Jesus of the Holy Spirit who inhabits him into the sick man, that he may have fullness of life. This sighing re-enacts, in a mournful key, the second action by God at the creation: The Lord God … breathed into [Adam’s] nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. After touching the man with his hands and communicating to him a restorative elixir from his own body, Jesus now emits this sigh, which expresses his ardent desire to share with the deaf-mute the vibrant inner life which is his as Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Jesus gives the man both water and breath from his mouth, that he may taste the delights of eternity, and he caresses him into audition with his fingers, one in each ear.
- Fourth Step. And Jesus said to the man, “Éphphatha”, that is, “Be you opened!”: After all these non-verbal gestures and actions, Jesus of Nazareth speaks as Christ, the eternal Logos, and he speaks an imperious, creating word of power that bestows the faculties essential for faith (hearing) and praise (speech), as if he said: ‘Let there be hearing! Let there be speech!’ And Christ conveys this command not just to the man’s ears and tongue but to his whole human person and his total human nature as such: Be opened! This command of Jesus as eternal Lord of the universe was considered by the early Church so sacred and precious an utterance that it has been preserved down the centuries in the Gospel and in the Baptismal Liturgy in its original Aramaic form, Éphphatha! These are the very consonants and vowels the historical Jesus would have uttered, and the uttering of this holy word by the priest makes Jesus sacramentally present here-and-now. What is at stake is not just the opening of bodily ears to the hearing of earthly sounds, but rather the grafting onto human nature of the capacity to hear and fully understand every word that comes from the mouth of God. This highly blessed man has been literally invaded by Christ the divine Logos on all sides! Incredibly, by his close association with Jesus, this anonymous person has heard the Holy One of God say to him, in the intimacy of his heart, what the bridegroom says to the bride in the Song of Songs: Open to me, … my beloved (5:2, NJB). To the all-knowing, all-loving Logos, no man is anonymous: in every human being God sees a beloved of his heart; and Jesus is healer only because he is, above all, Lover. He does not heal in order to showcase his power but to bestow life.
- Fifth Step. And immediately his ears were opened, and the bond of his tongue was untied, and he spoke plainly: Here is the expected result of the process of initiation into the Mystery of Christ: The man bears witness to the new life he has been given by “speaking correctly,” that is, by communicating to the world his participation in the truths of the Logos who has just re-created him in his divine image. Because the incarnate Logos himself has touched him, conferred his substance upon him, and spoken to him, and because he has obediently opened himself up to the divine voice, this man can henceforth himself speak logically, which in this context means like the Logos, fully in harmony with the Wisdom, Will and Love of the triune God.
Brothers and sisters: When left to ourselves, all of us are spiritually deaf and tongue-tied, are we not? Let us too, then, allow ourselves to be brought daily by the Church and the prayer of our friends into the healing presence of the Redeemer. In this way, we will be courageously submitting ourselves to his transformative mystical action through word and sacrament, and this will splendidly rejuvenate and strengthen us, in keeping with the perpetual youthfulness and beauty of Christ, the New Adam.
