Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
In today’s holy Gospel, we are given to contemplate the healing of a man who was both deaf and dumb. Our Blessed Lord takes him apart from the crowd, because such is the prerequisite for hearing His word, letting it take root in our heart and thus being delivered from our demons. Put another way, it is to cease floating along with the current, to stop doing “what everybody else is doing”; it is leaving behind our comfort and security zone, going out into solitude, that is to say, with the Lord and the community of those who put their faith and trust in Him.
Interestingly this poor man is both deaf and dumb. He can neither hear nor speak, which seems to imply that he has been so from birth. Our blessed Lord puts His sacred fingers into the man’s ears, and then, spitting He touches his tongue. The contact with the Lord is what saves us. It is because He has become incarnate, taking our flesh upon Himself that He can lead us into the world of grace, the world of the Holy Spirit. He pronounces the word Ephpheta, which means: be opened. Those same words are used in the ritual of baptism when the priest touches the ears of the one being baptised, symbolising that those ears, up to now deaf to the word of God, are now opened to its saving effects.
The healing of this man was as symbol of the spiritual healing that is wrought through faith and the sacraments. It is symbolic of the conversion of souls that takes place on a daily basis around the world. A soul who, up to now, was deaf to God’s word, and was unable to sing His praises and profess the true faith, meets Jesus, the Word Incarnate, and accepts the healing grace of conversion.
St Benedict, in the prologue of the Rule, speaks of our ears being in tune with God’s word so that we can pick up the right spiritual frequency. All too often our ears are open to anything but grace because our interests lie with the world and the flesh. St Ignatius for his part has us ask for the grace not to be deaf to the Lord’s call. So often we are. Even long after our conversion, due to worldly ambitions and misguided concerns for ourselves, we can become so busy with own projects that we no longer have any time for God’s word, and when we happen to hear it, it falls on deaf ears. We can also become so wound up in our own thoughts that we can be led into the illusion of thinking we are on the right path when we have actually strayed far.
Saul of Tarsus was one of those, as he tells us himself in today’s epistle. He does not hide the facts about himself: I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God (1 Cor 15:9). Why did he persecute the Church? Because in his zeal for the Mosaic Law, he could not accept a crucified Messiah. He was so blinded by his own interpretation of the Old Testament that he missed the One who was prophesied by all the patriarchs and prophets. He was convinced of being in the right. But he was in the wrong. Jesus Himself had to intervene, as He did on the road to Damascus, in order to reveal Himself and pull Saul out of his illusions, transforming him into the apostle St Paul and giving him the grace to carry the truth of the Gospel before all nations. This is why we should all pray everyday for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the light to see clearly God’s truth and path, not to be led astray by our own passions or desires or the spirit of the times, and fortitude to overcome all the obstacles that may lie in the way.
The most assured way of obtaining this grace is through humility. The humble soul, because of its reliance, not on self, but on grace, is inclined to pray much, especially before making decisions, and even after making them, while seeing through their execution, for the devil, when he cannot prevent us from doing good, will always try to diminish the effects of our good actions. The proud soul, on the contrary, imagines that simply because it has given thought to the matter at hand, it is doing right in making the choice that seems best. And in so doing, can easily fall into illusions. The humble soul is inclined to seek advice, to ask someone whom they trust to give a good answer, and they take it to heart when the advice they received goes contrary to their inclinations. St Teresa of Avila says that the most important quality in a spiritual director is that he have knowledge of the faith and of the spiritual life, for if he has that, even if he is not holy, he will give the good answer we need to hear.
The Church too has its periods of deafness and dumbness. Considering certain periods of Church history, we see entire portions of the Church remain obstinate in a position that from a distance was clearly untenable. How could the whole Christian world wake up to find itself Arian in the days of St Jerome? How could the Eastern Churches abandon priestly celibacy which is historically founded as being of apostolic origin and pretend to this day that it isn’t ? How could all of Christendom remain separated in two and even three camps for decades during the Great Western Schism? How could the Church of Rome, in the euphoria of the 1960’s, abandon its liturgy, the oldest in the world, for a modern day concoction that has presided over the exodus of thousands from the Church? How can a majority of Catholic couples practice contraception, knowing full well the clear condemnation of the Church they belong to? How can theologians ignore the reality of eternal damnation and go on as if there were no such thing? Does humility, docility and charity preside in all this? Or is it that we can so easily become deaf to the voice of the Holy Spirit and just as easily taken in by the slick talk of the serpent, just as Eve was in the garden? And the deafness leads to the dumbness in the sense that when we have failed to remain faithful to the truth and condemn errors, all the while being very talkative about anything and everything, we are no longer singing the praises of God, nor are we preaching the doctrine which saves souls. We are very much in one of those periods today.
Let’s not be too prompt however to throw stones at others. Each of us must learn to humble ourselves in prayer each day, conscious of our many weaknesses, imploring the Holy Spirit to guide us. We must pray for the courage to put into execution what He shows us. We must cease to be deaf to His word, and we must be prompt to speak and to live the truth. Then we will truly experience that the Lord does all things well: He makes the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak. And then, like for St Paul, His grace will not be received in vain.
