Wednesday, September 2, 2015

"BE OPENED!"


23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.  Is. 35:4-7a; Mark 7:31-37.
AIM: To proclaim Jesus as the one who enables us to be open to God, and others. 
Deafness, especially when it is total, is a heavier burden than blindness. There are blind people who become accomplished musicians or writers. The blind are also well represented in the learned professions. Deaf people find it difficult to match those achievements. Deafness isolates its victims from others more than blindness. The deaf see others talking and realize that they are excluded. 
The deaf man brought to Jesus by his friends in today=s gospel has apparently never heard human speech. He speaks indistinctly. The account we have just heard mentions a Aspeech impediment.@ Though Jesus sometimes healed with a mere word, he takes this man apart from the crowd. He had at least two reasons for doing so.
First, Jesus needed the man=s undivided attention. Second, Jesus experienced each of his healings as an intimate encounter with his heavenly Father: something too precious and too sacred, to be paraded before curious spectators. If Jesus= practice were followed by all who claim to heal in his name today, a number of Sunday television programs would have to go off the air.
So strong was Jesus= desire to avoid being known as a sensational miracle worker, that he often told those he healed to say nothing about it. Jesus knew that the one truly important miracle would be the empty tomb of Easter morning. Once, therefore, in this gospel according to Mark Jesus sets a limit to the silence he imposes: when he tells his three friends, Peter, James, and John, after they have witnessed his transfiguration, Anot to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead@ (Mk. 9:9). Then the greatest miracle of all, Jesus= resurrection, could be proclaimed B as long as the cross was proclaimed with it.  Calvary and the empty tomb must never be separated.
What is important about the miracle in today=s gospel, as about all Jesus= miracles of healing, is not so much the healing itself, as what it tells us about the healer. In the first reading we heard Isaiah prophesy that when God=s anointed servant, the Messiah, visits his people, Athe eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf cleared  ... the tongue of the mute will sing.@  
Jesus= healing of the deaf man fulfills this prophecy. In an act that speaks more eloquently than words Jesus is proclaiming that the one so long proclaimed by the prophets is here. In him, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary and Joseph, the very power of God is at work. God is visiting his people.
Even the details of the healing are significant. Jesus does not tell the man to be patient under his handicap, because in heaven his lot will be better. Nor does he urge the deaf man to Aoffer up@ his suffering. How often we hear both of those responses to sickness and suffering from those who claim to speak in Jesus= name.  We do not hear them, however, from Jesus himself.
Instead, Mark tells us, Jesus Alooked up to heaven and groaned.@ Why? The groan was Jesus= lament over this fresh example of how sin, which is the cause of suffering, has spoiled the beautiful and perfect world which God made. Jesus= heavenly Father and ours is not a God of sickness but of health. We must not think that an individual who is suffering is being punished for his or her personal sin.  But Scripture clearly teaches that the existence of suffering is connected with human sin in general. In the Genesis story of the fall, for instance, God tells the woman, after she has turned away from him and sinned, AI will intensify the pangs of your childbearing.@ And to the man who joined her in sinning, God says that henceforth work will no longer be a joy for him, but a burden: ABy the sweat of your face shall you get the bread you eat.@ (Gen. 3:16-19) In his Letter to the Romans Paul takes this teaching a step farther, writing that human sin caused not only suffering but death: Athrough one man sin entered into the world, and with sin death@ (5:12). The deaf man=s inability to hear or speak reminds Jesus of how sin has spoiled his Father=s handiwork in creation. That is why Jesus groans. 
The heart of the story is Jesus= command to the deaf man: ABe opened!@  Deafness has closed him off from others. Jesus wants to set him free. Jesus is the man of total openness: openness to God; and openness to those who society in Jesus= day accepted only in subordinate roles or not at all B women, children, and social outcasts like prostitutes and the hated tax collectors. Jesus came, our fourth Eucharistic prayer tells us, to proclaim “the good news of salvation, to prisoners, freedom, and to the sorrowful of heart, joy.”
Jesus is saying to us right now, in this church, what he said to the deaf man: ABe opened!@ How closed in we are much of the time: closed to God, closed to others. We shut ourselves up in prisons of our own making, whose walls are self-fulfillment, and whose guiding principle is the hackneyed and deceitful slogan: ADo your own thing.@ Most of the conflicts, divisions, and wars in our world B between individuals, families, classes, groups, and nations B are the result of people not being open. In the cacophony of conflicting arguments and claims we hear only what we want to hear, and no more; just enough to confirm our prejudices; and then we stop listening altogether. 
Even between Christians there are barriers erected by our failure to be open to each other. To remedy this tragic situation, a living contradiction of Jesus= prayer the night before he died, that all might be one (Jn. 17, passim), the Second Vatican Council recommended the method of dialogue. Dialogue requires that we be open to what those who are separated from us B whom we may even consider enemies B are saying; that we listen before we speak.
Can dialogue overcome all barriers? Sadly it cannot. Some conflicts are so grave that no human power seems great enough to break down the walls that separate us from one another. Nor can we penetrate by our own efforts alone the wall which our sins erect between us and the all-holy God. The gospel proclaims the good news that there is One who can break down those walls. His name is Jesus Christ.

Jesus, the man of total openness, has the right, if ever a man had it, to command: ABe opened!@ He won that right for all time on Calvary when, as we shall hear in a moment in the preface to our Eucharistic prayer, Ahe stretched out his hands as he endured his Passion, so as to break the bonds of death and manifest the resurrection.” (Weekday Preface VI) 

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