23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2024 - Gospel of Mark, Healing of Deaf Man, Year of Mission

 Last Sunday, we resumed the continuous Sunday Gospel readings from Gospel of Mark from which we’ll be reading until November. Especially if you’ve never done so, I’d recommend sometime in the next week or two reading through the entire Gospel of Mark. With only about 11,000 words and the average adult reading speed being between 175 and 230 words a minute, it would take about an hour. An hour: to read one of the most important texts not only of our faith, but to civilization.

By reading it in one sitting, you will get a more cohesive understanding of Our Lord and Savior’s  ministry and salvific mission. Mark's Gospel is structured in a way that builds momentum. So, reading it straight through will help you appreciate the urgency of Jesus’ message. And yet, Mark does not shy away from the fact that following Jesus, becoming his disciple, has a cost. And so you will also gain a deeper appreciation of how the disciples struggled and learned to follow Christ. 

Mark highlights both the human emotions and the divine authority of Jesus, and so an uninterrupted reading will give greater insight into the mystery of the Incarnation—how Jesus is fully human and fully divine.

Coming to Sunday Mass every week, without missing, you will still only get a portion of Mark’s Gospel. So, if you’ve never read the Gospel straight through, there are lessons from Our Lord that you may never have heard before.

So, give yourself the gift of an hour reading through the Gospel of Mark in the upcoming week or so, you won’t regret it—it will deepen your faith, your hope, and your love.

The healing of the deaf-mute man in this Sunday’s Gospel is a great story in itself, and also within the broader themes of Mark’s Gospel. It highlights key aspects of Jesus' mission and His identity. 

Throughout Mark's Gospel, Jesus is portrayed as the Messiah who brings about the Kingdom of God through his words and deeds. He is a man-of-action who backs up his teachings with miraculous works illustrating how Jesus has come to open us to the life of the kingdom of God. The healing of the deaf-mute man demonstrates how Jesus opens us—he opens our ears, he opens our mouths, he opens our hearts to the life of God—he has come to save us from those maladies which keep our minds, bodies, and spirits from the life God wants for us.

In the First Reading, we heard a prophecy of Isaiah, which foretold how the Messiah would open the eyes of the blind and clear the ears of the deaf.  And St. Mark’s Gospel narrates so many healing miracles to prove that point—that Jesus Christ is the long awaited Messiah. 

And yet notice where this miracle took place. The location of Jesus’ miracles is always significant. In today’s passage, he has left his headquarters in Capernaum, and even the surrounding villages of Judea. He has crossed the sea of Galilee with his disciples and has crossed to the eastern side of the sea of Galilee. This is significant i because it shows Jesus extending His ministry beyond the Jewish people to the Gentiles. Jesus is the Messiah not just for the Jews. Jesus fulfills God’s promise to bring salvation, not just to Israel, but to all people, of all places, of all times.

As the deaf man’s ears are opened, so too are the spiritual ears of all who follow Jesus. For Jesus helps us to hear God—to know that we are God’s beloved children, and that we have a God-given mission.

I’d like to consider how this Gospel has particular significance in this particular moment in Church history—during this final year of the Eucharistic revival, this Year of Mission

The deaf mute’s healing in this passage begins with Jesus' direct and intimate physical touch, as He places His fingers in the man’s ears and touches his tongue. This physical encounter mirrors how Jesus comes into real intimate contact with us, through the Eucharist. At Mass, we hear his words, we gaze upon his body and blood, and we physically receive Him. 

And just as Jesus opened the ears of the deaf man, the Eucharistic encounter opens the hearts and souls of Catholics to our vocation to holiness and our vocation for heaven. Additionally, the Eucharist brings us healing. St. Ignatius of Antioch, our patron, called the Eucharist, the medicine of immortality. The Eucharist is medicine, it brings healing that nothing else in the world can bring, because the Eucharist is Jesus the healer, the bestower of the salve of salvation. 

The healed man’s transformation—going from being deaf and mute to hearing and speaking—foreshadows the transformation that we undergo when we allow ourselves to be healed by Christ in the Eucharist. 

In the Gospel story, Jesus addresses both the man’s physical need (his inability to hear and speak) and his deeper need for restoration. In the Eucharist, Jesus fully gives Himself to us, fulfilling the deepest hunger of the human heart—the hunger for God—to know God, to know that we are loved by God. That’s probably something that many of us take for granted, yet it’s something that much of the world is starving for.

And that leads us to Mission. The encounter with Jesus, the healing he works in us, the deepening of our union with him, the transformation he brings about in us, isn’t just so that we can stand around being holy, but the Eucharist propels us into the world to invite others to that fount of healing, transformation, and communion. The Eucharist renews us, but then sends us forth to be Christ’s hands, feet, and voice in a world that is spiritually deaf and in need of hearing the Good News. 

So again, I invite you to read through the Gospel of Mark, in the upcoming days. It is a wonderful Gospel for this Year of Mission. It will deepen your faith, helping you to understand and experience more deeply the One who gathers us week after week around his table—to heal us, form us, and send us out for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

23rd Sunday in OT 2018 - Christ's Healing Activity Then and Now

As you may have seen in the bulletin, this month I’ll be hosting a bible study of the Gospel of Mark. Though we hear the Scriptures proclaimed at Holy Mass, to take them time to study them opens us to more deeply understand God’s Word. Like the deaf and the dumb man in the Gospel today, the Lord wishes to open our ears to understand the Word more deeply and loosen our tongues to proclaim the Word with greater courage, conviction, and faithfulness. So consider participating in our upcoming Scripture study on Monday nights in the chapel.

St. Mark’s Gospel is such an interesting Gospel to study. Compared to the Gospels of St. John, St. Luke, and St. Matthew, which relate to us many of the Lord’s sermons and longer teachings, St. Mark’s Gospel is very action-oriented. We see in Mark’s Gospel the Lord’s power, dominating the forces of evil and sickness, his strength of will in accomplishing the mission preordained by his Heavenly Father. St. Mark details how The Savior of the World working: healing the wounds of our sinfulness, casting out demons, opening eyes, ears, lips, minds, and hearts to God’s grace.

This weekend, our Gospel reading contains one of these wonderful detailed accounts from Mark’s Gospel of the Lord healing man who is deaf and dumb. To accomplish this miraculous healing the Lord could have simply willed the man to be healed, he could have snapped his finger or waved his hand and this man would be healed. But instead, we read of this multi-stepped ritual. The Lord first receives this man, then the Lord then takes him aside and he puts his fingers into the deaf man’s ears, and he spits and he rubs his spittle on the deaf man’s ears and tongue.   And then the Lord looks up to heaven, and he groans, and then he yells out, “Ephphatha, be opened.”  Why this ritual?  Why all these gestures, these signs, these actions? 

The Lord of course not only wanted to heal this man, but as usual, to teach us a lesson.  Namely, that he prefers to work through words, and gestures, and touch, and actions, and signs and intermediaries.  That’s how he healed so many during his earthly ministry, back then, and that’s how he wishes to bring healing to us, now, and all the ages of the Church.

This ritual healing, these gestures and signs in the Gospel today, teach us that the Lord heals through the gestures, signs, and rituals of his holy Church, primarily the Seven Sacraments. In washing our bodies in the waters of baptism, he brings cleansing of our sinful nature. In anointing our heads with chrism in the sacrament of confirmation, he brings strength for the work of the Gospel. In feeding us, under the appearance of bread and wine, in the Eucharist, he nourishes our deepest hunger for God, so that we turn less to be satiated by sin. Through the ritual words of absolution in the sacrament of confession, he brings the reconciliation with God that we cannot achieve on our own. In the exchange of vows in holy matrimony, he joins man and woman to become instruments of God’s fruitful love. Through the anointing of the Sick, the Lord gives powerful grace to endure bodily sickness and the final trial of physical death.

In recent years, there has been a real decline in the number of people coming to the Sacrament of Reconciliation for the forgiveness of their grave sins.  One of the reasons one often hears is that, “I don’t need to go to a priest, I just pray to God directly.”  But that’s not Christianity. The Lord works through his ministers, and through the words, gestures, and rituals of the Church. Offering our contrition to God in the privacy of our homes is good, for our sins truly offend God.  And we should offer our sorrow as soon as we recognize our sin.  BUT, God has made known exactly how He desires to forgive sins. We cannot insist that God forgive our sins on our own conditions.   That  forgiveness, that healing of sin, comes through the words and gestures of the sacrament—through the confession of our particular sins to a priest and the penitent’s expression of contrition, and the priest’s prayer of absolution.

The healing power of the Lord is not limited to the Sacraments, of course. He is present, when two or three are gathered in his name. The healing ritual in today’s gospel begins when the deaf man was brought to the Lord by other people. The Lord loves to work through other people, through parents and priests, neighbors and strangers, through support groups and best-friends-forever. He heals through doctors and medicine and nurses and caregivers, people who have dedicated their lives to healing. He helps those with emotional and psychological wounds through therapists and psychologists, by helping people confront wounds accumulated from childhood or trauma.  He teaches through catechists and clergy. Through Christians like you and me, the Lord desires to bring food to the hungry, clothing to the naked, consolation to the grieving, friendship to the lonely. He wants to use us, each and every one of us, to bring the healing the world so desperately needs.

What is the healing each of us needs? The Lord wishes to heal each one of us, to heal our wounded sense of right and wrong, our disordered attractions, to fix our broken moral compasses, to embolden our fear of speaking truth and being generous to the poor. Because of Original Sin we desire too much of what we don’t need and too little of what we do need. We desire too much social media, gossip, shopping, dessert, selfish exaltation, noise and entertainment, and too little prayer, study, charity, self-discipline, penance, fasting, mortification, silence and meditation. We do well to identify those parts of our lives which need healing, and bring them to the Lord.

That so many Catholics have fallen away from the Church in recent years is such a tragedy, because our brothers and sisters have fallen away from the ways that Jesus wants to work miracles in their lives, the ways the Lord wants to bring them healing and wholeness.

In the news these days, we’ve heard a lot about bishops and priests falling short of their sacred duties. It is a true scandal when ordained clerics undermine the spread of the Gospel through their grave sins. And yet, Christ has not abandoned us. He wants to bring healing to our Church now, and he will continue to do that through the Sacraments, through good holy priests and religious and lay faithful committed to the Gospel. Scandal, in a sense, is always a wake up call to the Church, the hierarchy and the lay faithful, and even to non-Catholics, that counterfeit and watered-down Christianity isn’t good for anybody. May we work and pray for the healing needed in the Church, our families, our community, by turning to the Lord in prayer and penance and the works of charity.

The Lord wishes to speak that powerful word, “Ephphatha” in each of our lives, that we might be ever-more open to his light and healing grace, by bringing our wounds to Him, by trusting in Him, by sharing our faith in Him for the glory of God and salvation of souls.