Today's
readings: http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/090615.cfm
My father in law is 84 and a
wonderful guy, but like many his age, he’s hard of hearing – to carry on a conversation
with him you have to speak quite loudly and enunciate your words very clearly. Which reminds me of a story I recently heard:
An older man had serious hearing problems for many
years. He went to the doctor and the
doctor was able to have him fitted for a set of hearing aids that allowed the
man to hear 100%.
The old man went back to the doctor a month later
and the doctor said, “your hearing is perfect.
Your family must be really pleased that you can hear again.”
The man replied, “Oh, I haven’t told my family
yet. I just sit around and listen to
their conversations. I’ve already seen
my lawyer to change my will three times!”
Many of us have also hearing
problems – I know I do. With each
passing year I find myself more and more asking others to repeat themselves. My wife has started to tell me “you really
need to get your hearing checked.” The
other day I tried out an on-line hearing test, one that has progressively
higher-pitched sounds. Our dog was going
crazy but I couldn’t hear a thing.
In our first reading from Isaiah,
the prophet is speaking hopeful words to the people in captivity in Babylon. Promising, says the Lord, that God is coming
to save you, to vindicate you, to clear the ears of the deaf, open the eyes of
the blind, and the tongue of the mute will sing!
And in today’s Gospel, the people
bring a deaf man to Jesus, a man who also had a speech impediment, and we hear
the amazing story of Jesus’ cure of both his deafness and his speech. As we journey through the Gospel of Mark, as
we witness these miraculous works of Our Blessed Lord, we learn more and more
that this Jesus is “the one,” the one who is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s
prophecy.
This is “good news” indeed, but the
message, I think, is not so much for those with physical disabilities-
blindness, deafness, speech impediments – as it is for all of us who by original
sin are to some extent blind, or deaf, or unable to speak clearly.
I’m speaking now of spiritual
deafness, spiritual blindness. And we
all suffer from it, don’t we? Are our
eyes fully open to the needs of those around us? To the injustices in the world around us?
We come to church and sing “the Lord
hears the cry of the poor” but do we?
Are our ears fully open to hear the cries of the poor? Now I’m preaching here as much to myself as
to anyone else here today, for truth be told, I don’t hear, spiritually hear,
all that well. Or maybe a better way to
put it is I don’t listen all that well.
Nor do I see all that well, or maybe
I too often close my eyes to put out of my mind that which is going on in the
world around me. This became very
apparent a couple days ago when I was confronted with the vivid image of a
little three-year-old boy, who along with his family had been fleeing, refugees
from the ongoing war in Syria, trying to join relatives in Canada. The dinghy they were in was overloaded with
people and capsized, and this little boy, his brother and his mother all
drowned. And this picture showed this
tiny little boy lying prone in the sand, his lifeless body having washed up on
the beach.
How could I help but have my eyes
opened to the plight of these immigrants, I asked myself? And not just the immigrants “over there” but
the immigrants right here among us, whom our faith calls us to welcome.
And all summer there have been these
undercover videos, nine of them released to date, which lift the veil so to
speak and starkly show the utter depravity of what’s going on day in and day
out at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. I’ve considered myself “pro-life” all my
life, have opposed the evil of abortion, but these videos, difficult as they
are to watch, have opened my eyes and my heart in a new way.
And while I haven’t yet read all of
it, Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si” presents some real challenges to us
in many many ways but most especially in how we care for our common home, the
earth. The Holy Father is calling each
of us, all of us, to open our eyes and our ears to what’s happening around us,
to reflect on the fact that this little planet is our only home, that this
little planet of ours isn’t ours, but belongs also to all the generations who
will come after us.
In our Christian faith, we are all
on a spiritual journey, a journey of conversion of heart, a process of being
more and more molded and fashioned by God’s grace into images of Our Blessed
Lord. And this process requires that Our
Lord do the same to you and me that He did to this deaf man in Mark’s Gospel –
that He open your ears and mine, your eyes and mine, your heart and my heart.
We see a vivid example of this process
of transformation in the life of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, Mother
Teresa. Already devoting her entire life
to Christ’s service, already having served as a schoolteacher for nearly twenty
years, Our Lord gradually opened her eyes and ears to the suffering and
hopelessness of the poorest of the poor on the streets of Calcutta. One day she heard clearly the voice of Christ
Himself, the words of Our Lord from the cross, “I thirst!” And Mother left her teaching position, headed
out into the streets, caring for those poorest of the poor.
Sadly, as many of us grow older we
gradually lose our hearing, our spiritual hearing. Become more blind, more hard of heart, more
set in our ways. More pridefully clinging
to our ways of thinking.
But today Jesus says to us, commands
us, “be opened!” This is a call to
humility. It’s a call to open our minds
and our hearts, to question, to search, to allow Him to mold us and transform
us, more and more into His own image. The Apostle Paul in his letter to the
Romans said that we are all to be transformed by the renewing of our minds,
conformed not to this world but to the pattern of Jesus Christ.
And so, brothers and sisters, let us
pray and meditate today, this weekend, this week on Our Lord’s simple but
life-changing command to the deaf man, and to you and to me – “ephphatha! Be
opened!” And let us listen with new ears
and hearts for the voice of God.
Open my ears, Lord, help me to hear
your voice. Open my eyes, Lord, help me
to see your face.
No comments:
Post a Comment