All of Jesus’ miracles offer us a foretaste of the miracle that we experience through the gift of faith.
In today’s Gospel, we see a man healed of deafness.
Firstly, note that the people brought him to Jesus and they asked him to be healed. This is a nod towards petitionary prayer. If we, as people of God, ask Jesus to help someone, that person can be healed. We may use this as real and foundational inspiration as we pray for those in need.
Secondly, the man’s deafness was a physical illness, but we may use the miracle account to remind ourselves of our spiritual deafness, our muteness. Is it not this from which we, the Church, should most urgently be healed?
He does, as we hear in the Gospel, make the blind see and the deaf hear. But our deafness and blindness is something we may not really like to attend to. It reminds us that we are not always ideal followers of Christ. Personally, we don’t always want to address the issue. And as a Church community, too: we don’t always have the courage to say we are wrong.
Here is where, as we walk this miracle of the Gospel down the centuries back to us in 2024, Christ’s teaching is so pertinent. Here is where it makes the difference. We are being offered clarity and speech in the Spirit; we are being offered eyes to see. We can bring ourselves for this healing, and we can bring others.
How we approach Jesus comes with many options, perhaps even as many as there are people who pray. But the single aspect that combines all these petitions for healing should be humility.
GOSPEL
The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Mark 7:31-37
Glory to you, O Lord.
Returning from the district of Tyre, Jesus went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, right through the Decapolis region. And they brought him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they asked him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, put his fingers into the man’s ears and touched his tongue with spittle.
Then looking up to heaven he sighed; and he said to him, ‘Ephphatha,‘ that is, ‘Be opened.‘ And his ears were opened, and the ligament of his tongue was loosened and he spoke clearly. And Jesus ordered them to tell no one about it, but the more he insisted, the more widely they published it.
Their admiration was unbounded.
‘He has done all things well,’ they said, ‘he makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak.’
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.