23rd Sunday Year B

See Commentary on Mark 7:31-37

Homily 1 - 2006

This past week or so the media have had a bonanza: Don Chipp – "Keep the bastards honest!" – died; then Steve Irwin - in spectacular circumstances, and yesterday, Peter Brock was also tragically killed.  The popular outpouring of emotion has been considerable.

During his pontificate Pope John Paul II canonised a whole sack of saints. With a few exceptions, no one seems to have been particularly inspired by any of them, even though apparently they were all heroically virtuous.

Somehow, personal sanctity did not seem to figure much with Jesus. He was always saying: Your faith has saved you, your readiness to trust, not yourself or your performance (that was the Pharisees’ ploy!), but to trust the power of God.  What mattered was not perfection. He didn’t say: Your faith in God has made you perfect, but: Your faith has saved you, has made you safe ... your trusting God has made you safe, God has made you safe. Perhaps that’s all that matters.  (Peter, in some things, was a disaster. Paul had his problems. But they let God love them, and ultimately that is all they worried about.)

Interestingly we can be inspired by people with clay feet, perhaps more easily than by those who seem perfect. Most of us with any experience under our belts can agree that it is honesty, indeed often the trusting sharing of our weaknesses, that draws us powerfully into intimacy... Simply because it is real.

The institutional Church shies away from facing its shadow, and so ... the knee-jerk reaction to sin has been to cover up. We are not good at naming our own sin.  As a priest I feel a strong pressure to strive to be perfect, and, if I can’t be perfect, at least to look perfect, and the thought of being found vulnerable can be quite scary.  Church leaders can sometimes seem to adopt the moral high-ground and even aggressively insist on their monopoly on moral truth ... with the result that most people take little notice of what the Church says, and even seem instinctively to resist it.

We have, in fact, precious insights into human dignity, and a respected tradition of clear thinking in areas of morality and social justice. Yet in the upcoming conscience vote in Parliament on the issue of embryonic stem cell research, how many will be open to the Church’s message?

The Gospel today presented us with a Gentile unable to hear – anything, unable to speak, to share an idea, an opinion, a preference – isolated from ordinary social conversation, oblivious to so much going on between people, inevitably consigned to the margins.

Jesus took him aside, away from the crowd, and made him the centre of his attention; he then gave him some idea of what he might do: by touching his ears and his tongue, with his spittle (which in the culture of the day was seen as a healing agent), he signed language to the deaf and dumb man the possibility of healing. What might have gone on in that man’s heart? - the beginning of hope? - the possibility of trust? perhaps blocked, held back by uncertainty, confusion, and fear. And then Jesus said: Be opened!  Nothing about Be perfect. Open up; Be freed; Let the hope, the trust, flow free.

We need to forget our own virtue, and no longer to rely on our own performance. We need to focus on God - the one who saves, who loves unconditionally.  We need to face reality – with all our ambiguity, with our goodness and our badness, with our “already” and our “not yet”. We need to hope, to trust; and surprisingly, to the extent that we let God’s love flow into us, we are changed. We, too, begin to act lovingly. We become compassionate, like our heavenly Father.

Homily 2 - 2015

For the coming Year of Mercy, Pope Francis will grant to all priests the power to forgive in Confession people who have committed the sin of abortion. [Up until now, Canon Law has restricted the power to bishops only.] It is not that Pope Francis is going soft on abortion, but, like Jesus before him, he has listened instinctively to people’s hearts and has heard in some, at least, the panic and despair from which their sin proceeds.

I have been thinking of the Pope’s initiative in the light of today’s Gospel. Jesus healed a man who was both deaf and dumb. In recounting the incident, Mark mentioned that Jesus sighed before performing his healing – probably because he saw in the man’s disability one further indication of the brokenness of our world. Deafness particularly excluded the man from human conversation and meaningful communication, leaving him effectively isolated. After the incident Jesus ordered the bystanders to tell no one about it – probably because they were enthusiastic for the wrong reasons. This was magic! This was great! Someone like that was just what they needed! For them, Jesus was a celebrity; for him, that was the last thing he wanted.

From time to time in the Gospels Jesus repeated the lament of Isaiah, ‘They have eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear', and perhaps we could add, 'mouths that do not speak'. What was Jesus referring to? For him, what would give life to a sin-scarred world was not just to hear and to speak [Most people already do that.], but to hear and to speak with love.

I believe that one, among many, of the factors affecting the Church’s virtual irrelevance in today’s world is that we have not always spoken with obvious love, compassion and hope. Nor have we listened firstly with love, wanting to understand and to hear the hearts of others before ever opening our mouths to speak. One of the reasons why Pope Francis is so willingly listened to is because people see him as one who has listened to and connected with their hearts, and who then speaks with mercy and compassion. He listens and speaks with love.

In today’s Western World, authority drawn from status or coercive or legal power has lost its clout. People will not listen to Popes or Bishops or priests, even parents, simply because of their role. There is no way we can successfully impose on others what we think is right. There was a time when the Church enjoyed some status, when it could muster a reasonably disciplined voting bloc. Those days have largely gone. We are back to the days of the early Church when Christians had no coercive power and no measurable influence at all on government and legislation. They simply lived, and were seen to live, what they believed. And what they believed, above all, was the mercy of God.

In this Western world, our authority will be in proportion to our witness. No longer can we count on shortcuts to impose social conformity. We can rely solely on the witness value of our lives.  That is not bad news, but good news. However, it does call for continuing and radical conversion, firstly, from us. We need to learn to listen with love. We need to learn to speak with love – and, despite wonderful exceptions, we are not good at that.

I believe that in order to be able to listen with love and to speak with love, we must firstly make room in our lives for silence. In our super-busy lives, in this ever-chattering world, we must prioritise silence – or we have no chance to listen and to speak with love. Love grows out of silence. Even just any prayer is not enough. I believe there is need in our lives also for silent prayer. The word “contemplation” may be unfamiliar and the prospect daunting, yet it is precisely to that that Pope Francis calls us all.

Homily 3 - 2021

Jesus had been making a sweep through pagan territory bordering on Galilee. His purpose seems not so much to have been to preach there the Kingdom of God as, perhaps, to give himself some “head space” after engaging with scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem. While in pagan territory, he had encountered a Syrophoenician woman who had begged him to cast out a devil oppressing her daughter. Though at first Jesus was apparently reluctant, she had eventually changed Jesus’ mind and he graciously yielded to her pleading.

In today’s incident, some pagan friends of a pagan man suffering from deafness and dumbness implored Jesus to “lay his [healing] hand” on their friend. This time, Jesus promptly acceded to their request and healed the man.

For Mark, the man’s affliction symbolised a situation too often existing in his own Christian community — and, by extension, among his later readers such as ourselves. We can all so easily fail truly to “hear” the message of Jesus, to read his heart, to share his values and his urgency. So often, as the cause of our deafness to his message, lies the profound, homogenising but unnoticed influence on us of our surrounding culture. Jesus led the deaf man “away from the crowd” and connected with him personally “in private”. 

Homily 4 - 2024

I found today’s first Reading from the prophet Isaiah wonderfully upbeat. His sense of God is still so relevant and his imagery and expression are so typical of him. He was writing to people still oppressed slaves of the Babylonians but soon, unknown to them, to be liberated. His message was a call for courage on their part. There was no need for fear. God was about to step into their history once again, and obviously so.

Vengeance was coming, and retribution. Not that Isaiah necessarily saw God as vengeful and punishing. That was simply the automatic cultural assumption of the time. The forceful but poetical expression of the prophet — salvation and good news for Israel — had to be inevitably understood as vengeance and retribution for their persecutors. As a people they still needed a few more centuries of gradual maturing, thoughtful prayer and the presence of Jesus among them before they would learn that there is no violence in God. [We could well wonder how widely it has been grasped even now.]

Isaiah continued in his beautifully metaphorical way:

“The eyes of the blind shall be opened,
the ears of the deaf unsealed.
The lame shall leap like a deer
and the tongues of the dumb sing for joy.
For water gushes in the desert,
streams in the wasteland;
the scorched earth becomes a lake,
the parched land springs of water.”

It is against this background that we can hear today’s Gospel incident: Jesus’ healing of the probably pagan deaf man. Though deaf, the man could see. So Jesus sought his cooperation, and perhaps even his act of faith, by means of gestures the man could see or feel.

Jesus took him aside in private, away from the crowd, where he would not be distracted. He touched the man’s ears to indicate he was about to do something about his deafness; and his tongue because he wished to help the man to speak fluently. Spittle, at the time, was seen as a healing agent [even today some parents still use it to heal the pain of a little child who has hurt a leg or an arm]. Jesus wanted to arouse the man’s hope. Then he spoke aloud a word of healing, which the man had the wonderful experience of hearing, and consequently even of speaking clearly, for the first time.

Mark, who recounted the incident, drew attention to Jesus’ perhaps surprising reaction:

“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.”

Jesus, however, was instinctively wary of crowds, large or small, and especially of enthusiastic crowds who need someone they can love or hate. This crowd wanted someone they could barrack for, and in their need they exaggerated. They had seen Jesus do one compassionate action, which they turned into, “He has done all things well.” They knew nothing of his teaching, yet we are told, “Their admiration was unbounded”.

Might Mark’s recounting of the incident have something to say to us, his readers, twenty centuries later? Most of us currently are worried about the future of our Church as Mass attendances drop significantly. It wasn’t all that long ago [was it in the 70’s?] that churches were full. Priests were plentiful, as were nuns.

But what was it that attracted people? Was it Jesus’ teaching, and his calling us to co-operate with him, in his insistence on bringing more love into the world? — loving one another? loving your neighbour? loving those we see as the enemy,? forgiving those who have hurt us? forgiving ‘no strings attached’ [as God always does]?

Rather than a helpless unvoiced reproach to those who no longer worship with us, might we first look to ourselves? Do we owe them an apology? or … a challenge?