23rd Sunday Year B - Homily 4

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?