Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Proper 18 B - Sunday, September 5, 2021
After what felt like a brief reprieve, once again, we find ourselves in a liminal space as Covid continues to affect our lives, reminding us that we live in a finite world. At such times we long for a strong and powerful God—a God removed from suffering. But in Jesus, God shows us how God participates in the finiteness of this world. The enfleshment of Jesus reveals that God is not apart from the trials of humanity. God is not aloof or a spectator. God is not merely tolerating human suffering or instantly healing it. God is participating in it with us.
Pain and beauty guide us to see the face of God. On the one hand we’re attracted to the unbelievable beauty of the divine reflected in the beauty of human beings and the natural world. On the other hand, brokenness and weakness also mysteriously pull us out of ourselves. Vulnerability forces us beyond ourselves. Whenever we see pain, most of us are drawn out of our own preoccupations. It saves us from our smaller self. That’s why so many saints wanted to get near suffering—because as they said again and again, they meet Christ there.
Grief puts us in touch with our vulnerabilities. It lets us know how capable we are of having our hearts broken and our feelings hurt. All of us have setbacks, broken dreams, broken relationships, or unrealized possibilities. All of us have bodies that just don’t do what they used to do. Because we’re human, we understand that loss is a universal language.
Today we hear two Gospel stories that highlight both the universality of God’s relationship with humanity and the tenacious faith of two vulnerable Gentiles that allows them to witness to and participate in Jesus’ power. It strikes me that the placement of these two healing stories in Mark, following directly after Jesus’ warnings about hypocrisy, highlights not the shortcoming of his followers but of those of Jesus himself. The uncharacteristic rude response of Jesus to the woman seems out of place if Mark is only using the story to emphasize God’s universality. The encounter with this woman is a conversion moment for Jesus in which he realizes, in a very human moment of physical and mental exhaustion, his own vulnerability and how he has lost sight of the point of his mission. She straightens him out, she opens him up. It is the courage of the woman to confront Jesus that changes him.
This Gentile woman teaches this Jewish man the true meaning of what he has just reminded his followers in the prior verse, which is that social conventions should not stand in the way of helping those in need. Mark is showing us that the incarnation is no easy task. If Jesus is fully human, he must face his own hypocrisy and work through his own self-integration. He must suffer under the conditions of human existence, the challenge of the human condition. To be otherwise would not allow him to be fully human. To be fully God, he cannot avoid this suffering either. Mark provides a way to see how the divine and human are combined in Jesus. Jesus is fully God and fully human only if he can be faithfully opened to both at the same time.
The story of the deaf mute that follows serves as an example of how being opened empowers one to be open to others. People bring a deaf man with a speech impediment to Jesus and beg Jesus to heal him. The miracle is done privately. Having been opened himself, Jesus gives special attention to this man. Jesus leads him away from the crowd. Whatever fear, anxiety, or frustration he felt were shared in a more intimate setting. Jesus speaks the language of touch to him putting his fingers in his ears, his saliva on his tongue. Joining him in his pain Jesus groans aloud, and he proclaims God’s action – “Be opened!” “Be opened”, a prayer more than a command. The action is all God’s. Immediately the man hears and speaks clearly.
How often do we question in our own hearts why God would take special care or be bothered with us? The deafness that afflicts us is a spiritual deafness, an inability to believe that God loves us enough, just as we are, to sigh for us---to wish we be opened---to hear God’s love and to speak it to others, to be opened to trusting more and controlling less. Sometimes the pain of being bound in silence and isolation is thought to be preferable to the risks of hearing and speaking----of being in relationship. This insecurity pushes us to create rules that give status and value to some while denigrating others including ourselves. The Letter of James underlines the human tendency to show partiality to some and to neglect others. Since God erects no barriers between God and humans so there should be no barriers between human beings. Status is a product of our imagination. It is invisible to God. The reading from Proverbs reminds us that “The Lord is the maker of them all.” When we acknowledge that there are no walls separating us from God and each other, then love and mercy flow, and all are deemed equally valuable.
It’s so easy to become anesthetized by the repetitiveness of our daily routine. It’s natural to block out dissonant messages that stoke our fears and raise our defenses. At present, we’re fatigued from marshalling all our resources to get through the disruptions of this pandemic in such a polarized society and fractured world. The inclination to shut down, to be less than our best selves, to see less and to hear less, is understandable. Yet Jesus wants to speak healing in our lives. He wants to help us experience the world in a bigger, more textured, and messier way. How might we be opened that we might broaden our outlook to see the redemptive work that God is performing in us and all around us and join in?
Our ability to be open to God, to our world, and to our own need issues from God’s gracious activity within us. God desires to touch us. God desires to heal us. God desires to give us the life for which we have been created, calling us to look at life and ourselves through his merciful eyes. In the end, it’s about opening our hearts to a relationship---coming into the love and peace of God that we know in Jesus, so by seeing him, we can see ourselves and others as he sees, with the same infinite compassion.
+Amen.
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