Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the holy gospel according to Mark.
[00:00:31] Speaker C: Glory to you Lord.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Again, Jesus left the district of Tyre and went by way of Sidon to the sea of Galilee into the district of the Decapolis.
And people brought to him a deaf man, what a speech impediment, and begged him to lay his hand on him.
He took him off by himself, away from the crowd. He put his finger into the man's ears and spitting, touched his tongue. Then he looked up to heaven and groaned and said to him, Ephaphtha, that is be opened.
And immediately the man's ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed. And he spoke plainly. Plainly.
He ordered them not to tell anyone. But the more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it. They were exceedingly astonished and they said, he has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak. The gospel of the Lord.
[00:01:43] Speaker C: Praise to you Lord Jesus.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: When we read sacred scripture, it's always important that we remind ourselves of the context of the scripture and the purpose of it.
And it's important to remember when we read the gospels in particular, that they are not historical narratives that are describing every event that happened during Jesus public ministry.
And each of them is written more as a portrait of emphasizing certain things that Jesus did, certain things that he revealed to people and giving us a glimpse of what he's like, but never the entirety.
And when we see miracle stories in the gospels, it's also important to remember that these are not all of the miracles. There were probably many more things that Jesus did that were powerful in the eyes of the people. But the ones that we hear about in the scriptures are always meant to teach us a deeper truth than simply going, wow, isn't that amazing? He made a deaf person. Here.
They're always meant to speak a deeper truth about what we need to know about our lives.
And here I want to emphasize one word because I've always been in a little bit of a struggle with it. And that is where, as Jesus is praying and healing this man, the scripture says he groaned. And I've wondered, what could that possibly mean? Why is that detail given to us in the gospel?
And I've come to believe that that groaning was his desire to heal the deafness of the world, of all of us, and to free our speech impediment that keeps us from expressing ourselves as Christ would want us. It was a bigger healing that he desired. Now, this individual, clearly, the scripture says, could hear and speak freely.
But how many times are we hard of hearing when it comes to what God wants? And if you've noticed over the last several weeks, you've probably seen what could almost be described as a theme that I've been talking about, that whenever our personal ego gets involved in things, we tend to miss the point. Whenever we think that we are right about everything, that if things went our way, things would be better, we usually end up missing the message we need to hear and we need to understand.
And that's critical, because God is always revealing deeper truths to us each and every day of our life in order to make us the person we're called upon to be. Because none of us, or maybe on the exception, are truly perfect. The rest of us struggle to get better and better.
But the other half of it is not only hearing those words, but, much like the letter of James tells us, putting them into practice. And one of the ways we do that is through our speech.
But our tongue sometimes is not freed. It's not freed when we speak out of anger. It's not freed when we speak out of stubbornness or jealousy or rage or lies.
It's only freed when we speak with compassion. It's only freed when we speak with mercy. It's only freed when we speak out of love.
So that groaning was about wanting all of us to be better at our hearing, but also better at our speech, modeling what true discipleship is all about.
