I love this time of year. It’s a time of change. Kids and teachers are off to school. The first fall colors are starting to peek through. Even the air is different. Change is exciting, a little dangerous, but beneath it all, change signals hope, hope for something better. Our gospel reading today also signaled a time of change in the world. Exciting, dangerous, but a new hope for humanity. But we humans resist change.
The back story in Mark’s gospel is this: Jesus was born into an occupied country under the thumb of a foreign army, the Roman empire. The Jewish people were essentially enslaved by Rome, and as slaves in their own country had little hope. They were ready for change, but afraid. As bad off as they were, they were afraid of any change. It could get worse.
I can understand this because I grew up Jewish. I was a more or less typical Jewish child, even though my family lived on a dairy farm in a heavily Catholic town in eastern Massachusetts. Early September meant not just the start of school, but the coming of the High Holy Days and the Jewish New Year. Tradition required I skip a week or so of school and pray and contemplate my sins. I tried to follow the Law of Moses to the letter. The traditional way of life. It wasn’t easy. I certainly believed if I didn’t do things right, bad things would happen to me and my family. If I did everything right, bad things might not happen. My faith was centered on avoiding catastrophically bad consequences, on following many, many religious daily behavior rules, like keeping Kosher. No wonder I was constantly edgy and stressed. Oh, how my life has changed since becoming a Christian!
The Jewish faith in Jesus’ time offered a sense of community, of solidarity in tradition. But other than the prophets’ promise of a better but distant future, no immediate hope. Things are what they are. We’re stuck, but we’re stuck in this together. Hunker down. Jesus taught change. Dramatic change. Change is difficult for a traditional community. Even Jesus’ disciples had trouble understanding and believing in Jesus while he walked and taught and ate with them.
Before Christianity, the motivation to be religious was to avoid angering God. Jesus’ ministry and resurrection gives us a new and different picture of faith. As we heard in our epistle, a faith centered on love of God, love of God’s creation, love of our fellow creatures. A new life of acting in God’s love and spreading God’s love in the world. A new world where God is universal, a God who cares for all people, not just a particular tribe. That God has plans for all. But people had a hard time hearing this truth.
Jesus’ teaching was exciting, but seemed very strange, very untraditional. Even Jesus’ disciples had trouble believing him. The disciples had grown up as traditional God-fearing Jews. Familiarity and tradition can dig a very deep rut in our road. The most extreme example of this familiarity was in Nazareth. In an earlier chapter of Mark, Jesus went back to his hometown Nazareth, and the people said, “who does he think he is? Isn’t he the carpenter’s son? We know his brothers and sisters.” Because they were so familiar with Jesus as a child and an everyday neighbor, they turned against him. Nothing could change. He wasn’t able to do any miracles there except heal a few sick. Jesus said, “A prophet never lacks honor except among his relations and his own family.”
That’s the backdrop to our gospel story today. Jesus led his disciples out of Galilee and Jewish territory and into Syrian Phoenicia, what’s now Lebanon. In the pagan cities of Tyre and Sidon Jesus began his ministry to non-Jews as a way to show his disciples – and us – the universality of God’s love. Almost as soon as he arrived in Tyre, a Syrian woman, a gentile whose daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard about Jesus and came to him. She begged him to drive out the demon. Jesus said, “Let the children be satisfied first; it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” We can hear that answer today as an insulting dismissal, but Jesus was opening with the traditional view - no mingling between the Jewish people and those pagans in Tyre. And you can bet that his disciples were chiming right in. And I believe Jesus knew the discussion would continue.
That Syrian woman’s faith – and intelligence – were so strong, she came right back with a challenge for Jesus; “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.” Jesus was satisfied with her answer and he said to her, “For saying that, go, and you will find the demon has left your daughter.” And when she returned home she found that was so, the demon had left her. That rule-breaking leap of faith by the Syrian woman changed many lives.
So, we have to ask, what is it that keeps more people from having the faith to give Jesus a chance? Why do so many today act like the residents of Nazareth who rejected Jesus, who couldn’t be healed, who didn’t believe?
Mark’s gospel gives us a hint when it goes on to relate what Jesus did next. On his way back to Galilee, Jesus goes the long way round, through Sidon, still in gentile territory. We hear that people brought him a man who was deaf and had a severe speech impediment, and they begged Jesus to just lay his hands on the man. We aren’t told whether the people or the afflicted man were gentile or Jewish. The gospel is perhaps deliberately ambiguous about that.
What Jesus and the deaf man did next was extraordinary – and has a message for all of us and for all our loved ones. First, Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd. The man trusted Jesus enough to go with him unaccompanied. Being deaf and unable to speak, he was vulnerable. Yet he came. He left his familiar supportive family and friends who’d brought him to Jesus. He stood there alone with Jesus in his vulnerability, expectant.
Away from the crowd he was able to focus his attention on Jesus. The crowd had basically told Jesus how to heal the man. ‘Just lay your hands on him’, they said. Jesus dealt with this cure his own way, not the way the crowd expected. The man was deaf, so explaining to him in words what he was about to do just wouldn’t do. Jesus put his fingers in the man’s ears clearly letting the deaf man know what he was about to do. Then, taking his fingers from the man’s ears, he spit on his finger and with it touched the man’s tongue, indicating he was going to “lubricate” his tongue with his own essence, the divine essence. Jesus accommodated his need and his ability to understand.
Then with the man’s attention fixed on Jesus, Jesus looked to heaven invoking God the Father, showing that it was not only Jesus in the flesh performing this action but instead connecting it to heaven. Jesus showed how God meets us where we are with whatever limitations we have or think we have, and proceeds to do for us what and how God determines is best for us and for all.
There in Sidon, Jesus sighed in sympathy with the man’s affliction and uttered a single word to him, “Ephphata” which means, “Be Opened.” As the word was uttered, his hearing was restored, and at the same moment his tongue was loosened and the impediment gone – he heard clearly and spoke clearly. Transformation.
Many of us are routinely unseeing; daily events happen and pass by unnoticed or accepted as “that’s just how it is.” This is a spiritual blindness. God and his angels speak to us almost constantly, but we don’t hear. We are spiritually deaf. We have feelings of friendship, kindness, support and even love for people, but we can’t speak the words. We are spiritually dumb. We suspect we know what needs to be done, what we are called to do but we cannot summon the will and grit to act. We are spiritually lame.
How much are we are all trapped in our quotidian rut, leaning on our routine, resisting any change, any new way of being in the world. My favorite Bible verse, the bit of Scripture that started me on my journey to becoming a Christian, is Romans 12: 2: Don’t be conformed to this world around you. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. We humans resist change, transformation, a new way of living.
Jesus has the healing we each need. He knows your need before you ask. He’ll call you away from all the distractions that constantly compete for our attention. Step away with him to a quiet place away from the crowd. He will ask if you want to be healed in a way you can understand, and he’ll understand your response even without a word spoken. He will touch you with himself, he’ll even enter into you in a mysterious way such that you will feel the presence of the divine. And if it is his will, he will speak that most powerful word to you in language you can hear, “Be Opened.”
Our cow barn in Stoneham, Mass. had a window close by the dirt road out back. That window was badly cracked, the glass was cloudy. It was mud-splashed, dusty and dirty, the frame peeling paint. It was the saddest, grungiest corner of a well-worn working farm. One night I had a dream, a dream of a window, blazing with dazzling colors, living and moving, unearthly colors radiating through the glass. I knew immediately I was seeing that window glorified. I was overwhelmed with a sense that this was just a glimpse, that there was more and better beyond where I was and what I was doing.
Jesus showed us the way to receive the blessing of healing today and hope to come. Let your heart and your being be transformed. Accept the change. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God, in Christ, has forgiven you. Be kind and act with love to your enemies, your friends, and yourself. Love all of your family, especially those from whom you feel estranged. Love all, forgive all, and accept that you have been forgiven yourself.
Be opened. Be opened.
Amen