Sunday Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons: 8th September 2024

Deaf man healed

Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

On a very personal note, I wish that the Lord could come to me and say as he did to the deaf man with a speech impediment in our Sunday gospel: "Ephphatha!" Be opened! Why? Because as I grow older I face more openly my innate prejudices and my blind spots and wish that I could have more help to deal with them, but more especially those other areas of my personality and life that prevent me from 'hearing' the needs, concerns of others, of not being able to listen to the voice of the Lord calling me into authentic encounters and relationships, and so through my own misinterpretation or non-listening, lack having better empathy with people and our living world.

I cannot make any insightful comment about your own experiences, you will have to examine your own consciences and faith experience to see how these words of ~Jesus affect your own journey from now on, but at the heart of this passage from Mark 7 is this sentence just after the healing has taken place : "And [immediately] the man's ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly". (Mk 7:35) My own focus is on that word 'plainly', in other words freed from the difficulty of trying to articulate words that could be understood by others and discern their response , the man is now able to communicate fully. In some ways this gospel and the second reading form a palimpsest, a picture of Jesus' ministry that has many levels.

Here before us, yet again is an outsider who Jesus welcomes fully into friendship with him, and as a sign of love heals him, reaching out beyond the safety net of ordinary life to welcome the stranger and outcast. In a visual expression of profound meaning, this event in Mark shows us the reality of living out the teaching we find in the letter of James: "My brothers and sisters, show no partiality as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ".(Jas 2:1) How often are we told that in Christianity the teaching we received from the Lord and passed down to us concerns the truth about the equality of all in God, the connectivity and importance of all living things united by the Holy Spirit in Christ. How often is this ignored, especially by people who hold positions of authority and power including those of us within the Church of Christ? Lord Acton's quote on power is one we need to keep reminding ourselves about on a regular basis :" All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it". I suppose we might try and make allowances for those we hold as teachers, leaders and guardians of the faith, but the Lord will not; "But someone who does not know, and then does something wrong, will be punished only lightly. When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required".(Lk 12:48)

The Church very wisely encourages us to frequent examination of conscience, it is there in an act of penitence at the celebration of the Eucharist and in that symbolic act of the sign of peace before communion, but in those formal daily hours of prayer the final office each day, Compline, makes sure those preparing for sleep, first ask pardon of each other bringing before God their own need of healing, but also for a deeper attention to inner listening, that we may continually discern the voice of the Lord. James calls us back to that moment when the Lord Jesus heals the man who cannot hear nor speak well, he puts before us a choice that heals and free us from our impediments : "So speak and so act as people who will be judged by the law of freedom. For the judgment is merciless to one who has not shown mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment".(Jas 2: 12, 13)

Lectio:

Basil on Humility

(PG 31, col. 525, Homilia 20.)

3. Therefore no truly prudent human will think himself great because of his own wisdom, or because of the other things I have spoken of, but will attend rather to the excellent counsel of the blessed Anna, and the prophet Jeremiah: (Jer. ix. 23). But in what shall people glory: and in what is a person great? Let him that glorieth glory in this, he said, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord. This is the grandeur of human, this his glory and greatness, truly to know Him Who is great, to cling to Him, and to seek for the glory of the Lord of glory. For the Apostle says to us: He that glorieth, may glory in the Lord (I Cor. 1. 31) where he declares: But of him are you in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and justice, and sanctification, and redemption: That, as it was written: He that glorieth, may glory in the Lord.

This is complete and perfect glorying in God, when a person is uplifted, not because of his own justice, but because he knows he is empty of true glory, and made just only through his faith in Christ. In this Paul gloried, that he thought nothing of his own justice; that he sought that justice alone which comes through Christ, which is from God, justice in faith (Phil. iii. 9); and that he might know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the sharing of His sufferings, and be made like Him in His death, if by any means he might himself attain to the resurrection which is from the dead. It is here that the whole top-loftiness of arrogance falls down. Nothing is left to you to glory in, O human; whose true glorying and whose hope is in mortifying yourself in all things, and in seeking for that future life in Christ, of which we have already a foretaste when we live wholly in the love and in the grace of God.

Lord Acton:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.