23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time
Reflection: Treat violence with peace
By SISTER MARY McGLONE
One of my dear friends was an elementary teacher for some 45 years. She loved to march her second-graders around the neighborhood like a pied piper. She knew how to calm the wildest child, attend to the frightened and help the dyslexic read.
One day, a little guy in third grade had gone wild — to the point of trying to throw a desk. The teacher brought him to the office and called for Sister Mary Kay. When she appeared at the office door, the little fellow looked at her with wide eyes and started imploring, “Please, Sister, NO! Don’t do it! PLEASE!”
In spite of his tearful pleading, she looked him straight in the eyes and slowly walked toward him. She took his head firmly in both hands and kissed him on the forehead. With that, the child began to weep, and she held him until he calmed down. He had known that the minute she reminded him of how much he was loved, his fury would fizzle.
Today, Isaiah tells us that God comes with vindication. What a word! It sounds like God will smite the evildoers and trounce the oppressors.
But, no, Isaiah tells us that God the vindicator looks more like Sister Mary Kay than like a warrior. God’s recompense heals rather than being destructive. When God is reigning, the blind will see, the deaf hear, the lame will dance and the mute will sing (probably in four-part harmony). Drought will be history and deserts will flower.
Today’s Gospel lets us watch Jesus attend to a deaf man. How did this man’s friends let him know that they wanted to bring him to Jesus? Their own language was useless because the man could neither hear nor speak.
Over time, he and his friends must have worked out a system of signs, ways to turn their thoughts into gestures that both sides could understand. In essence, when faced with very significant differences, they had to invent a new language that both could understand. The deaf man had to enter the world of symbolic communication and the hearing had to go beyond their accustomed ways of relating to others.
Seeing all that had already happened among them, Jesus took the man aside and finished the job. He opened the man’s ears. Now that he could hear others, he could imitate their pronunciation and communicate like they did. The man and his friends were now bilingual, able to connect in different ways.
Our reading from the Letter of St. James reflects on this process. Knowing that his community could be impressed by showiness, he warns them not to fall for the apparent value of glitz and power lest they lose touch with God and their divine mission.
God is thoroughly unimpressed by academic degrees, bank accounts or any other kind of stardom. Those who overvalue those things have planted their feet at the very edges of the circle of God’s love — a love no one can earn. Unlike the deaf man’s friends who stood in solidarity, they are likely to thank God for not being frail without realizing that their distorted value system is a more debilitating impairment than that of those from whom they stand apart (Luke 18:9-14).
These readings are uniquely appropriate right now. We are living amid divisions in our country unlike anything our society has seen during the past 150 years. At the same time, our church is moving toward the second session of the synod on synodality. If we are looking for divine recompense, our responsibility to bring it about could hardly be more obvious.
The synodal way offers a difficult and effective antidote to our divisiveness. Imitating the deaf man and his friends, synodality invites us to learn new ways of communicating — ways that allow everyone to have their say.
The synod invites us to escape our deafness through contemplative dialogue — a way of listening that genuinely expects to learn something new, listening that opens us to broader ways of thinking. It’s a way of listening that avoids debate and the false belief that there is only one way to understand the truth.
Synodality would delight St. James for its respect for each point of view, realizing that the woman who cleans the office, the monsignor, the plumber, the academic and the executive all have much to offer one another.
Our world is in desperate need of listeners, of people who can approach the violent with a kiss and who can receive revelation from very different points of view. God has instigated a plan to open our ears and to form us as agents of divine recompense. Are we willing, like Jesus and the deaf man’s friends, to lead our world toward the healing we need?
Reading I
(Isaiah 35: 4-7a)
Thus says the LORD:
Say to those whose hearts are frightened:
Be strong, fear not!
Here is your God,
he comes with vindication;
with divine recompense
he comes to save you.
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened,
the ears of the deaf be cleared;
then will the lame leap like a stag,
then the tongue of the mute will sing.
Streams will burst forth in the desert,
and rivers in the steppe.
The burning sands will become pools,
and the thirsty ground, springs of water.
Responsorial Psalm
(Psalm 146: 6-10)
Reading II
(James 2:1-5)
My brothers and sisters, show no partiality
as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.
For if a man with gold rings and fine clothes
comes into your assembly,
and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in,
and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes
and say, “Sit here, please, ”
while you say to the poor one, “Stand there, ” or “Sit at my feet, ”
have you not made distinctions among yourselves
and become judges with evil designs?
Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Did not God choose those who are poor in the world
to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom
that he promised to those who love him?
Gospel
(Mark 7: 31-37)
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 who had 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,
“Ephphatha!”— that is, “Be opened!” —
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed,
and he spoke 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.”