Friday in the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time, February 11, 2022

I am still having trouble with my health.  Although I am not wracked with coughing as I was a few weeks ago, I have little stamina and wear out quickly. Please keep praying for me.  

Mark 7, 31-37

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.”

The Decapolis was a league of ten cities built by the Greeks after the death of Alexander the Great to the east of the Jordan River.  Damascus was one of them.  Few Jews, if any, lived in these cities, but they may have lived in the towns around them.  Matthew 4, 25 informs us that “many people followed him from Galilee, and from Decapolis.”  These would have been Jews.

“And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment and begged him to lay his hand on him.”  The people of the place Jesus visited on this occasion knew of his power and brought to him to be cured a man who was both deaf and dumb.  The Lord took the man away from the crowd and then performed a strange action upon him: while putting his finger in the man’s ears, perhaps a single finger into one ear and then the other, he spat and touched the man’s tongue with the saliva, saying the Aramaic word, Ephphatha, meaning, “be opened”.  We see here a figure of baptism: the one seeking the healing of his sins is taken away from other sinners lest he continue in his sin; the Lord enters into the one to be baptized (through his “ears” in this case) in order to heal him from within; the spitting is is sign of the waters of baptism and of the Holy Spirit; and the command, “Be opened” causes the man to be capable of receiving the forgiveness the Lord offers.  The effect is immediate.  He is free.  As the action transpired, the people of that time and place expected rituals for the cure of the sick, and Jesus provided one for them, one which they would think about long after he departed from them.  The use of the Aramaic word is interesting.  At the time of Jesus, Aramaic was displacing Hebrew as the everyday language of the Jews in Galilee and Judea, though it remained their religious language.  When the Lord and the Pharisees talk, it seems to have been in Hebrew.  Jesus used an Aramaic word the people of the area would have understood.  We might wonder about the reason that Mark does not translate this word directly into the Greek in which he is writing his Gospel.  There seems no purpose to telling his readers the exact word he said.  That he does so tells us that the word possessed some significance for these readers in the first days of the Church.  This significance becomes plain when we realize that this Aramaic word was used in the Baptismal ritual.  Whatever the  language in which the ritual was conducted, the Aramaic word was used for opening the ears of the newly baptized to hear (and understand) the word of God and his tongue to speak God’s praise.  Thus, from the earliest times, this word was continuously used, and when Mark came to render the account of this cure for his Gospel, he decided not to translate it so that his readers could see for themselves its origin and context.  The use of saliva, by the way, continued into recent times in the traditional rite.

“He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”  Perhaps this line was used in an ancient hymn.  Otherwise, it stands out in Mark’s almost laconic accounts of the Lord actions.  It is a confession of faith and an expression of wonder.  “Well” here can also be translated as “nobly” and rightly”.  It is as though the people were considering what Jesus did and the manner in which he acted, and were saying, “When the Messiah comes, shall he do more signs than this man does?” (John 7, 31).

Most baptized Christians continue to live among their Gentile neighbors, and this is right for them so that they might convert them, but they — we — must be careful not to live as they live and to use the world as they do.  We must live apart spiritually and morally so that we are not dogs going back to their vomit (cf. 2 Peter 2, 22).  Rather, we are cities set on a hill, quite distinct from their surroundings.