There is not only a physical deafness which essentially cuts people off from social life; there is also a “hard- ness of hearing” where God is concerned, and this is something from which we particularly suffer in our own time. But we are no longer able to hear God- there are too many different frequencies filling our ears. What is said about God strikes us as pre-scientific, no longer suited to our age. Along with this hardness of hearing or outright deafness where God is concerned, we naturally lose our ability to speak with and to him. And so we end up losing a decisive capacity for perception. We risk losing our inner senses. This weakening of our capacity for perception drastically and dangerously curtails the range of our relationship with reality in general. The horizon of our life is disturbingly foreshortened…
At our baptism, [Jesus] touched each of us and said “Ephphatha”-“Be opened”-thus enabling us to hear God’s voice and to be able to talk to him… The Gospel invites us to realise that we have a “deficit” in our capacity for perception. Initially, we overlook this deficiency as such since everything else seems so urgent and logical, since everything seems to proceed normally, even when we no longer have eyes and ears for God and we live without him. But is it true that everything goes on as usual when God is no longer a part of our lives and our world?
As we gather here, let us ask the Lord with all our hearts to speak his “Ephphatha anew” to heal our hardness of hearing for God’s presence, activity, and Word and to give us sight and hearing. Let us ask his help in rediscovering prayer, to which he invites us in the liturgy and whose essential formula he has taught us in the Our Father.
The Greek form of a Syro-Chaldaic or
Aramaic word, meaning “Be opened,”
uttered by Christ when healing the man
who was deaf and dumb (Mark 7:34). It
is one of the characteristics of Mark
that he uses the very Aramaic words
which fell from our Lord’s lips. (See
3:17; 5:41; 7:11; 14:36; 15:34.)
International Standard Bible
You must be logged in to post a comment.