I often take things back to the garden of Eden. That is so very significant, that fall of mankind, and everything else that takes place throughout the rest of the Bible is related straight back to that, as is also the great ending of the book of Revelation, when the tree of life – once forbidden to the children of Adam – is now accessible once more. But let us remember the malevolence of the serpent in that garden at the beginning of the story – how the enemy of our souls the devil succeeded in dragging our race into the mire of his own sin – pride and disobedience. Here is a crime that humanity in general still perpetrates against its Creator; this weakness in our nature almost makes us victims of our base instincts, and without the assistance of the Holy One we shall not be able to rise very far. It is in this respect that the prophet Isaiah in our first reading today speaks of the vengeance of God – He created humanity to be good and has had to watch sin and death wreak havoc upon His greatest creature.
“Thrills the barren desert with rejoicing; the wilderness takes heart, and blossoms, fair as the lily. Blossom on blossom, it will rejoice and sing for joy; all the majesty of Lebanon is bestowed on it, all the grace of Carmel and of Saron. All alike shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Stiffen, then, the sinews of drooping hand and flagging knee; give word to the faint-hearted, Take courage, and have no fear; see where your Lord is bringing redress for your wrongs, God Himself, coming to deliver you! Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and deaf ears unsealed; the lame man, then, shall leap as the deer leap, the speechless tongue cry aloud. Springs will gush out in the wilderness, streams flow through the desert; ground that was dried up will give place to pools, barren land to wells of clear water; where the serpent had its lair once, reed and bulrush will show their green.”
Prophecy of Isaias, 35: 1-7 [link]
God has watched love be perverted, injustice triumph over justice. And so, says the prophet, retribution is coming, sin has had its day, salvation is now at hand. Isaiah with his gift of foresight can see the day of Christ, can see the astonishing miracles in the Galilee, can see above all the miracle of men and women turning back to their Creator in humility, the eyes of their unbelief opened, their ears deafened to the call of God now able to hear again, their lameness in walking with God according to the Law and the Commandments now ended, their tongues once unable to sing the praise of the Holy One now unstoppable.
So, then, we may theologise the deafness of the man in the gospel story, and say that humanity for the most part is deaf and dumb – deaf to the call of the Holy One and unable to speak well of Him, or to praise His holy Name. And here we have Christ overcoming the disability and bringing healing. The wilderness into which Adam our father was thrown into after his great sin, which he had to work with his hands to bring forth food and sustenance, with the sweat of his brow and long labour – into this wilderness now water gushes forth, streams in a wasteland, in the words of the prophet. What is this water gushing forth but that water that the prophet Ezechiel saw in a vision as gushing from the side of the Temple? What is this water but which Christ spoke about when He said, ‘Come to me all you who are thirsty, rivers of living water shall burst forth from within you?’ What is this water but which gushes from the side of Christ, grace from the living Shrine, pouring out upon a world of dryness and unbelief?
“Then He set out again from the region of Tyre, and came by way of Sidon to the sea of Galilee, right into the region of Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and dumb, with the prayer that He would lay His hand upon him. And He took him aside out of the multitude; He put His fingers into his ears, and spat, and touched his tongue; then He looked up to heaven, and sighed; ‘Ephpheta,’ He said, (that is, ‘Be opened’). Whereupon his ears were opened, and the bond which tied his tongue was loosed, and he talked plainly. And He laid a strict charge on them, not to speak of it to anyone; but the more He charged them, the more widely they published it, and were more than ever astonished; ‘He has done well,’ they said, ‘in all His doings; He has made the deaf hear, and the dumb speak.'”
Gospel of S. Mark, 7: 31-37 [link]
And so, take courage. Are you a sinner? Aren’t we all? Do you have a particular weakness and sinful habit? So many people struggle with these? We must take refuge in the One Who can irrigate the wilderness of our souls, rendering them fertile and able to take the seeding of the gospel and bring forth much crop. This is the Christian life: the constant struggle against the blindness and the deafness and the muteness that this world of sin brings upon us, weighing us down, keeping us from soaring aloft to our eternal destiny with God. All we can do is put our best feet forward and wait for the Holy One to come up to us and say Ephphatha. Be opened. And we shall be opened.
And this is the substance of our opening prayer or collect at the beginning of the Mass this weekend. The prayer calls us the adopted children of God, but prays that we may have true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. Note here that it doesn’t say that we already have true freedom and that we are guaranteed that everlasting inheritance. No, indeed, it’s all a work in progress, this undoing of blindness, of deafness, of dumbness. Some of us get there faster – we call them the Saints – the rest of us struggle all our lives. And so let us be constant in prayer, and active in charity. And let us ask for the assistance of our Lady and the Saints, that we may be eventually be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 