Lesson from the Gospel Passage about The Healing of the Man Who Is Deaf and Mute- Mk. 7: 31-37

In this passage we see Jesus leaving the district of Tyre and going to the district of Decapolis where a man who is deaf and suffers from a speech impediment of some kind is brought to him by the crowd. Those who brought the man to Jesus beg him to heal their friend. It is what happens next that is the teaching moment of this passage in Mark’s Gospel.

Immediately, Jesus took the man apart from the crowd and put his finger into the man’s ears and then, spitting, touched the man’s tongue. He then prays, looking to heaven we are told that he groans and says to the man, “Ephphatha” which is one of the nine Aramaic words that survive and come down to us in the Gospels. It translates into English as “Be opened”. Immediately the man can hear and his speech impediment is gone. Then, as we see often in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus ‘ordered’ them not to tell anyone. But, of course, the more he orders them not to tell what was done, the more they want to proclaim it wherever they go. The people in this passage are no different than we are. If such a thing had happened to us, we would be so filled with joy and wonder that we wouldn’t be able to keep it to ourselves either. You can bet that Jesus knew this, too.

But the key element in the passage is that Jesus takes the man apart from the noise and commotion of the crowd to meet the man where he is personally and intimately. This one-on-one intimacy is necessary for our healing as well. For we, too, are often deaf to the Word of God, or are so distracted by the ‘crowds’ around us that we do not hear it, or we hear it in distorted ways. Our world is a Babel of many voices that assail us every moment of every day. We are constantly being bombarded by the harang of advertising on social media, TV, and radio. This noise of advertisement constantly tempts us to turn our ‘wants’ into imagined ‘needs’, and promises some form of instant relief from our lack of self-esteem. We are also often caught up in the confusion of competing ‘spiritualities’ and all of this makes it difficult to impossible for us to hear, or listen, to God’s word. What, then, is the lesson we can take from this?

The lesson is that we need to find the time and the space to remove ourselves from the noise and confusion of our daily lives. We need to draw apart to places of solitude and silence where we can have the focus and the quiet that is necessary to hear what God is speaking into our hearts every moment of every day, to hear and understand what he is saying to us in the scriptures. We need to draw apart to be with him alone so that we can experience the real depths of communion that God desires to have with us.

Jesus wants to draw us, like the man in this passage, into this space of solitude and silence with him. We must first recognize the noise and distractions that surround us every day and how they make us deaf to God’s word. That noise is the world attempting to block out God’s word, to make us deaf to it. John Bunyan’s great work Pilgrim’s Progress reveals this in many ways but most especially when his characters, Christian and Faithful, enter the town called Vanity Fair, which is a perfect metaphor for the world then and now. We must recognize the noise, the distracting temptations to our vanity that advertising and the current culture present to us as the ‘norm’. It is in drawing apart from the noise that we are more able to discern the difference between the clamor of the world and God’s word. This proper discernment is necessary for the eternal good of our souls, as well as for the good of our present lives.

The art of solitude and silence is necessary for the well-being of our hearts, minds, and souls. Jesus wants to draw us apart from the mad Babel and clamor of the crowds and the endless distractions of the present culture that prevent us from truly hearing God’s life-giving and saving word. He wants to open our ears and give us tongues that can express his word of love, forgiveness, and salvation clearly and joyfully to a world that remains deaf to it and suffers greatly because of that deafness.