NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 23 in Ordinary Time, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time. We continue with Mark's Gospel, but unfortunately, yet again, we've jumped over a chunk. You remember last time we left Jesus having engaged in debate with the scribes and Pharisees who come down from Jerusalem to inspect, as it were, his re-evangelization of the northern part of Israel, the part where there had been a mixture between the people of Israel and the kings of the pagans whom Joshua had not thrown out. We were seeing how the real Joshua was here and how he was giving a definitive interpretation of the law, and rather holding back the more restrictive account of the law that the scribes and Pharisees wanted to impose as part of their new evangelization. He was like going back to first principles in a much freer way. He then moves on — this is still part of his visitation of the north — and the first thing that happens, the reason I'm going to talk about this is because it's important for our second passage, is he goes and hides out in the region of Tyre, the northern part of Israel by the sea. He enters a house and did not want anyone to know he was there, yet he could not — the translation gives — escape notice, but in Greek it says "hide." And there's a little hint here: "Truly, O God of Israel, thou art a hidden God," and yet the one who is coming in can't even hide. So that's an important little hint of what's going to go on. And then we're going to have two different castings out of demons — not healings, strictly speaking — but because in both cases it's a demon that's involved. And the two: one is the Syrophoenician woman and her daughter, and the other is the man with an impediment in his speech, the deaf man with an impediment in his speech. They're both strictly parallel to things that happened earlier amongst Jewish people. So it's worth following that. There's something strict going on here. You'll remember when the woman whose little daughter has an unclean spirit immediately heard about him and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. Now, that healing is going to be done, and I'll follow that in a second. But I just want you to remember two women curings that happened before the feeding of the 5,000. The first was the woman with a flux of blood, the woman who was bleeding, who comes and touches Jesus's cloak — the hem of his cloak, as it were — clandestinely, to get him to work a miracle while he's on the way to cure a little girl. And he turns around and cures her, recognizes that she has been cured by him, tells her that her faith is strong, and then he goes to the house of the little girl, using his cure of her to give faith to the synagogue director, the synagogue official whose little daughter is ill, and then when they find her, they find her laid out on a bed as if dead — but he tells her to get up. So here we have that, but as a two-in-one. It's the woman whose little daughter has an unclean spirit, which usually means that there's something wrong between the two of them. And he says to her in a provocative way, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." So here the Lord, the God of Israel, has come amongst his own, and he's saying to her, don't let the little dogs — you know, I'm not going to give the little dogs food first. And she replies to him, and this is the beautiful reply. She basically quotes the psalm of David, Psalm 17, the last verses. So "even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Basically she's quoting a psalm to him which says, "May their bellies be filled with what you have stored up for them, may their children have more than enough, may they leave something over to their little ones." So basically she's addressing him as if he were the Son of David. And the verse after that says, "As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake I shall be satisfied beholding your likeness." So she's got very strong faith. She knows she's talking to the Son of David. She quotes David at him, and he says to her — not as our translations say, "for saying that you may go," but — "on account of this word, you may go; the demon has left your daughter." In other words, because you have quoted David to me, the Son of David, knowing what you are doing. So she went home and found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone. So we get the lying on the bed, but the demon gone. So the two miracles of the hemorrhaging woman and Jairus's daughter in one go, and the Syrophoenician woman and her daughter in one go. We're getting, if you like, the pagan version happening at the same time. And this is a double act of healing that we're going to see now as we have the parallel. The parallel here was with the paralytic man whose friends carried him in and lowered him through the roof, so that Jesus could heal him. So now we come to today's Gospel. "Then he returned from the region of Tyre." So he's coming back into Israel, in a mixed group where it's not clear who's pagan and who's gentile. "And went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis." So he's heading for the Galilee, a Jewish region, but he's in the region of the Decapolis. The Decapolis, if you remember, was where the Gadarene demoniac whom he had healed — whom he had cured earlier in the Gospel — had gone around preaching after he had been set free. He went around telling everybody what wonderful things the Lord had done for him, so that people were amazed. And so the people in that region had presumably heard of him. And perhaps this… is part of the spillover from the healing, the preaching of the former Gadarene demoniac. So they brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. Now please notice: the request to lay his hand on him, which was the same as Jairus's request concerning his daughter, presupposed that the problem was a problem of possession. That was the kind of touch that you did for a possessed person. They weren't saying this is a person who is sick; they were saying this is a person who is possessed. And Jesus' activity here is curious. There are many mysteries in this passage, very many very subtle mysteries. I bet you I haven't caught all of them. I'm going to try and catch some. So he takes him away aside in private, away from the crowd. So the suggestion that there is something evil that goes on in the crowd. There is something, if you like, about crowd contagion that keeps spirits like this going. There's something about this person's relationship to the crowd that is going to be key to his being brought to life. He is, as we all are, a thoroughly mimetic person. And if you live in a mixed world with some holiness like in Israel but also some demons like in this part of the town, then there's going to be a mixture of things wrong with you. So he takes him away in private, away from the crowd, and he puts his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. It doesn't say — notice, it doesn't say — he spat on his fingers and touched his tongue. It's slightly… the three uses of spat in the New Testament: the first here, the second later in Mark where he spits on a person's eyes, and the third in John where he spits on the ground to make clay to rub in the man's eyes. In each case the use of spitting is slightly different. So, puts his fingers into his ears. What's going on here? "Close your ears from hearing of bloodshed." This is from Isaiah. I hope I've got that right. Yes, it is: closing your ears from hearing of bloodshed. And your mouth from — I forget what the term is from the mouth — closing your ears from hearing of bloodshed. He's actually apparently, if you like, that doesn't sound as though he's opening the ears. He's shutting out what comes from outside, from the crowd, the evil, and the tongue he's going to touch. But first of all, he spits. This appears to be — how would you say — a ritual thing. There's a very odd passage in the book of Numbers where Moses asks for Miriam, his sister, who has been given leprosy because of her challenging who got to speak on behalf of the Lord. And the Lord says to Moses: even if her father had spit in her face, she would still have to go out for seven weeks for impurity. In other words, there's the suggestion that spitting is an expulsive gesture. So he's spitting, and that's part of the rite — the exorcism rite — is spitting out the devil, and touches his tongue. It says in the Book of Wisdom that if you blow on a flame, it's a spark, it'll grow into a flame. If you spit on it, it'll put it out. So here he goes, putting it out, touching the tongue. Then, looking up to heaven, he sighs and says to him, that is, "Be opened." Okay. Well, we have this rather odd and rather beautiful enactment of a quote from the Book of Job here, and I'm going to take a little time with this because it's very beautiful, and it shows something of how people would read a passage like that in times past. You see, there's a beautiful passage in Job that I'm going to read as well as I can to you. It says — this is Job 9:27 to 35 — he says: "And if I should say I will forget to speak, bowing down to the face I will groan. I quake in all my limbs, for I know that thou will not leave me alone as innocent. But since I am ungodly, why have I not died? For if I should wash myself with snow and purge myself with pure hands, thou hast thoroughly plunged me in filth, and my garment had abhorred me. For thou art not man like me, with whom I could contend, that we might come together to judgment. Would that he, our mediator, were present, and a reprover, and one who should hear the cause between both! Let him remove his rod from me, and let not his fear terrify me. So shall I not be afraid, but I will speak, for I am not thus conscious of guilt." So you have here the plea, as it were, of the demonized man put into the mouth of Job. But here we have present the redeemer, the mediator, who is going to touch him — who is, in the words of this thing, who bends down to his face. This one is going to look up to heaven and groan, because he's the mediator, and then touch his face, and he's going to be able to speak. So we have Jesus being the mediator, but not as one of vengeance — as one who is doing, in a sense, the reverse of what is talked about in Job. But as the mediator, he's enabling the person to speak. So it's a beautiful little enactment that we're getting here in Mark's Gospel. And he says to him then, "Ephphatha" — be opened. This is probably from Hebrew rather than from Aramaic, because that is a verb in Hebrew. And immediately his ears were opened and his tongue was released — he said the block was released — and he spoke plainly. Again, this is a beautiful thing. So let's remember: what is it that has "ears but cannot hear and a tongue but cannot speak?" Well, it's an idol. Jesus is in idol territory. Psalm 135 has the famous quote about "with ears they cannot hear, with tongue they cannot speak." So here is someone who in pagan territory is semi-idolized, semi-turned into an idol, and now is being brought to life, brought to the possibility of speaking. "And his tongue was loosened," said the text — the block was undone. It's the loosing of the block. So it's the same word as binding and loosing. Jesus is enacting, even before the power is given to the authorities, the binding and the loosing. Here he is binding the evil one and loosing the tongue. What does this mean? That whereas when he'd been doing the same amongst the people of Israel it was talking about sins being forgiven and faith, here it's about driving out demons — because they're half-demonized — but bringing to life, because that's what undoing demons does. And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and it says he spoke plainly. It's the word orthos. It's a beautiful little hint, because in the book of Deuteronomy, this is chapter 18, the Lord speaks to Moses, who tells him that the people are right: they speak rightly to him. They speak aright — orthos. And then he says, "I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people. I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command." In other words, this semi-idol who has been brought to life bears witness to the fact that this is the prophet whom God had promised to Moses. And of course the word starts to run around, and the people speak with more abundance than Jesus would like at this moment. He orders them not to tell people about it. I'm honestly not sure why that. But the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. Maybe that was his intent — I don't know. They were astounded beyond measure. So this is the fulfillment of the Isaianic prophecies about the wilderness bursting into life, into flower, into song, into dance at the arrival of the Lord. The one who is hidden is coming into their midst. He has done everything well. They don't realize it, but they're announcing that the one who has done everything well, the one who made all things and saw that they were good — the Creator — is alive. He even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. In other words, idols are a thing of the past. Humans who are bound down to idols are being turned into daughters and sons of God. And so Jesus continues with his more-than-Joshua, greater-than-Moses, the Lord coming into the midst of his people to reveal who he is. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.