Growing Deaf?

September 7, 2003 Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

The theme set forth in today’s scriptural reading is the danger of deafness as regards to hearing and heeding the Word of God. Those who allow themselves to become deaf to the whisperings of God are inviting tragedy by placing their relationship with God in danger.

Our Israelite forebears in the faith believed that those who suffered from deafness were lacking in wholeness. Indeed, such a person was regarded as somehow unclean and therefore incapable of full participation in the life of the community. Moreover, the restoration of hearing and wholeness to the deaf came to be associated with the coming of the messiah, the era of salvation (1st reading, Isaiah 35:4-7a). That Jesus had the power and the willingness to cure the deaf (gospel, Mk. 7:31-37) was a sure signal to his contemporaries that the messianic era was being realized in him and through him. Jesus’ cure of the deaf man was God’s way of making crooked ways straight at the dawn of a new era. The deafness Jesus cured was more than physical; Jesus also reached out to restore spiritual hearing and healing to all those who, for whatever reason, had grown deaf, insensitive to the word of God in whatever venue that word may have been spoken.

As we come together for weekly worship, our venue is a liturgical one. The word that is proclaimed challenges us to recognize that it is meant to be portable and translatable. To put it another way, the scriptures that we hear with our ears are to be carried away with us in our hearts and minds and memories. This being so, we will be able to revisit the word that is proclaimed on Sunday so as to be renewed in it and challenged and directed by that same word on every other day of the week.

Besides its most obvious liturgical venue, the word of God is proclaimed and challenges us to hear and heed it in other venues as well. The voice of God is ever present in word, in sacrament, in church teaching and in Christian insight. At times, however, the venues through which God speaks are unpleasant and we are tempted to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the poor, to their need for food, shelter, clothing and care. Those who profess to belong to the Lord must rouse themselves from deafness and be attentive to the Lord’s many and varied voices.