Sept 9, 2018—23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
For today’s mass our deacon preached on Jesus’ healing of a
deaf and “speech-impedimented” (i.e., dumb) man.
First, he noted that the man who was healed is not named in
the story, and that this was because he represents all of us, who are all deaf
and (generally pretty) dumb, and need to “be opened” (“ephphatha!”). This claim
might be surprising insofar as it seems to ignore and perhaps undermine the
primary, historical sense of the text (is the deaf and dumb man merely representative?). I guess he
probably read this interpretation in a book and ran with it, fair enough, but
given that it clearly is an interpretation of the text and not something actually
derivable from it, he might have done well to clearly present it as such.
Anyway, most of us actually can hear and speak, so obviously
the deacon was talking about not the literal sense of the reading – again, to
my recollection he pretty much ignored that – but one of its spiritual senses.
And in itself that’s fine. Reading for a spiritual sense has always – since at
least, say, Jesus? – been a standard Catholic way to read scripture. The
standard, traditional distinction is four senses: the literal/historical sense
plus three spiritual senses: the allegorical (connecting the Old and New
Testaments), the moral (teaching us how to act and live), and the anagogical
(teaching about the world to come).
If we turn to Thomas Aquinas’s Catena aurea (“Golden Chain” of patristic commentaries) for the
day’s reading (see Lectio 4 for Mark
ch.7), we can see plenty of examples of spiritual readings. Chrysostom talks
about Christ’s use of his body – fingers and spittle – as indicating the divine
power which followed from the union of his human body with his divine nature
and as showing forth in Christ the true perfection of human nature that had
been wounded in Adam and his descendants. Bede says that Christ looked up to
heaven when healing the man to show that it is from above that the healing of
all our infirmities is to be sought and that he sighed not because he, who is
the giver of all things with the Father, needed to ask anything from the
Father, but to give us an example of how to invoke divine aid. Chrysostom says
he also sighed out of compassion for the miseries into which human nature has
fallen. Bede says:
The one who is deaf and dumb is
he who has neither ears for hearing the word of God, nor opens his mouth in
order to speak them; for such as these it is necessary that those who speak
already, and have learned to hear the divine utterance, bring them to the Lord
to be healed.
And according to Jerome:
But the one who merits to be
healed is always led apart, from turbulent thoughts, and disordered acts, and
disordered conversation. And the fingers, which are put in his ears, are the
words or gifts of the Spirit, of whom it is said: ‘the finger of God is here.’
And the spittle is the divine wisdom, which dissolves the fetters on the lips
of the human race, so that it may say: ‘I believe in God the Father almighty’
and the rest. And looking up to heaven he sighed, that is, he taught us to
sigh, and in heaven to set up the treasures of our hearts: since through sighs
of inmost compunction the worthless joy of the flesh is purged.
Returning to our deacon’s preaching, he presented a somewhat
different, more earth-focused interpretation of Jesus’ healing. He focused on
the word “ephphatha” – “be opened” – and unfolded to the congregation what he
took to be the real message of the reading: not so much, ask Christ to open our
ears so that we can hear, and maybe even hear and take in and receive and
accept the word of God, etc.; but rather be open to people, to all kinds of
people, whatever they’re like, however different they are, whatever they think,
however they live. Be open and welcoming to the world. Don’t criticize or speak
negatively about anyone or anything. That’s the point, according to our deacon,
that Mark was trying to make with this story about Jesus.
Unfortunately I think this interpretation fails three
important tests: first, the consistency/hypocrisy test; second, the what-about-Jesus
test; and then finally, the basic where-are-you-getting-this-from test.
First, it seems clear enough that the deacon was saying that
it is wrong to be closed-minded, to
not welcome everyone unconditionally. So he was criticizing and speaking
negatively about certain people who are not properly open-minded and
unconditionally welcoming. That is, he was enjoining others to do one thing
while himself doing the opposite, which is a form of inconsistency called
hypocrisy. (It also seemed an especially gross admonition to level at the
congregation, given the big (elephant-in-the-room!) public scandal featured in
the current news cycle involving misguided policies and decisions and long
series of malicious acts of pressuring people not to speak out, negatively and
critically, about sexually abusive clerics, etc.!) It’s necessary to understand
the laws of contradiction and excluded middle here: When you say one thing,
anything, you are implicitly negating its opposite. And even if you want to get
clever and deny that you mean to
affirm one thing and deny the opposite, and instead claim that you can and do
affirm some proposition as well as its opposite, or without denying its
opposite, as if there’s some middle way, then you’re still obviously denying
and criticizing the claim that you can’t
do that.
Second, Jesus obviously (tolle,
lege!) spent lots of time criticizing people and speaking negatively about
things. So our deacon used his opportunity to preach on the gospel to
effectively condemn the Jesus of the gospels and substitute his own superior
form of righteousness. Preachers do this pretty commonly and no doubt mostly
unwittingly (or should I say, witlessly?), but still, it’s wrong.
And third, what the deacon said simply had no basis in any
actual intelligent, open-minded, receptive reading of the gospel. He just used
a word from the gospel, ‘open,’ and then said what he wanted to say. He ignored
the text while pretending that he was explaining to us its meaning. If you’ve
actually listened to the gospel, paid attention, and care about what it says, that’s
just irritating – although again, he has the excuse that it’s a pretty common
practice.
I could also mention that proclaiming a blanket condemnation
of anyone who is critical or speaks negatively looks rather like the dirty
trick of poisoning the well. [For an example of this trick being used against
Jesus, see John 10:20: “Many of them said, He must be possessed; he is a
madman; why do you listen to him?” For an example of a pope using this trick... do your own research!] Anyone who might have been inclined to be
critical or speak negatively about the deacon’s claim (i.e., the blanket condemnation
of criticism) would be automatically condemned according to the standard of
that claim, regardless of his reasons and regardless of the legitimacy of his
criticism. So the idea would be, “Don’t listen to that guy – he’s being
critical!” To which the rejoinder would be, “Right, I’m being critical, and so
are you; but unlike you I’m not claiming there’s something wrong with that, so
I’m not being hypocritical.” And if
we’re trying to be followers of Christ, Jesus criticized lots of people for
lots of things, but it seems to me there’s no one he teed off on more than
hypocrites (see especially Matthew 23), so hypocrisy should probably be high on
our list of things to try to avoid.
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