Mass Notes: Ephphatha!

Sept 9, 2018—23^rd 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.

Mass Notes: Inside Out

Mass Notes for Sept 2, 2018 (22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

At this Sunday’s mass, the gospel reading was from Mark and the preaching focused on the following passage:

Then Jesus called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that [by] going in can defile them [sic], but the things that come out of a person are what defile them [sic].” Mark 7:14-15

So it’s really apparent, that the lectionary’s grammar’s errant. Anyway. In Greek and Latin:

14  καὶ προσκαλεσάμενος πάλιν τὸν ὄχλον ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς: ἀκούσατέ μου πάντες καὶ σύνετε.  15  οὐδέν ἐστιν ἔξωθεν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου εἰσπορευόμενον εἰς αὐτὸν ὃ δύναται κοινῶσαι αὐτόν: ἀλλὰ τὰ ἐκ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐκπορευόμενά ἐστιν τὰ κοινοῦντα τὸν ἄνθρωπον.

14 Et advocans iterum turbam, dicebat illis: “Audite me omnes, et intellegite. 15 Nihil est extra hominem introiens in eum, quod possit eum coinquinare, sed quæ de homine procedunt, illa sunt, quæ coinquinant hominem.”

So a better translation (certainly better grammar):

And again calling the crowd, he said to them: Listen to me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a man entering into him that can defile him (or make him common, bring him into common use), but what proceeds from a man, those things are what defile a man.”

The next verse, 16 – omitted in many editions – is perhaps worth mentioning: “If someone has ears for hearing, let him hear.” In other words, pay attention, think: the meaning here might not be obvious, as indeed it was not to Jesus’ disciples, as we can read in the ensuing passage.

Preaching on the passage above, Fr. D put up his gloss on the overhead, which read something like: “Holiness is not about what is outside, it’s about what is inside.” That, he assured us, is what Jesus was saying in the day’s gospel reading. But is that right?

He went on to apply his claim to liturgical postures – the rubrics, the red print in the missal. He talked about how the postures prescribed have changed from time to time – he reminisced about the battles of the 70’s – but assured us that it’s really not something to be concerned about: We should just do what we’re told to do and understand that it really doesn’t matter, because what matters is holiness and, again, “Holiness is not about what is outside, it’s about what is inside.”

But there are serious problems here. First, some questions about the liturgy: Is Father saying that there is no rhyme or reason behind the postures? that the postures don’t actually mean anything, aren’t meant by their nature to express anything? that in themselves they are meaningless and that by assuming them we are merely (supposed to be?) carrying out acts of blind obedience to arbitrarily prescribed ritual? That seemed to be what he was implying.

But are a man’s worship postures something that “enters into him,” or something that “proceeds from him”? In a sense they may be the former – they are received by him as prescriptions – but as enacted they are certainly also the latter, something proceeding from him. So are they really supposed to proceed from him merely as acts of blind obedience to the inscrutable, arbitrary prescriptions of whimsical liturgical legislators? I think not. I think such an attitude is in fact a corruption of the meaning of liturgy. And preaching so as to encourage an anti-intellectual, anti-understanding, nominalistic view of the liturgy may well be something that “proceeds from a man and defiles him [the preacher].” And when this preaching is received, it defiles also the understanding of those who receive it, as well as defiling their consequent participation in the liturgy, rendering it vain, empty, inert, mindless, heartless. I think that is the actual claim that Jesus is making in the gospel, about the scribes and Pharisees’ vain worship through observance of the precepts of men, while their hearts are far from God.

When Fr. D announced that Jesus was telling us that holiness is about what is inside, not about what is outside, it seems he failed to consider a very obvious question: So what is the relationship between what is inside and what is outside?

If we look at what Jesus actually says, it seems clear that Father’s simplistic dichotomy won’t do at all. Jesus is not talking about what is inside versus outside a man, he is talking about what enters a man – through his mouth – versus what proceeds from him. What really matters is what proceeds from him, Jesus says, or as the lectionary translates it, “things that come out of a person” – so Jesus says pretty much the opposite of what Father claimed! Of course what is inside the heart matters too, but it matters precisely in that it is from the evil thoughts of the heart that all kinds of evil come out: v.20: “what goes out (L. exit) of a man, that defiles him.” Jesus mentions (vv.22-23) fornication, theft, murder, etc. – and (ironically) also foolishness (ἀφροσύνη, stultitia), for example, the foolishness of saying “what’s inside matters and what’s outside doesn’t.”

Omitted from the lectionary reading are v.18-19: “Do you not understand that nothing outside a man entering into him can defile him? Because it does not enter into his heart…”

In Thomas Aquinas’s ‘golden chain’ (Catena aurea) collection of patristic commentaries on Mark’s gospel, he gives the following gloss:

It is said “into his heart,” that is, into the mind, which is the principal part of the soul, from which the whole life of man depends; wherefore it is according to it that it is necessary to esteem a man clean or defiled; and thus those things that do not enter into the mind cannot produce defilement. [And likewise, it would seem, those things that do not enter into the mind – like a sound understanding of the liturgy or of the scriptures – cannot produce holiness.] Foods, therefore, since they do not enter into the mind, by their nature cannot defile a man [or make him holy]; but the inordinate use of foods, which comes from disorderedness of the mind, pertains to a man’s defilement.

Finally, in regard to foolishness (stultitia), I think it worth noting the two interpretations Thomas lists. Foolishness is “injustice towards neighbor.” Or it is when someone “does not discern rightly about God: for it is opposed to wisdom, which is a grasp of divine things.” Now it’s not often (maybe ever!) you’ll hear preaching against foolishness – more often, perhaps, you’ll hear preaching that is foolishness – but it’s important to recognize that foolishness really is one of the things that we are required to avoid, by a concerted effort of the will. Indulging in it is unjust towards our neighbors and alienates us from God. It is one of the things that defile us from the inside out.

New Parish – Liturgy as communal meal?

My family and I have been at our new parish in the Calgary diocese for around a month now and I guess the culture shock is starting to wear off. For the past couple of years we had been at a small parish in the Ottawa area where the pastor’s focus was on being a faithful priest and celebrating mass reverently and obediently. His homilies weren’t brilliant, sometimes rather ham-fisted, but he at least really did aim to humbly and frankly preach the truths of the Catholic faith. There was no music, which meant we didn’t have to put up with the usual, liturgically inappropriate music – bad Catholic hymns from the 70's or dumb contemporary protestant P&W pop songs – that is standard at most parishes, and instead there was a healthy amount of silence.

At our first mass at our new parish, by contrast, it felt like the priest was doing his best ‘priestly’ impression of Rockin’ Rob (or whatever his name was) the rodeo clown, whose groaner jokes and antics we’d semi-enjoyed the preceding afternoon at a local rodeo. Communion was reminiscent of the wild-cow milking – do they really need so many (extraordinary) ministers of (Holy) Communion? – and just prior to the conclusion of mass, advertisements are displayed on the overhead projectors while the priest unfailingly (so far!) wanders around in search of visitors, asking them “Where y’all from? Did you come to see our smoke? It’s not ours, y’ know, it’s from BC! YUK YUK!” He's a nice guy, as people say, but not my style, so adjust we must (or go in search of a less-convenient better-pastored parish? – ‘tis an option of course).

On a theological note, during our first mass the priest made some fuzzily heartwarming comments about the Eucharistic liturgy as the celebration of a ‘community/communal meal.’ I guess some people think that’s what Holy Communion is, or is supposed to be, even though it’s obviously not that. It seems to me that anybody who thinks it is that has clearly never been to a real community meal. At a real community meal you get a plate, you fill it, you probably also get a drink and a fork and a seat, often a second helping and dessert, and you mingle and chat while you enjoy your meal with your community. Holy Communion is just nothing like that.

In any case, the idea of the Eucharistic liturgy as a communal meal evidently has some currency. In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius, 2000 – see ch. 3), Joseph then-Cardinal Ratzinger argues that this common view is a fruit of the extremely prevalent post-Vatican II reorientation of the celebrating priest “toward the people” (versus populum), “in such a way that priest and people looked at each other and formed together the circle of the celebrating community.” Ratzinger notes that Vatican II itself says nothing about the priest “turning toward the people,” but also that this reordering of liturgical worship “brings with it a new idea of the essence of the liturgy – the liturgy as a communal meal.” He claims that the embrace of this view of the liturgy is based on a misunderstanding of its alleged historical precedents in the Roman liturgy and on an inaccurate view of what ancient communal meals, including the Last Supper, were actually like.

More importantly he notes that “the Eucharist that Christians celebrate really cannot be adequately described by the term ‘meal’” – a point which, as I claimed above, is obvious! “True, the Lord established the new reality of Christian worship within the framework of a Jewish (Passover) meal, but it was precisely this new reality [of Christian worship], not the meal as such, that he commanded us to repeat.”

Ratzinger then describes how the real significance of the Eucharistic liturgy became obscured and fell into oblivion, so that it is “the meal” which has become “the normative idea of liturgical celebration for Christians.” But if we get beyond this implausible normative idea, which priests and others still try to sell, the reality of what has happened with the priest’s “turn-to-the-people,” Ratzinger argues, is quite different:

“In reality what happened was that an unprecedented clericalization came on the scene. Now the priest – the ‘presider’, as they now prefer to call him – becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing. Not surprisingly, people try to reduce this newly created role by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the ‘creative’ planning of the liturgy to groups of people who like to, and are supposed to, ‘make their own contribution’. Less and less is God in the picture. More and more important is what is done by the human beings who meet here and do not like to subject themselves to a ‘pre-determined pattern’. The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. [Fittingly, our new parish also features a sacred garden with a (self-enclosed, circular) labyrinth!] In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself.”

So says Ratzinger. Now to be fair, there’s more than one way for a group to become closed in on itself, but it strikes me, unfortunately, that liturgy is critically important, and that Ratzinger’s description here is all too accurate for many a parish.

To conclude, community meals are great. The Eucharist makes for a lousy community meal. But that's okay because, whatever your priest might say, that's not what the Eucharist essentially is or is essentially supposed to be anyway.