"Be strong, fear not!"
23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
In this Sunday's first reading we hear the prophet Isaiah tell the people: "Be strong, fear not! Here is your God... he comes to save you." He then goes on to speak of the amazing things that God will do when he comes to save his people: the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will walk, the mute will speak.
Then, in the Gospel, we hear of Jesus doing one of those very things! Along the way of his journey people bring to Jesus a deaf man and ask Jesus to lay hands on him to heal him. Jesus, in his great compassion, doesn't just do so in front of everyone, when perhaps the man may be overwhelmed with the sounds of people's shock and amazement when his hearing is restored. So, Jesus takes the man aside, away from the crowd, and then does some demonstrative actions (spitting, putting his fingers in his ears), in a sense showing the man what he intended to do so as to prepare him. Finally, Jesus says, "Ephphatha!"— that is, "Be opened!", and we are told that the man's ears then opened.
While this story is certainly amazing and beautiful as a concrete example of Jesus' compassion in love and in action, did you know that at every Catholic baptism we continue this tradition? For adults, the morning before their baptism, and for children immediately after it, there is a prayer called the Ephphatha Rite. In it, the priest traces a cross over the person's ears and lips (demonstrative actions, like Jesus) and says, "May the Lord Jesus, who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak, grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips, to the glory and praise of God the Father."
So, like the Prophet Isaiah, the Church says to each one of us at the very beginning of our sacramental life, "Be strong, fear not! Here is your God... he comes to save you!" Our ears and lips are empowered to hear God's Word and to profess it to His glory! Let us pray that, this week, we may have the grace to hear God's word wherever it is being spoken to us in our lives. And let us pray that we may have the courage to profess with our lips that our God is here, and that he wishes to save and heal us.
Want to read the readings for this Sunday? Click here to find them.