“Be Opened”

The Gospel is literally a quite touching story. People bring to Jesus a man who has hearing loss and an inability to communicate through sound-words. We formerly referred to such persons as “deaf and dumb” - how cruel. This man’s friends ask Jesus to lay hands on him which he does by putting his own fingers into the man’s ears while praying groanfully. He then prays, “Be open”. The crowd sees that Jesus has done all things well by fulfilling the expectations of what a Messiah should be doing.

Perhaps the difference between listening and hearing is that when we are listening we allow what we hear to change something within us or about us, or about others.  The Gospel calls this fellow, “a deaf person”. That is what others called him and so that was his name, his image, his defectiveness. In placing His fingers into the man’s ears, Jesus is asking the man to be open to whom Jesus names him. The challenge before the man then, would be to live that healed name.

Jesus redeems this man more than heals him. This is the work, the laboring, of Jesus to bring all of us out of our deafness, to lives of hearing deeply that to which Jesus asks us to listen. He did all things well, except He cannot force any of us to really listen and allow what we hear to bring us more into full creation. Listening to adjectives by which we define ourselves impedes our ability to hear. We have our own personal fingers in our ears and we can be so accustomed to not listening that we can assume nothing different is being spoken.

There is a challenge implied in our hearing what Jesus says about us. Change comes from listening, but change is frightening and so we hear the ever-present God saying to us as well, “Swim, fly, dive, dance, do not be afraid, things are going to be better if you hear who you really are.”  

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