"Ephpheta, Be Thou Opened”

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Extraordinary Form

“Ephpheta, be thou opened,” Jesus said, after groaning, “and immediately his ears were opened, and the impediment to his speech was loosed, and he spoke clearly.” Come to any baptism–as we’ll have here on Saturday the eighteenth, and you’ll hear these words. We are born shackled by original sin, tied down and unable to act as God originally intended for us. Our ears cannot hear God’s word clearly, our eyes cannot see the face of Jesus in other people, our tongues cannot give right praise to the Father. But God’s grace working in the sacraments of Baptism and Penance can change that for the better. We can be remade into the image of Christ, the very image of God the Father.

But while we are on this earth, our imitation of Christ is too often in the word right before Jesus’s miraculous cure. We groan. The verb in this form is used only here in the NT. Elsewhere we find it most clearly in St. Paul’s letters to Rome and to Corinth. Paul characterizes our prayer as groaning as we await our full adoption as children of God. We groan as we await the call to put on our heavenly dwelling. We groan as we wait for our mortality to be swallowed up by the life of Christ.

I suspect that every one of us here who has been through adolescence has had something happen that caused us either to groan like Jesus or to want to do so. Well, let’s not do it now, but please understand that both Our Lord and St. Paul give you permission to do that. It might be something as personal as the death of a parent, child or friend. It might be something as cosmic as hurricane Harvey sweeping away whole families, flooding whole communities, or it may be the terroristic acts that grieve us down to the depths of our souls. It’s ok to groan, as long as we are hefting that as a prayer to God, a prayer given in union with Our Lord. God hears those prayers, and answers them either by mitigating the problem or by giving us the grace to deal with it. If you need more words than your groaning, then read or sing psalms 18 and 77.

We groan because the world is in a mess due to sin–original and actual. Of all the problems humans face, sin is the most difficult, most pervasive, most intractable. And there is no human solution for it. Nothing we can do will pull us out of the pit we dug for ourselves as a race and as individuals. Only the grace of the Blessed Trinity, made available to us by the passion, death and resurrection of Our Lord, only that can pull humans back on the path to eternal life. And what is standing in the way of making that grace available to all the world?

To answer this, let’s look at the situation about the year forty AD. The followers of Jesus, known as disciples of The Way, were scattered in communities throughout Palestine and Syria, and maybe even in Arabia. Where there were synagogues, the original disciples had gone to preach and heal and baptize. A few God-fearing Gentiles in those areas had also been baptized, but by and large the Christian communities were treated as a Jewish sect, sometimes tolerated, sometimes persecuted. A diminutive Jew named Saul had experienced a vision of Jesus and had morphed from persecutor to passionate disciple of the crucified and risen Messiah. In today’s reading he calls himself the “least of the apostles,” and even uses the Greek word for “miscarriage” to describe his recruitment to the ministry. In other words, he considered himself of all the apostles the “runt of the litter.”

But this is the man who was singled out by the church at Antioch to carry the message of Christ into Anatolia, and ultimately to Macedonia and Greece, and even, we think, to Rome and Spain. He would never have taken this on himself. Being an apostle is not something you anoint yourself to do. Paul was summoned by God to preach to Jew and Gentile alike, and the result was the spreading of the Gospel over the entire Mediterranean area.

Today we face a world that by and large has two attitudes toward the Gospel. The first is an attitude of indifference. People are too engrossed in gossiping on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Snapchat to care about or consider their eternal destiny. The second is an attitude of hostility. Let’s face it, lots of people are in love so much with proximate goods that they are unwilling to face Ultimate Good, our God. When the beauty of the human person is warped into pornographic images or narratives, when the conviviality associated with a glass of wine for dinner becomes addictive alcoholism, when the joy of the marital act is perverted into something other than union between husband and wife, the human mind and will are degraded into what the Creator never intended. Both kinds of folk need to be converted in order to live a truly joyful existence. God will never give up on anyone until the last breath is taken, but we need the Catholic Church to have a haven for the wounded souls who turn toward God, maybe even not knowing how to latch hold of Him.