Sunday Homily: Did Jesus Appoint a Prophet?

Once the deaf man was healed, what did he say?

There is an interesting twist to today’s miracle story. Jesus heals a deaf man and suddenly, he can hear and speak normally. Jesus makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.

The Bible Commentary from the Sacra Pagina series adds another way to say that last part of the sentence: He gives a voice to the voiceless. Jesus literally allows the man to speak who never spoke before. What do you think he says?

What does this story do to help us understand our faith? We can look at it with amazement that Jesus healed a deaf person, completely impossible medically at the time. We can also look for a deeper meaning.

Let me give you an example. What kind of life would a deaf person have in that time. His work would be limited and maybe he would have to rely on the generosity of others. His value to society might be rated in how productive he was to his neighbors. How productive would he be? However, Jesus sees him differently, he sees him as one of his father’s creations. Whether he is productive or not, is irrelevant. He is a child of God. He did nothing to earn this healing except to request it from Jesus.

He now has a voice

Now he has a voice, what would he say? If Jesus gave him the voice to speak plainly, he could now share his observations of what he understood and saw as a deaf person.

If you were there, what would you understand and what would you see? What would you hear the deaf person say now that he could speak and speak clearly? What new insights into the world around you would he share with you?

Now, imagine you are the deaf person who suddenly had your hearing and ability to speak restored. Imagine the world around you and how would you see it differently. What values would the society hold that you would think are silly. What would you see people fighting over that you realize is a waste of their energy and they are diverting their attention to something that is ultimately useless.

There is an interesting idea when we see stories like this. What if we see the wrong message? What if we focus on the fact that Jesus healed the deaf person and there is a deeper message that we do not see? What if the point is that Jesus gives us hearing to what we were deaf to in the first place. Maybe we are deaf to things because we are listening to the wrong things? I am not talking about music or TV or even gossip and other things we should avoid.

What would he say to you?

Maybe there is more to be discovered and we cannot experience it because our attention is focused on the wrong place. This man never had that opportunity and now he can share his observations of what we never noticed.

Whatever the case, this man will clearly come from a different perspective than those who had the advantages he did not. However, as Catholic teaching says, no person is without dignity. Clearly, he may have suffered rejection because of his disability but to treat him that way is a grave sin in Catholicism. To dismiss him because of his now healed disability to lose out on a great opportunity to learn what you can learn from no one else.

Someone planning to write a Catholic article for English speakers in the US on the Canção Nova website wrote that we have to give up all our dreams to follow God. I responded you could never write that to a US audience; living for our dreams is the key to being in this country.

What she actually meant is to give our dreams to God and let him mold them into his plans. So, how do we live our faith by understanding what others see but we do not? How do we seek to understand the world in ways that others do not.

Two weeks ago, we saw people leave Jesus because of one sentence he said about eating his body and drinking his blood and all but the apostles left. Why? Because at that point they understood the world was bigger than all those walking away. They understood that Christ was leading them to a new vision that those walking away could not comprehend so they walked away. They did not understand the vision but they understood there was a vision. They became open to a new way to look a things.

How is our perspective different?

If we are going to live our faith, we are going to see things differently and live by that new vision. That will lead us to see everyone differently than the world teaches us to see them. This is the kind of thing you can learn from the deaf man who was healed. You could even learn it from the deaf man if you could communicate to him prior to his healing.

Jesus calls us to see with the eyes of faith which means to see beyond what the world sees and to believe beyond what the world believes. That will be a real challenge but that is the point. Our call is to live with a vision the world who rejects Jesus cannot appreciate. That puts us at odds with the way of the world, however that is the point as well.

Jesus healed the deaf-mute man but he gave his neighbors a gift, a source of a new insight in the world around him and a fountain of information that would change people’s vision of the world around them. In their relationship with Christ they would now understand the world differently and that is exactly the point when we live our faith.   

photo:bangkoker via BigStockPhoto.com

Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA

The parish podcast is at https://catholicaudiomedia.com