Two
reflections from today’s Gospel about Jesus healing the deaf man:
1.
Jesus comes to heal us. In today’s
Gospel Jesus brings wholeness to the man by restoring his hearing. We too carry
within ourselves parts of ourselves that are not whole or things that we are
deaf to. Jesus shows that He is stronger than human frailty and that He came
into the world to transform the world and to make all things new. What are our insecurities that we carry with
us? Have we asked Jesus to bring healing to our brokenness? While most of us
are able to physically hear, what voices are we deaf to in our world? Have we asked Jesus to open our ears to hear
those in need?
2.
Growing closer to God affects our bodies
and souls. Jesus could easily have opened the man’s ears with a blink of an
eye but instead he put his finger in the man’s ear, spit on his hand and
touched his saliva to the man’s tongue, and then looked up to heaven and said ‘be opened’. Why all the work and germs?
Jesus becoming incarnate (in flesh) and creating us as human beings reveals to
us that our path to heaven and wholeness is not to discard our human experience
but to direct it to God so that the physical enhances our spiritual lives and vise
versa. This requires building good physical and spiritual habits and practicing
discipline. In our Faith we practice these habits when we baptize with water, anoint
with pungent oils, and process in lines to receive Jesus’ presence in bread and
wine. We use physical things to reveal to us the deeper spiritual realities of
life. Problems develop in life when we separate the physical and spiritual or
only focus on one over the other.
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