Encountering Jesus: The Twelfth Sunday After Trinity (August 18, 2024)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

On the side, I really enjoy teaching Informal and Formal Logic to homeschool students during the week. I teach online, once-a-week. And one of the basic distinctions in logic is between deductive and inductive logic. Deduction is when you go from a universal statement down to a specific statement; you use a general principle to draw a specific inference: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. Inductive reasoning, on the other hand, is when we collect specific data points in order to create a more complete picture. If you like Sherlock Holmes, he uses inductive reasoning to figure out who committed the crime. In the world of philosophy, there’s a similar divide between the analytic philosophers who were known for their highly ordered, top-down approach and the phenomenologists who started with experience to piece together answers to philosophical questions. And we should say, neither deductive nor inductive reasoning are better than the other; we use deductive reasoning in theology, but inductive reasoning might be used in a Bible study or when conducting science experiments. They’re both tools that help us better understand, and therefore better appreciate reality. Now last week, I would argue that we took a rather deductive look at the Gospel: Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, was buried, and rose again on the third day; we are part of the world, therefore, the Gospel is for us. That’s helpful because we experienced it more in an analytic, deductive mode. But today, our readings, especially from St. Mark put us in a direct encounter with the Gospel and so I think we should attempt to build an inductive account of the Gospel by placing ourselves in the shoes of the deaf man with the speech impediment.

In our reading, this is who is brought to Jesus, a man deprived of the ability to hear and who cannot speak properly. Now, in any culture, this is a major disability, but perhaps our modern situation obfuscates just how serious a condition this would have been because we have a text and image-based culture. Closed-captioning and text-messaging can make communication much easier for someone in this condition; but in the Palestine of Jesus’ day, the culture was primarily oral and aural making this an incredibly isolating condition. Because of this, the man offers us a concise picture of the condition that we are in because of original and actual sin: it leaves us deaf because we cannot hear the truth without mixing error, and we cannot convey the truth with our actions. And of course, the really insidious thing about sin is that it only ever brings us isolation; it promises us satisfaction, it promises us community, but it renders authentic human relationship impossible. Sin poses problems that, without an external aid, are insurmountable for us.

And so Jesus receives this man and note all the things he does for him: Jesus places his fingers in the man’s ears, spits, touches his tongue, looks up to heaven and groans, and sighs as he says, “Be opened.” Now of course, Jesus could have just said, “be healed” and the man would have been healed; he’s done this elsewhere. But in this story, the material nature of the healing is remarkable; Jesus chooses to heal this way to display his power over malady by touching. While God certainly can and does directly intervene in many of our lives, like he did with St. Paul on the Road to Damascus, he also loves to use causes to bring us to himself: the words of Scripture, Sacraments of water, bread, and wine, the proclaimed Word of God, the actions of a friend, or even a traumatic experience as ways of bringing about healing to our souls. And so Jesus says “be opened” to the man, but he also says it to us: be opened to hear and to speak, unlocking a new horizon of possibilities for our relationship with God and for authentic human connection. Be opened is God’s call to us to be free from sin and alive to him.

Once the man receives this healing, note how he his reaction: Jesus tells him not to tell anyone; “but the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it.” They couldn’t keep it to themselves; the man’s life has been so transformed that it becomes saturated with praise. Meanwhile, the crowds looking on are astonished, saying, “He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.” This description hearkens back to the messianic promise in Isaiah 35:5–6 “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, And the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, And the tongue of the dumb sing: For in the wilderness shall waters break out, And streams in the desert.” The picture Isaiah is painting is what will happen when the Messiah delivers the people from oppression. The Messiah has come and he has liberated us. The question is how do we respond: not only with our lips, but in our lives, as we say during Evening Prayer. Through lives of praise and doxology. We can’t keep it to ourselves, it overflows into our interactions with our fellow parishioners, with our family members, with our friends and neighbors.

It’s important to remember what St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:4–5 “And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;” The deaf man highlights who we were and who we would be without God’s grace. But this encounter with Jesus produces a change: he can hear and speak. Baptism, Holy Communion, Scripture, prayer, works of mercy, and works of charity are all ways that we encounter Jesus and, if we’re willing to receive the grace that he offers us, they won’t leave us unchanged. We’re a new people because of what Christ has done for us. Are we willing to live out that reality?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.