Why we all need to have ‘Ephphatha’ spoken over us

In this gospel, in an episode unique to Mark’s account, Jesus uses his spittle to heal a man who is both deaf and dumb. In direct imitation, the old pre-Vatican II baptismal rite involved the priest touching the ears and mouth of the child being baptised with his own saliva, using the very same Aramaic word, Ephphatha – be opened that Jesus uses in the gospel. The practice would now doubtless be condemned by Health and Safety, but it was a powerful reminder that, through original sin, we are born with an in-built resistance to both hearing and speaking God’s Word. We all need to have Ephphatha spoken over us, if we are to hear and speak that Word truthfully and fearlessly to a largely deaf world.

The bulk of Jesus’ miracles are miracles of healing but their purpose and meaning, whatever the actual malady involved, is the restoration of something more precious than physical well-being. The gospels teem with countless individuals who, whether because of sickness or physical deformity - through no fault of their own, in other words - have been ostracised according to a mean-minded, cramping and restrictive understanding of the Law obsessed with ritual uncleanness. Through their encounter with Jesus, such people are restored to physical health, so as to live once again within the community of faith, in the fullness of God’s presence. But the gospels also teem with people who, by their own life-choices or lifestyles, have excluded themselves from living in the fullness of God’s presence: tax-collectors and prostitutes, for instance, all conventionally considered hopeless cases and irrecoverably lost. For them, too, he does what they have been unable to do for themselves, restoring them to fullness of life in God’s presence.

This particular miracle reminds us of an important theme running through Mark’s deceptively simple gospel. His account is full of individual people whose names we never learn: the leper who pleads with Jesus, for instance, or the anonymous host who comes at sunset to be healed, or Peter’s mother-inlaw, who remains nameless, or a woman with a haemorrhage, the daughter of the synagogue official, an anonymous Gentile woman, and here, an unnamed deaf-mute. What all these unidentified individuals have in common is their readiness, unhindered by vanity or hubris, to acknowledge both their need and their inability to bring about in their life the change they long for. That desired change comes about through their encounter with Jesus. And they are deliberately contrasted with the religious authorities and other respectable pillars of society, who have no need of Jesus’ healing – or so they think. These needy and desperate people, desirous but incapable of change, are contrasted even with the disciples themselves, whom Mark unremittingly depicts as both obtuse and obdurate, failing, for all their good intentions, in both understanding and loyalty: Judas betrays him, Peter denies him, and the rest desert him. In Mark’s gospel, it’s the ‘crooks and crocks’ (Ronald Knox’s phrase), not his disciples and devotees, who are held up as models of faith, who come to Jesus in trust and with courage to ask for help. 

For us, too, the miracles carry a graphic message of hope: they remind us that nothing is impervious to his grace, nothing can come between us and God. The miracles of Jesus are told and re-told to reveal new possibilities, where we otherwise might be tempted to despair in the face of our inadequacies, weaknesses and sinfulness. They teach us that, by God’s grace, the love that we may have wasted and the gifts that we may have refused, can be restored, given to us again, albeit in ways of God’s inscrutable devising. The miracles, then, are for the hopeless and the helpless – people like us, in other words. The only condition of their happening is that we, like the unnamed, needy people in the gospel, have the courage, humility, and honesty to recognise ourselves in one or other (or both) of these categories. Only those who need a miracle will know when it happens. As one of the sages of Rabbinic Judaism says, “The height of folly is to rely on miracles; the depth of wisdom is to know that they do happen.”