Dear Sisters, dear brethren, if you are looking for a picture of hell, you might go to the weird and disturbing images of the Flemish 16th century painter Hieronymus Bosch, who portrays humans being tortured in nightmarish ways by strange and horrible beings. But there is another way of envisaging damnation, less visually arresting, but no less frightening than that of torture; it is the idea of complete isolation. To be cut off from all contact outside oneself – unable to hear anything, unable to speak; how long could anyone endure such a self-enclosed state? How soon would such claustrophobia descend into madness? Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “hell is other people”; but we might well correct this and suggest instead that hell is oneself, utterly alone for ever.
It is for this reason that Our Lord’s miracle in the Gospel we have just heard is so powerful a symbol of salvation. It is the opening up of a human person closed off from all contact with others by his inability to hear and speak clearly. We were made to communicate, and to be communicated with. Human beings are, by nature, social beings. To be deprived of the sense of hearing and the power of speech is to be seriously diminished as humans.
But what we also notice about Our Lord’s healing of this poor deaf-mute is the manner in which He does it. Already known to have powers of healing far beyond anything ever heard before, Our Lord is urged to lay His hands upon the man, to heal him. Yet this is not exactly what He does. He takes the man aside privately, puts His fingers into the man’s ears, touches the man’s tongue with His own spittle, looks up to heaven and sighs, before uttering a single word of command: “Be opened!” The drama of this scene is captured for us by the recollection of the very word that Our Lord used in Aramaic: “Ephphetha!”
But what does all this action and drama mean? Our Lord could, as on other occasions, have healed this man simply by laying His hands upon Him, or as with the lepers by a mere word of command; or, as with the Centurion’s servant and the Synagogue official’s son, even will their healing from a distance. Yet here Our Lord could not be more physical, more bodily, let us say even more ritualistic, in His actions. If we have ever wondered why God became man, as so many great thinkers and men and women of faith have done for centuries; if we have wondered, not in a sense of puzzlement, but in a sense of awe – we should look at this healing. For God did not need to become man in order to forgive man’s sins. God could heal our illnesses by a simple act of His almighty will. Yet He does not do so in that way, for it would leave something out of the picture that God wants us to know and understand. God became man in order to share Himself with us, and in order to allow us to share in the experience of His presence. God became man in order to overcome the isolation that sin had brought to man. Sin had alienated us from God. Recall how Adam and Eve, after sinning in the Garden, hid themselves from God out of fear. It was to overcome that fear and the isolation from God that sin had brought upon us, that God became man.
In His humanity, Jesus the Son of God is fully present to us. Our Lord’s human nature is not just a kind of packaging, by which we might gain access to something otherwise inaccessible. Our Lord’s human nature really belongs to Him, and in it His divine Person shines through and acts upon us. So in this miracle, God the Son Himself takes away the isolation of the deaf-mute by His own humanity – His fingers, His sigh, His spittle, His command.
This is the way of the Incarnation, of the Son of God made man. It is the way in which God has chosen to make us whole – to heal us of sin, and of the isolation and selfishness that sin both causes and symbolises. Moreover, this is the way Our Lord continues His healing work in the Sacraments of His Church. For when we are baptised, it is Christ Himself who baptises, who in His humanity gives us new life by water which symbolises both death of sin and selfishness, and the new life of communion in the Holy Spirit. When our conscience convicts us of our sins, it is to Christ that we turn, and Himself whom we meet in confession. We confess our sins in the Sacrament of Penance, not in order to tell Our Lord what He already knows, but to allow Him to touch us with His healing grace, and to speak His powerful word of command: “be absolved”, that is “be free” of your sin, of the impediment to your true freedom with which sin has weighed you down. It is Christ Himself who feeds our whole human nature, our bodies and souls, with His own self: Body, Blood, soul and divinity, when He gives Himself to us as the living bread in Holy Communion.
But having said all this, what, in the end, is more powerful than death? Death carries all human beings away. Whatever success or failure our lives may have to show, in the end we are doomed to the darkness of the grave. Yet even here Christ’s humanity brings us out. It was to the entombed Lazarus that Our Lord gave His powerful word of command: “Come forth!” and to those around that He said “unbind him; let him go free!” These words symbolise the power of the Son of God made man over death, and the ultimate isolation of the grave. Yet His power over death would not have been complete had He not shared death with us. And had He remained dead, then death would have conquered Him. All His wonderful miracles would, at the best, have been only a cruel sign of unfulfilled hope for doomed mankind. But Christ the Son of God made man is alive in glory. He has overcome the darkness and isolation of death for us men and for our salvation. In the Sacraments of the Church, it is the risen Christ Himself who continues to touch us, to anoint us, to speak His word of command: “Be unbound, go free!”
This is what our faith teaches us, that in Christ we are made fully human. Christ alone can touch us, can speak to us, with power to overcome our isolation, our death and our hell. In the Sacraments, He comes to meet us and heal us; and at Holy Mass, in the greatest and most wonderful Sacrament of all He gives us communion with himself. Neither in this life, nor in the next, is there anything better or more wonderful than that! The more we recognise this truth, and the better we prepare ourselves to meet Christ in His Sacraments, the more powerful His effect upon us, and we will find our true freedom and fulfilment, as He has always intended for us, in union with Him.
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