In today’s Gospel, we are told Jesus moves
about in the gentile world. Tyre, Sidon,
and the Decapolis are Greco pagan inhabited territories. But here too Jesus will perform a miracle,
and a very significant one. Here He is
fulfilling a miracle prophesied in Isaiah chapter 35, which, lo and behold, is
matched up today’s the lectionary.
Again Jesus left the
district of Tyre
and went by way of
Sidon to the Sea of Galilee,
into the district of
the Decapolis.
And people brought to him a deaf man
who had a speech impediment
and begged him to lay
his hand on him.
He took him off by
himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into
the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched
his tongue;
then he looked up to
heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!”— that is,
“Be opened!” —
And immediately the
man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment
was removed,
and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to
tell anyone.
But the more he
ordered them not to,
the more they
proclaimed it.
They were exceedingly
astonished and they said,
“He has done all
things well.
He makes the deaf hear
and the mute speak.”
~Mk 7:31-37
In this little short
explanation Dr. Brant Pitre connects it all.
There is one other allusion that Dr. Pitre
doesn’t touch on in this passage to another part of the Old Testament, and that
is Genesis. When the people who are
witnesses to this miracle say that Jesus “has done all things well,” it is a
slant allusion to Genesis 1:31, “God looked at everything he had made, and
found it very good.” The root of the
word “good” of Genesis is the same the word “well” in Mark, at least in the
Septuagint translation of the Old Testament.
So the implication is that Christ is recreating mankind anew, or at
least healing it to a restored state that had been damaged from the fall.
Sunday Meditation: “Be opened!”
Instead of a song this week, how about the
dramatization of this passage in the series The
Chosen
Only The
Chosen could derive humor from that scene.
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