THE TEXT BELOW IS THE TRANSCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO COMMENTARY BY FR. FERNANDO ARMELLINI

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A good Sunday to all. 

Last week, we listened to one of the most controversial passages in the Gospel, the confrontation with the Jewish religion. Previously, Jesus had discussed matters with the scribes and Pharisees, and at one point he told them they were hypocrites, not in the sense of false, but as comedians. In fact, ‘your religious practice is a comedy that does not interest God; you wear special clothing, and then you offer sacrifices that do not interest God.’ He then quoted the prophet Isaiah. He met with the disciples and continued the discussion until Jesus said: ‘You are so short of intellect that you do not understand that impurity does not come from without; it comes from the heart; it comes from within.’ At that point in the discussion, the evangelist Mark says, “Jesus arose and went straight away to Tyre and Sidon.” He left the disciples there and went on his own. 

Mark says the disciples were not with him. What was the reason? He left—and I added, slamming the door. The discussion about purity and impurity had to be clearly clarified. From infancy, Jesus must have assimilated his people’s mentality and what they taught him. He was taught that pagans were to be avoided because they were unclean and far from God. And this issue of purity and impurity is a big one. 

Jesus was told at a very young age that if he stepped on pagan soil on his way back to the holy land, he would have to remove the dust from his feet to avoid contaminating the holy land. But Jesus grew in wisdom, age, and grace. What does this mean? It means the Spirit always guided him in his identity as the Son of God and led him to understand that the rabbis’ catechesis was not the thought of God; it was the tradition of the people. That is why Jesus went to Tyre and Sidon. He followed the voice of the Spirit that had guided his life; he understood that people are not impure. Their actions can be impure or unclean, but people are all sons and daughters of God; therefore, they are not unclean. 

He goes to Tyre, where he meets a Canaanite woman. The account of what happened in Tyre during this encounter with the Canaanite woman is not narrated to us in these Sundays. But there Jesus finds confirmation that sinners are waiting for the bread of his word, the word that casts out demons; the pagans have faith as well, and sometimes even more than the members of the people of Israel. This is the conclusion Jesus reaches while he is alone in pagan territory. It is an experience he seeks, a confirmation of what the Spirit has always suggested to him; it corresponds to the reality of this pagan world waiting for his Gospel. 

Today’s passage begins with Jesus’ return from this pagan land. Let us listen: 

“Again, he left the district of Tyre and went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, into the Decapolis district.” 

If, while listening to the reading of the gospel passage, you have followed the itinerary Jesus took on the map, you will surely be surprised, as it is an outlandish route. Jesus departs from Tyre; he wants to go toward the Lake of Galilee; therefore, he must go south instead of going to Sidon; then he goes down toward the Lake of Galilee because he must go to the city he has chosen as his residence, Capernaum, and instead we find him in the middle of the territory of the Decapolis. 

The Decapolis was a collection of ten cities on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, located in present-day Jordan and Syria. Damascus is in Syria; the other cities are all in Jordan: Gerasa, Gadara, and Philistia (modern Amman). The only city in Syria on the western side of the Jordan River was Scythopolis, modern Beit She’an. 

Spontaneously, we ask ourselves: Why did the evangelist include these strange indications about Jesus’ itinerary? The impression is that Jesus is reluctant to return to his homeland; he knows he will again clash with the exclusivist mentality of his people. The issue of purity and impurity is very important because Jesus wants to eliminate definitively, at least from the minds of his disciples, the idea that there are impure people. All people are pure before God. Actions can be impure, yes. 

Jesus is in the Decapolis. The Decapolis is composed of pagan cities, and among the pagans are found those 12 impure behaviors that Jesus listed in the Gospel of last Sunday, which we have been examining individually. It is not the first time that Jesus has gone to the Decapolis. In chapter 5 of his Gospel, Mark has already recounted the healing performed by Jesus in that land; when he arrived, he met a very dangerous demoniac who was harming himself and others; and when he met Jesus, he said to him, ‘Leave us alone,’ because he was moved by these unclean spirits that were so many. 

It is the image of the pagan world, moved by unclean spirits that drive it to commit the actions Jesus defined as unclean. Where Jesus comes, these spirits must leave; and there is a very significant image of these unclean spirits entering the swine and ending up in the sea. Swine are unclean animals, a symbol of impurity. No pig ended up in the sea; the evangelist wants to say that impurity disappears when Jesus arrives with his Gospel, and then they are purified. 

Now Jesus comes to this land; whom does he meet? Let us listen: 

People brought him a deaf man with a speech impediment and begged him to lay his hand on him.

Before commenting on the passage, I want to recall an observation I have made on other occasions, one that must always be considered, or else we risk losing the passage’s main message. When the evangelists relate the healings performed by Jesus, they do not simply give us information about what happened; no one has ever doubted that Jesus had the power to perform prodigious healings. Their purpose is, above all, to show us that each healing is a sign of another healing that takes place in people when they encounter Christ and his Gospel. There is a prodigy in them; they are healed of the diseases that made them less human and dehumanized them, and now are found to be fully human. So the healing stories should always be read as parables of this healing realized through the encounter with Christ and his Gospel. 

Let us look at our narrative. Jesus arrives in Decapolis, a pagan land; what man does he find? The sick person is deaf and dumb. Properly, it does not say mute but stammerer: μογιλάλον, ‘mogilalon,’ and this Greek term is very significant because it points to the symbolic meaning of Jesus’s healing in this Decapolis. Where does it orient us? Because this term occurs only twice in the whole Bible, in the Old Testament and the New Testament; once here in our narrative, with this stammerer who met Jesus, and the other time it is in the book of the prophet Isaiah, speaking to the Israelites, who ended up as slaves deported to the Babylonians. 

The prophet Isaiah says that one day the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf will be opened. Then he says that the lame will leap like a deer and the tongue of these stammerers will shout for joy. The deaf stammerer is the people of Israel, who ended up among the pagan Babylonians. Therefore, it is an invitation to read this episode that took place in the Decapolis in light of what happened to the people of Israel, who were deaf to the Torah and to the word of God. The consequence was that they ended up among the pagans. This condition of the people of Israel, being deaf, is also found in the other prophets. 

Zechariah makes a strong accusation against his people. He says: “They have hardened their ears not to hear. They have hardened their hearts, like a diamond, so that they will not listen. They want to do things their way; they have closed their ears.” 

Jeremiah defines Israel as a deaf people. He says they have ears but do not hear. When God speaks to Ezekiel, he says: “You live amid a race of rebels; they have ears but do not hear because they are a generation of rebels.” What happened to these Israelites who came to Babylon and became deaf to the word of God? What does the deaf do? The deaf man looks around him and acts according to what he sees, not by what he hears, because he cannot hear. So, Israel, having ended up in a pagan land, what did they do? They let themselves be guided by what they saw the pagans doing, and little by little, they totally forgot the Torah because it was no longer listened to, and they adapted to the moral customs of the Babylonians. They behaved like them and lost what characterized them as a chosen people. 

The message is for us, too; it can be our history, because we can become like that deaf, stuttering man of the Decapolis, or like the Israelites who ended up among the pagans in Babylon. If we become deaf to the word of God and the Gospel, we end up living as the pagans around us do; we get involved in what is called secularization; we follow the fashions and the dominant thought; we start to reason, talk, and even live a little like we see non-believers do, those who focus their lives not on the beatitudes of the Gospel but on the beatitudes of this world; and so we handle money as others do, sexuality as we see others do, loyalty, justice, even respect for life, everything as we see others do. Then what the current morality suggests becomes right and reasonable, and the norm becomes “It is what everyone does.” 

If you are deaf to the word of the Gospel, you are in trouble because then Christians cease to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, becoming like everyone else; they are no longer distinguished. The Israelites are these stammerers. Who does this stammerer of the Decapolis represent? He represents the stuttering of all those who do not listen to the word of God, yet who put some truth into it. 

There are many beautiful truths, even in paganism; think, for example, of the Greek and Egyptian wisdom of the entire ancient Middle East, which sought answers to the riddles of human existence and the meaning of our lives. And we know how many moral values are also found in pagan thinking. In the famous Book of the Dead, when we read the confession of the righteous before Osiris, he says: ‘I have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked….’ It is that love of neighbor which the pagans already spoke of but which was later taken up and brought to the fore by the morality preached by Jesus, who will speak of that love that reaches even to the enemy. 

Can the Christian limit himself to babbling truths shared even by the pagans? The answer is NO; he has his clear proposal of man, which he saw incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, when it comes to choosing between good and evil, between darkness and light, between sweet and bitter, the Christian cannot stutter. If he stammers, he has become deaf to the Gospel. 

The evangelist then highlights that the deaf stammerer does not come to Jesus alone but is accompanied by others. This is not an extra detail; it is significant. Other times, the Gospel of Mark records that the person who needs to meet Jesus must be accompanied; alone, he does not find the one who can heal him. For example, in Capernaum, from the beginning, the sick are brought to Jesus on Saturday evening; the paralytic is lowered from the roof and carried on a stretcher by four persons; the blind man of Bethsaida, whom we shall meet on another Sunday, is carried and accompanied to Jesus. 

What does this detail mean? This deaf stammerer seems to be the image of the one who resigns himself to his condition, to his diminished humanity, because he cannot make the right choices in his life. This man is the image of the one who is far from Christ, who perhaps no longer even has consciousness of his condition, does not care, goes ahead as he can, and perhaps even attaches himself to his deafness and his stuttering because then he doesn’t have to make the right choices in his life. 

Fortunately, this man has someone who loves him and won’t leave him in his condition; someone who cares and wants him to open his ears to a new approach to life. Who are these people who accompany deaf people to Jesus? They are the angels of the Lord, those whom the good God placed with us in life, those who watch over us. They are the guardian angels, those who have already known the Gospel that has purified their hearts, those who have experienced the power of salvation present in the word of the Gospel, and they want all to open their ears to this word of life. 

And what do these angels do? They bring Jesus to those who need to meet him and be touched by him. What does it mean to ask Jesus to heal a sick brother? Many times, we are asked about the effect of the prayer we address to Jesus for a needy brother. The prayer is not to convince Jesus. We want him to find Jesus to heal the brother we love. Jesus only wants the good of the people. 

What effect does the prayer we address to Jesus for one of our brothers have? It does not change the heart of Jesus; when we want to help a brother, we present him to Jesus in the dialogue we have with him, and prayer keeps us in the right disposition toward the brother who is still deaf to the word of the Gospel. If we do not pray, we find ourselves in front of a brother who does not want to make decisions, who is slow in his steps, who hesitates, who then has regrets, and even gets angry. If, instead, we pray, then we see the situation of this brother, of this sister, as He sees it, and although this brother may offend us and say he wants to be left alone… If we don’t pray, we risk ruining everything. What are these angels asking Jesus for? They ask him to touch the sick with his Gospel, which touches the heart and heals that heart so that choices conform to the Son of God. Therefore, let them realize their human life in fullness. 

After grasping the symbolic significance of this dangerous deafness, this stuttering, and this inability to communicate, we now hear how the healing takes place: 

Jesus took him aside, away from the crowd. He put his finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue; then he looked up to heaven, groaned, and said to him, “Ephphatha!” (that is, “Be opened!”) 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 astonished and said, ‘He has done all things well. He makes deaf people hear and [the] mute speak.’ 

We want to pay attention to every detail of this healing story because each one carries a message. First, Jesus takes this sick man aside, away from the crowd. What is the symbolic meaning of this gesture? If you want a person who lives among the pagans, reasons like them, and lives like them, because he has not heard other proposals for life, the first thing to do is to take him out of this crowd. If he is still tied there, to that world, he will continue with the same life; if he continues with the friends who follow pagan principles and values, who are still interested in trivialities, talking about useless things, he will continue with his disease. 

It is necessary to put a muffler on the noise of advertising, shouted by touts who make right seem wrong. If we are dazed and deafened by so much chatter, we end up deafening the word of God and stammering. We stammer some words of the Gospel but mix them with many pagan speeches. Therefore, we must go out of this village. 

And now Jesus makes a series of gestures that may seem strange to us, but they were not strange at that time in that cultural context. These gestures were widespread in Middle Eastern culture. Their symbolic meaning becomes clearer when we read them in light of the biblical references. In the first gesture, Jesus puts his fingers in his ears. What does this finger mean? We find it in the Bible as the finger of God. For example, in Exodus 8, when the wise men from Egypt saw the wonders performed by Moses, they said, “That is the finger of God.” That is to say, there is an intervention of the power of God. Also, in Luke chapter 11, we find Jesus saying: “If I cast out demons with the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come.”Again, the finger of God and the intervention of a power not of this world. An intervention of the Lord is needed to open the ears that are closed to the word of God. 

Christians understood the symbolism of this gesture very well. In the ancient rite of baptism, all these gestures are part of the narrative we are examining. They are also repeated in the present rite, with the gesture of opening the ear placed after baptism and accompanied by wonderful words: “May the Lord Jesus, who made the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak, grant you—says the celebrant to this child—the privilege of soon hearing his word and professing faith in him.” The Christian, therefore, is not only the one who can hear the Gospel but also the one who is called to announce it without stammering. 

The third gesture: with the saliva touching the tongue. To understand this gesture of saliva, it is necessary to keep in mind that, in the popular conception of the time, saliva was the concentration of the breath, therefore, of the spirit. With this gesture, Jesus communicates to that tongue his breath, his Spirit, and then that tongue will no longer speak as before, with an incomprehensible language, stammering something true but also a lot of nonsense… NO, now the tongue, moved by the Spirit of God, will speak a new language; the words it will utter shall not be dictated by impure spirits but by this voice, which is the voice of the Son of God, who shall speak only of love, of dialogue, of reconciliation, of forgiveness. This is the communication of the Spirit of God to that stammering tongue. Now it is the Son and the Daughter of God speaking. 

Then there is the gesture of looking up. While the other gestures were widespread in Middle Eastern culture, this one, on the other hand, is new. Only Jesus looks toward heaven, and this gesture indicates that he attributes the healing, the creation of this new man who now hears only the voice of the Spirit and speaks as a son of God, to a gift from heaven.

Then there is a sigh. This sigh has received many interpretations. I believe the correct one, rather than a sigh, is a groan of pain on the part of Jesus. This is the meaning of the Greek term. To grasp in this pain an empathy, an involvement of Jesus in the pain of sick humanity in need of his salvation. 

Then he says, “Ephphatha!” an Aramaic word meaning ‘be opened,’ addressed not to the ears but to the heart closed to the word of the Lord, which allows itself to be guided by the evil one who leads it to perform impure and unclean actions. On the other hand, the heart is opened to the word of the Lord. And it says that immediately, not the ears to which the finger touched, but now the hearing is opened, the heart is opened to hear the word of God. Jesus recommends not spreading the fact because it could be misinterpreted as a healing, but he was giving the sign of the new humanity born from the encounter with him and his Gospel. 

The conclusion is a song of joy and praise from all who have understood and say that he has done all things well. This alludes to what happened during creation, when God saw that all things were good and everything was beautiful. Now people realize that Jesus has created a new humanity; there is a new creation that brings forth a new humanity, guided by the Spirit and the word of the Lord. I wish you all a good Sunday and a good week.