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Morning Meditation

August 27, 2025

Feast Day of Thomas Gallaudet and Henry Winter Syle

Reading: Mark 7:32-36

They brought to Jesus a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

Meditation by Peter Vanderveen

The author John Updike was once asked what religion had meant to him. Without hesitating, he said it gave him courage. “In other words, don’t play it safe,” Updike said then. “Go for it. Tell the truth at all costs. The Lord knows the truth, so why shouldn’t the reader know the truth?” * In so many ways we are in need of the recovery of that courage today when the powerful are so unabashedly unmooring their speech and actions from the constraints of the truth so that they can offer up for our eager consumption, instead, a steady diet of fanciful fabrications. It’s the exercise of a willful blindness that, at some time, may leave any or all of us abandoned simply by being unseen.

I have long thought that the miracle accounts in the Gospels are routinely misread; it’s so tempting to think that they are meant to provide us some hope of gain from the power of God – if we manage to earn God’s favor. In this way, we read them greedily. But they are just as much a testimony of how hard and unfair life actually is. There is always a ready supply of persons who are suffering, who, in some way, are unable to maintain their inclusion in the mainstream of life. We tend not to notice them. Jesus did, however, and in so doing, he pushed everyone to see the truth of the world.

And what’s most fascinating about Jesus’ encounter with the deaf man isn’t that he was suddenly and inexplicitly healed (as if by magic). What’s more compelling is the nature of Jesus’ actions. They’re so unusually physical and uncomfortably intimate: fingers in the ears and spit on the tongue. Who would do this? Who would dare to be so fleshily connected to a stranger? And yet, it seems that it was precisely this touch that sparked the word “Ephatha” - “be opened.” It was a word that began with a sigh, that arose from a closeness that we would not, of ourselves, have the courage to enact. But opening is only meaningful in recognition of the hard truth of what had been closed to this man, in every respect.

The church is often dismissed as being no more than a factory of false dreams. This is laughable on two counts. Falsehoods now abound everywhere. They’re the new coin of the realm. And it is the church, in its attempt to be a faithful community, that maintains the courageous habit of being redemptively truthful about the world.

Prayer

We will stand before you, O Lord, at the last,

and we will know as we are known,

and we will see what we have failed to see;

open our eyes to see and know

that we stand in your presence now,

that you are here before us

in the needs of family, friends, and strangers alike,

seeking our response of love;

grant that we may respond now in such a way

that we may be prepared to stand before you at the last.

Christopher Webber: Give Us Grace