The movement from blindness to seeing, or from muteness to speaking, or from deafness to hearing, is traumatic and startling. Perhaps you have seen a video of a child who receives a cochlear implant and upon hearing the first sound, he or she is amazed and responds with indescribable joy.
It is this kind of joy that we see in our First Reading from the prophet Isaiah and we can also imagine in the Gospel account of the healing of a deaf man. It is awesome.
This is how we imagine the reaction should be to the Good News of the proclamation of our salvation. When encountering the Gospel – the telling of the Paschal Mystery – should elicit such a response from the hearer. It is the ultimate “aha moment” – the greatest and most profound insight that we could ever experience.
Yet, more often than not, the response to the proclamation of the Gospel is more of an “ahem” than an “aha.”
The prophet Isaiah is addressing the people of Israel during a most turbulent time in their history. The enemy is bearing down and they are frightened. Those who have been faithful to the Lord and the covenant fear that they are going to be swept away with the guilty, the idolaters and those who have profaned the land with their sins. The Lord promises them vindication and hope and he will indeed bring them justice. He uses the rich imagery of the joy of those who are restored to health as the sign of the response of the people to the coming of the Lord.
Isaiah could very well be speaking to us right now. We are being bombarded – not with good news, but with horrible news. Just when you think it’s bad, it gets worse. None of us alive has ever seen such turmoil in the Church, especially among the hierarchy. And certainly not with such vitriol against the Pope. We live in a world that proliferates what some call fake news, while others might refer to double-speak, or disinformation. But we end up not knowing what or who to believe.
We are at that awkward moment when we do not know whether or not we are being enlightened because we think that we are seeing, or if indeed we are being blinded and deafened to the truth because of the dissonance around us. Seeing and hearing do not come without their biases. Any attorney will tell you that the eyewitness is the least credible witness, because the witness only knows what he or she knows from the moment that he or she became aware of what was happening.
The same is true in our present struggle. We are always blind and deaf, for the truth of the Kingdom of God is yet to be revealed.
Like the Israelites of old, we are forced to make a decision. We can mire in sin and evil, become discouraged and abandon the Church, or we can remain faithful to the call to discipleship and ride through the storm. We know with “sure and certain hope” that even in the midst of strife and war– the bearing down of the enemies as in the time of Isaiah – we are always to be a people of hope. The day of the Lord will come. The vindication of the Lord will happen in God’s time.
As Jesus touched the man with the speech impediment he said: “Ephphatha!”— “Be opened!” The Lord says that to each of us today. We must be opened – opened to the truth, and then opened to announce that truth to the world.
We cannot allow dissonance, evil and sin to prevent us from telling the entire world that Jesus Christ is our savior and that to be faithful to him and to his teaching is the key to eternal life.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.