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It feels like a repetition. Yesterday was the Exaltation of the Cross. The Gospel today seems to echo yesterday’s commemoration as the focus is on the Crown and the Cross. Actually, it is more than a repetition because it feels like a mini-Passion or Holy Week.
The 1st Reading points to Christ the suffering servant. The reason for enduring pain and difficulties is faith in God’s succour or assistance and we dare to be unafraid because God will always come to the aid of His servant. This assurance is truly the joy of saints. Imagine being wiped out or being made redundant. People no longer respect and no longer recognise you. Even when one endures injustice, one is unafraid because of God.
The experience of the Suffering Servant is a guarantee of God’s faithfulness. He will not allow His servant to be annihilated and this becomes the basis for accepting the suffering Messiah. Jesus foretold His impending suffering. He did not sugar-coat the troubles that lay ahead. But Jesus promised them that their sacrifice would not go unrewarded. The Evangelist presents this sort of Saviour as the model to follow. Are we going after Him and if not, what prevents us from following?
The answer is partly determined by the world because the world’s expectations is different from Christ’s. He asks for a discipleship that is radical and resolute—to lay down one’s life without fear. But we have loud voices coming from the world. One of the counsels given is prudence. We are advised to temper our radicality. Furthermore, radicality is also tarred with the brush of extremism and no one likes to be called a fundamentalist—a word that suggests of imprudence and uncompromising hard-headedness. More than being labelled, radical discipleship is also considered to be “fool-hardy” and no one likes to be deemed a fool.
Instead, worldly prudence demands that we be even-headed, even-tempered or level-headed. Idealism is the foolishness of the young. But what undergirds this “prudence” is basically fear. Many of us are afraid. We fear rejection and so we do not try. We fear failure and so we compromise. We fear scarcity and rationalise our greed. Fear is a prison that dampens the fire of our desire to love the Lord and to follow Him closely.
But we are not alone. Even as devout a Jew as Peter would have heard of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah. After this revelation of Jesus about His future suffering, Peter tried to temper Christ’s resolution to carry out the Father’s will. The idea of a great God is almost incompatible with servitude and suffering. We want an omnipotent God who displays His power for all to see. The idea of a powerless God scandalised Peter that he began to remonstrate with Christ.
Peter only began to understand more of his vocation after Christ’s death and resurrection. It proves that growing into a radical discipleship of Christ might be for some of us a life-long pilgrimage. Sometimes when a person is young, he or she will never contemplate the after-life. They have a lot to live for. But for many of us, whose past stretches in a long shadow behind us, we have little time before death to think of our legacy and how we will be judged.
The logic of the world does not allow us to embrace Christ’s invitation. “If you want to be a disciple of mine, you must deny yourself, take up your Cross and follow me. And whoever wishes to preserve his life will lose it and he who loses his life for my sake will keep it”. This is not easy to embrace but it is not impossible.
Present society is pain-phobic meaning that we avoid pain at all costs. In fact, we numb ourselves through drugs of all kinds. Even food is a form of narcotics. But St Paul, through the grace and power of Christ, tells us that he completes in his body, the suffering lacking in the Body of Christ. It is not impossible to carry the Cross because of the grace and power of Christ. Martyrdom, be it red or white, is a grace of Christ. It might not feel like it but the true shape of love is cruciform. Without the Cross, love will don the cloak of convenience. There is purpose in our pain and sorrow, not that we deserve to suffer. Instead, in Christ, suffering takes on a salvific role for in Him, suffering saves.
This Sunday’s Gospel in the midst of nowhere is a reminder to refocus and fix our eyes on Christ and His Cross. We are invited to clasp Christ carrying His Cross for the salvation of the world. Many of us will struggle because it is natural to desire the crown minus the Cross. But if we follow Him, the Cross will cast its shadow over us. The credibility of the Christian conviction rests on the crown of the Cross. The Cross is indeed our victory and glory forever.
We have returned to Mark’s Gospel since last Sunday and today he captures one of the few Aramaic words possibly used by Jesus Himself—"Ephphatha”. Like “Talitha kum” Christ is engaged in the act of restoration. He restores a man to hearing.
The first reading mentions deafness as it highlights the signs and wonders that accompany the Jews returning from their exile. The blind shall see, the deaf will hear, the lame will leap, the mute will sing and streams in dry lands will burst forth with life. These are concrete signs that their oppression has come to an end. By restoring the man’s hearing, Christ not only ended his isolation from society, He also fulfils the Messianic longing expressed in the 1st Reading.
What is interesting is that the Lord performed two great sacramental acts. Later in the Gospel, Jesus will heal a man born blind. Whether it be deafness or blindness, Jesus not only uttered words of healing. He also used matter and gestures to complete the act. Fingers in the ears and spittle on the tongue are both sacramental matters and actions. The use of matter accompanied by the formulaic prayer to accomplish healing is reflected in our Sacrament of Anointing. Oil on the forehead and the palms coupled with the formula of healing and salvation, forgiveness and restoration.
What this particular healing revealed is how profoundly social the sacraments are. But, deafness, like blindness, is more than just a physical condition. It goes beyond physical deficiency. In fact, restoration has universal dimension as we witness Jesus making His journey through the Decapolis. St Paul may be the great Apostle of the Gentiles but Christ Himself had already forged that path ahead of St Paul.
In a way, “ephphatha” is truly a powerful invitation by the Lord to open our ears, our eyes and our hearts. It makes sense if we read it from the perspective of St James’ epistle. He admonished the Church not to be partial or prejudiced in community living and communal arrangements. Maybe we are not as deaf as we are unwillingness to hear. In other words we may be wilfully deaf and not only that. We may be wilfully blind too. We cannot hear God even if He were shouting at us. We cannot see Him even if He were to stand right in front of us.
The word “wilful” sounds condemnatory or condescending. Judgemental even. Could it be that we are not as wilful as we are unable to distinguish where God is speaking to us? The discordant voices we hear are confusing and we have difficulty trusting. A good way to appreciate how we have arrived at this unwillingness is the phenomenon of scams. There are so many scams going around that we have become paranoid. For example, some will never take a call from a number not saved in their mobile’s address.
Top that suspicion with our sense of betrayal. We have been dismissing the so-called far right conspiracist theorists but imagine that Mark Zuckerberg has come out recently to say that Meta or Facebook was forced by the present US administration to censor contents during Covid and also suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. In other words, governmental cover-ups are real. So too Church leaders have been known to hide the truth of the clerical scandals over the years. When people are lied to one time too many, trust level goes down and people cannot be faulted for not believing even as they steadily grow cynical. We tune off not because we do not want to hear but because we do not know which voice belongs to God.
How do we sift through all these conflicting voices to hear God speaking to us? Where do we find the authentic voice of God?
Firstly, to hear God, we need to have a connexion to Him. Many forget this important criterion. Prayer is an essential element in establishing a relationship with God. How do we hear Him if we have no relationship with Him? Elijah went to the cave and there He encountered God in the silence of the breeze. It is a reminder to each one of us, how noise has pervaded our airwaves that we are easily distracted.
Secondly, God’s voice is also interpersonal. We have become so wrapped around the pole of our individual autonomy that we forget that truth is interpersonal. What do I mean by this?
Truth is not just what I determined. In the past, we had a lot more taboos. They are like invisible boundaries which serve to prevent members of a group from straying too far away from approved behaviour. Today, we have by and large removed social taboos that are linked to religion. We have replaced taboos with personal preferences. Except for the protection of minors and the vulnerable, everything else is possible.
In effect, all kinds of taboo behaviours are accepted or they are being normalised except the more “traditional” behaviours demanded by religion. As long as there is consent, the norms of morality is basically reduced to personal choice. If there is accountability, it just means that one should avoid being caught. For example, it is said that the 1MDB debacle would not have seen the light of day if a fat woman did not flaunt her Berkin bags. Plausible deniability is the escape route from accountability.
But more than that, we are children of rampant relativism. You may have heard of the “apparent agreement” that people arrive at, that is, “what is true for you is true for you and what is true for me is true for me”. It appears to be an amicable compromise but it is the fertile breeding ground for who has the greater power to exert the “truth”. What is true for me is true for me but what is true for you is labelled as misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. One man’s truth is another man’s extremism. Today, sources of information, otherwise known as “news” have become more partial and partisan because they push certain perspectives. Relativism reduces God’s voice to just one perspective or it makes it difficult for Him to break through.
Where do we find and how do we hear God’s voice? Amid this melee of noises Christ’s voice remains constant and dependable through His Church. We need to make a distinction between the validity of truth and the personal failures of individuals. Current model of morality is rather tied to personal “sinlessness”. We are unable to process the that being right is not based on what is widely accepted or that truth’s credibility is not dependent on multiple failures to live up to it. Just because everyone has a mistress does not make it right and just because everyone cheats on the spouse does not make monogamy less true.
This is where the Church comes in. Whether we like it or not, the certain source of God’s voice remains His Church. Personal prayer and proper formation in the Church’s moral and social teachings help to shape our conscience. It is the voice of God speaking to us. There are some who commit spiritual suicide because of what they perceive to be hypocritical behaviour of those who proclaim the Gospel. But the faith and morals of the Church is based on Christ’s promise before His Ascension: I will be with you until the end of time. The age of the experts is no replacement for the Church’s teachings. Most importantly, the failure in the leadership of the shepherds does not invalidate Christ’s teachings through His Church.
