Ephphatha! that is, Be opened!

This fragment of the Gospel according to St. Mark stands at the beginning of one of the rites of Christian initiation, which in our Catholic tradition we have probably completely forgotten.

All those who were baptized before the liturgical renewal of the seventies of the twentieth century received this rite, and it was called Ephphatha. It has been for centuries and is an important part of the catechumenate (preparation for Holy Baptism) of adults, and for centuries it was also part of the baptism of children, as one of the rites explaining Holy Baptism, but in the seventies bishops decided that it is no longer understood today and was removed from the new ritual of Holy Baptism.That the priest or deacon who administered the sacrament touched the ears and mouth of a child, saying the words of the Lord Jesus in today's Gospel: Ephphatha means: "Be opened!", and it meant the same thing that the Lord Jesus did then in the physical sense, and what in the sacrament of Baptism is done in the spiritual sense.

The Gospel says that a deaf man who had a speech impediment was brought to Jesus. In the original Greek we read that the man brought was deaf, but he was not mute at all. He was a mogilalon, that is, he spoke, but he spoke badly, gibberish, incomprehensibly... Anyone who has dealt with people who are deaf from birth knows what it is. We learn speech through imitation and repetition, and a deaf person, not having such a possibility, has a serious problem with learning how to articulate words correctly. The companions of this deaf and bad-speaking man ask Jesus to lay hands on him and thus heal him, but the Lord does something else: He takes him aside, separately from the crowd, puts his fingers in his ears and touches his tongue with saliva, looks up to heaven and says the word: Ephphatha, that is, Open yourself! Then a miracle happens: the man's ears are opened, the bonds of the tongue are loosened, and he can speak correctly (orthos).

This specific rite which the Lord performs becomes a model for the early Church and then for the Church of later centuries. Well, a non-Christian is a spiritually deaf man. He does not hear the Word of God. Consequently, even if he speaks, and especially when he speaks of God, he is like that deaf and deficient speaker. He can even say a lot, which happens in our times, but this speech does little or even harms. It is an ideology, a confusion of truth and falsehood, which is even more harmful than falsehood itself. Falsehood itself is easier to discover than a clever confusion of truth and falsehood. In the catechumenate of the first centuries, the Church took such a man away from the crowd, opened his ears to the Word of God, put this Word in his mouth (the saliva of Jesus is a symbol of the Word of God), and the man was healed – he could speak correctly, proclaim the Word of God and bring God closer to others. The Greek word orthos in the original text means not only correct, but also truthful.

The Lord wants to do this miracle in us as well. Admittedly, we have been baptized. Many of us also received this rite of Ephphatha at Baptism, but we were children then. That is why we are called by this Gospel to constantly ask the Lord to open our ears to his Word and to allow the Lord to take us from the crowd, so that we can be only with him and listen to his word, there and then we can speak of God according to the truth and not according to our ideas about him. The world today is in great need of the truth about God, not human theories about Him, which are often like the speech of the deaf man in today's Gospel. The truth about God is not a human product, but a gift from God received by listening to his Word, which ultimately is Jesus Christ himself.

Thought from Saint Faustina: Secretary of My mercy, write, tell souls about this great mercy of Mine, because the awful day, the day of My justice, is near. (Diary 965)

Speak to the world about My mercy; let all mankind recognize My unfathomable mercy. (Diary 848)

Tell the world about My mercy and My love. The flames of mercy are burning me. I desire to pour them out upon human souls. Oh, what pain they cause Me when they do not want to accept them! (Diary 1074)

Until Tomorrow

fr. george