Mark 7:31 - 37
When I was in grade school there was a kid in my class, Daniel, who wore very conspicuous hearing aids along with glasses that were as thick as the bottoms of coke bottles. He spoke differently as well; sometimes he was hard to understand. Dan had some kind of condition, I don’t know which one, that resulted in progressive deafness. He could expect to completely lose his hearing, which he did. I don’t know if he had a problem with his eyes or was just nearsighted. In those days I wasn’t much of a diagnostician.
Dan had a cheerful personality, and was involved in sports. He wasn’t a great student, and used his deafness to his advantage. He would look at the teacher with innocent eyes and say he had not heard the homework assignment. I used to walk home with Dan, who lived about five blocks from my house, and when we were walking together we could talk to each other perfectly well, as long as he had his hearing aids on.
I lost touch with Dan after high school, but someone sent me an obituary when he passed away. His deafness did progress to the point where he couldn’t hear anything. That didn’t phase him, though. He got married, had a couple of kids, became a professional advocate for deaf people, learned sign language -- probably contributed more to the world than many of his classmates. We all can admire someone like Dan, but deep in our hearts, we wouldn’t want to trade places. We like being able to see and hear and touch and speak so we can be understood. And we grieve a little when we begin to lose our strength, our senses, our agility, and even our minds. Something in us recognizes that it is wonderful to be whole.
Some people with a lot of time on their hands have estimated that 28 percent of the four gospels are taken up with healing miracles of Jesus. Whenever you find Jesus spitting or touching or sticking his fingers in someone’s ears, that’s probably Mark. When you get to John, the miracles are all done from a distance. But all four gospel writers want us to know that Jesus cured people, raised the dead, drove out devils. Nothing seemed to stop him -- except the lack of faith. In his hometown there was little faith and he could do few of his wonderful works. It didn’t take much faith; there was a boy possessed by a demon when Jesus came down from the mountain of transfiguration whose father said “I believe, help my unbelief”. The boy was cured.
Today we meet a man who is deaf and can’t speak well. That almost certainly means that he was not completely deaf as a child, like my friend Dan. He had learned to speak but after his deafness became complete he could not hear himself or others talk, and thus could not correct his own speech. It says “some people brought” the man to Jesus and begged him to cure him. Where was the faith here? They couldn’t possibly have conveyed to the man that Jesus was a healer, but they knew, and they wanted the healing for their friend. And as the miracle demonstrates that the faith of friends and relatives is sometimes enough.
So what do we make of all these stories? Especially when Mark is always having Jesus tell people to keep the healings a secret.
We all know challenged people; in fact, some of us are those people. We are incomplete in some way. I have arthritis in my left hand, and it’s a constant reminder that I’m not the way I was designed to be. Of course my challenges are minimal compared to some people. Every week I encounter many people my own age and younger who have Alzhiemer’s disease, or have undergone a crippling stroke or have other problems that make mine look like blessings. And during my career when I took care of cancer patients, everyone who walked into my office was not the way they were meant to be.
Besides physical, mental and emotional conditions which keep us from being what we were meant to be, there are spiritual issues. None of us are where we were meant to be spiritually -- that’s the message of original sin. Even the greatest saints were quite aware of their faults, sins, and incompleteness; Last week we celebrated Saint Gregory the Great, a pope who lived in the firth century. He had been a monk before his election to the papacy, and in one of his letters he complained bitterly about how hard it was for him to pray, and how his position meant that he had to spend time with worldly people, and eventually even began enjoying conversations about worldly matters. And this is one of our greatest saints! YOu and I may be cleansed of sin with a good confession, but it doesn’t take away our faults, our distractions, or our other spiritual defects.
And that’s one of the things about the miracles of Jesus. Defects, incompleteness, not being the way we were meant to be -- in the presence of Jesus, the man who is God, these are overcome when faith is present; and the resurrected Jesus, the Christ, no longer bound by physical limitations in time and space, holds out that promise to us all -- in his presence, when we rise from our own deaths, he will make up what is lacking in us -- our faith will make us whole. In the presence of our savior, my friend Dan is no longer deaf and like him we will all be made complete.
