When we picture someone being healed in the gospels, I think it’s inevitable that what we picture is a crowd scene. Because in many of these healing stories, that’s exactly what it is. There are spectators, sometimes a large crowd, and they see a miracle, but really they see it from a distance, their perspective is a little bit like you out there, watching what’s going on up here. And when we hear these stories, that’s a little the way we can feel about them, too, they’re distant, something happening to someone else, with us more as an audience than as an active participant.
But today, the scene and the moment we need to focus on is not a crowd scene, although it starts out like one. Jesus is attracting attention, and some people bring Jesus a man who is both deaf and can’t speak. But what happens next, is that the first thing Jesus does is take this man off by himself away from the crowd, somewhere where suddenly, it is just the two of them. There are no spectators. We aren’t watching from a distance. If we are going to see, we are going to have to be very close to the two people who are there.
First, everything must have happened very quietly. This deaf man couldn’t say who he was or ask who Jesus was, he couldn’t ask or answer any questions, he couldn’t hear what Jesus said, he had no way of expressing what he wanted. And where is this encounter happening? Suddenly Jesus has taken him aside somehow, somewhere quiet and private. We have to use our imagination — was it in a room in a house, was it in a quiet passageway, was it under a tree? Wherever it is, suddenly the crowd is gone, so when you’re picturing it, picture two people who are looking straight at each other, with nothing standing between them. One single word from Jesus, the touch of his hand, and this person is restored or as Jesus says, opened up.
Why did this need to be a private, intimate moment like this? We’ll never know. But somehow, what happened here could only happen one on one.
I think this story and this moment is here to reveal something to us, and what it is showing us is something simple but overwhelming. Most of us were not taught to aspire to this kind of a moment with God as part of our life of faith here on this earth. For most of us, if we believe that God pays attention to us, we might believe that this happens from a distance, or maybe we believe that God keeps an eye on us like he does on everyone, which always sounded to me more like a form of surveillance than something welcome. We might finally encounter God one on one at the final judgment, but the way we were taught to picture it that never seemed like the best conditions for a relationship to develop. When we try to pray, our expectations for an actual exchange or encounter in that process aren’t often very high. And yet, this image today is one image we need to remember of how God wants this relationship between God and us to seem to us.
It’s not exactly an equal relationship, since one of us isn’t God, but it is as intimate and as real and as filled with love and genuine relief any relationship we know about. God wants us to want this moment that we see today, where we realize that God is with us, looking at us not in judgment but with love, and will do for us what we need, not just generally, but one on one, what we need, where we are. We are all broken and left behind people like this deaf man, but apparently his need only makes God love him more.
You know, any time is a good time remember this image of God with us, but right now is a good time to embrace it. I don’t know how many of you are disturbed these past few weeks by so much turmoil and conflict and disillusionment in the church. As for me, I’m in the Catholic business, both here on Sunday and during the week, so for me there’s no escaping it. There’s a lot we can all say and do about what needs to happen next in this church we belong to, I have plenty of strong opinions like I’m sure many of you do, maybe yours are even stronger. And all this is not going to go away.
It might be hard to remember right now that in the middle of this, underneath it, and maybe it’s all that matters and all along, it’s all that ever mattered, what is at the center of our relationship with God is this moment in the gospel, the savior of the world taking someone aside and fulfilling the promise of the ages, taking someone who can’t hear, and can’t speak or sing or laugh, someone who is cast aside by the world and has nowhere to turn, and in a single private moment reveals that all God wants in a relationship with us is to bring us healing and freedom.
The only reason we even have a church is to help us towards this moment and that relationship and that realization, that moment where we get opened up by God to express our pain and our guilt and our joy and the desires of our heart, and to know that we are healed and lifted up, all without us having to grovel or to prove we deserve it.
Coming to that moment isn’t always an easy process, we need to find a way to get out of our own way, to put aside whatever attachments are holding us back, to change our expectations about God and our sense of our own unworthiness. But we keep trying and keep asking, because we are promised that when we find a way to be there God will speak the one word that we need to hear.