Ordinary Time: 23rd Sunday

23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B (2024)

Here’s a question to start today: When we try to pray, how do we begin? What do you do? I would imagine that if we actually took a survey here today which, don’t worry, isn’t going to happen, it would take way too long, but if we did, I think we would get a wide variety of answers, ranging from one of the memorized or traditional prayers that some of us have known for years, to a few people who would be very honest and say, well, you know, a lot of times I don’t really know how to start, I feel awkward and like I am not really good at praying, or what it’s really all about.

Today isn’t the day to cover everything about prayer, and the great thing is that in general, whatever we do in this area, no matter how badly done it seems to us, if it comes from our heart it probably makes God perfectly happy. But there was one great master of prayer who said that there was one way that you could begin that would make every experience of prayer better and more meaningful. So of course you want to know what that is, don’t you? It’s this: He said take a moment as you begin, and look at God looking at you.

Now of course on the one hand this seems impossible, doesn’t it? We can’t actually see God looking at us. And yet we all have an image of God in our minds and how God might be looking at us, but when we think about it, a lot of those images that we have developed over the years are not very inviting. When we picture God looking at us, we might have grown up having it described to us a little like police surveillance, someone watching very closely but from a great distance, and it’s a system mostly intended to detect problems and failures, which will never go unseen. Or we picture God as a distant father with way too many children, who doesn’t have time for trivial individual concerns, especially ones that have been expressed over and over again. But what if we could envision God as God actually might be, looking at us perhaps even with love, and ready to interact with us?

So now we can finally get to today’s gospel reading. Because it strikes me that a reading like this is an antidote to a lot of those distant images of God, and can give us another way to see how God might actually look at us. When we picture someone being healed in the gospels, I think it’s inevitable that what we picture is a crowd scene. But not this time. 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.

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, and Jesus seemingly ready to focus entirely on this one human being that he loves. This is another way entirely to look at God looking at us.

I think this gospel is here to reveal something to us, and what it is showing us is something simple but really kind of overwhelming. Most of us were not taught to aspire to this kind of a moment with God as part of our life on this earth. And yet, this is one of the ways 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 as any human 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 desires to do for us what we need, 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. Jesus is willing not just to be with him but to touch him, if that’s what it takes to heal him. One single word from Jesus, the touch of his hand, and this person is restored or as Jesus says, opened up.

Opening up the ears of the deaf and the tongues of the dumb is an image throughout the scriptures of God’s promises being fulfilled. That is what God wants to do. We are not prepared for the words of God to touch us that closely, for God to touch us in a way that makes something new possible for us, so that we can hear things we have never heard before and say things out loud to people we have never been able to say before. And yet God can look at us with love and do this. And God does this not out of any excellence on our part or because we are better at praying than other people, but simply because this is what the God revealed to us in Jesus is like.

There are plenty of other stories in the gospel that might inspire you towards different ways of picturing how God actually regards us, from Jesus talking with the woman at the well to the risen Jesus walking with his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Realizing that this same God wants to be present with us in exactly the same way takes a while for us to adapt ourselves to. Coming to that moment isn’t always an easy process, we need to find a way to put our past images of God aside for a bit, to raise our expectations about what God can do and to somehow get control of our sense of our own unworthiness. But we keep trying and keep asking, because we are promised that when we are ready to meet him, God will look at us in a way that will open us up.