Comic book superheroes are depicted nowadays as flawed characters. Batman is depressed, Iron Man is arrogant, Spiderman is full of angst, Superman is conflicted, Wonder Woman – well, Wonder Woman is perfect but then what should you expect, she’s a woman. There is even a super family, the Incredibles, who strive with little success to blend into ordinary life. Perhaps the lesson we are supposed to draw from these flawed characters is that even when you have super powers you are still a human being with all of the troubles and ills inherent in our species. Superheroes are like us seems to be the message. Maybe something similar was going on in the miracle of the healing of the deaf man in St. Mark’s gospel. The gospel has reminded us all along the way of Jesus’ unique status – not a superhero but something infinitely more important, the incarnate Son of God come to save the world. Yet in this scene he acts in an earthy, almost crude manner. As the gospel reports the people brought the sick man to him and “begged him to lay his hand on him.” Okay, that seems kind of bland. But what does Jesus do instead? He put his finger in his ears, he spit, he touched his tongue, he looked up to heaven, he groaned. St. Mark shows Jesus acting as if he is putting a lot of effort into curing the deaf man. He acts in a very human manner. And maybe that is the point. Yes, Jesus is the Son of God and, yes, he wields divine power, but he is still like us, still one of us as a human being. He spits, he groans, he sweats, he gets hungry, he becomes sad, he weeps.
Perhaps what the evangelist was reacting to is the natural tendency we have to put our heroes up on a pedestal. But if we keep Jesus on a pedestal we miss an essential element in the faith – that God chose to share human life. God was one of us. Jesus was like us in his hungers, his worries, his loneliness. He was most like us in his suffering and his death. Jesus was not spared the fate that we all share as human beings – our ultimate end in this life. Reflect for a moment on why we are all gathered here today – we want to find God, we want to feel God’s presence, we want to encounter God’s love. The temptation that we face, since obviously God is removed from this earthly plane, is to imagine that we somehow have to reach somewhere other than right here in order to experience God. But the life and example of Jesus proves otherwise. God is present in the stuff of life – in the fingers and the tongue, in the spitting and the groaning, in the suffering and the dying that we have in common with Jesus. God is hiding in plain sight if we have but the eyes to see. God is close to us in the wounds that are all around if we have the courage to touch. God addresses us in the groans of grief if we have the ears to hear.
Jesus addresses the deaf man – and hence, us – by saying “ephphatha,” that is be opened. It takes a particular kind of openness to recognize God in the messiness of human existence. I would prefer to see God in the lovely garden with sweet smelling breezes wafting through the air and angelic melodies playing in the background. It seems instead that I must be open to the nitty and the gritty reality of human life for that is where Jesus immersed himself.
Unfortunately one of those realities that we are dealing with in the Church right now is the ugliness, the sinfulness of clergy sexual abuse. My initial reaction is to run. Who wants to hear once again of these terrible crimes? It breaks your heart to listen to the pain in the voices of the victims. But there is no place to run. I have heard people say, they can’t stay. They can’t find God in a Church where its leaders commit such crimes; where the criminals are protected and the victims are neglected. You can understand that. But I wonder what happens when we are open to hearing these stories? Can we find God there? We groan with Jesus at the tragedy playing out before us. We become spitting mad that children are being harmed. We witness God in the suffering of people here just as much as we witness the agony of God on the cross. Instead of running, how about if we go deeper into the pain. What would we learn there? That Church is not a place to escape from the painful realities of life but where we go to equip ourselves to deal with those realities. That Church people have no reason to think themselves better than anyone since we all need God’s mercy. That priests are not an elite caste who can bring God to us but fellow pilgrims who share the flaws of humanity and walk with all the people of God in a journey of faith. That children deserve to be treated as precious gifts of God and protected from all harm. That Church leaders need to understand they do not possess all wisdom. That we are all in the God business together – from Papacy to pew – and that only together can we create the kind of Church where people might look at us and say, “They are doing all things well.”
