Telling Of Him Who Does All Things Well, 23rd Sunday (B), September 8, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 8, 2024
Is 35:4-7, Ps 146, James 2:1-5, Mk 7:31-37

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we get a glimpse of the awe of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. Many of the Jews by this point were beginning to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah from today’s first reading of how God would come to save them, opening the eyes of the blind, clearing the ears of the deaf, making cripples leap like deer and making mute people sing. They were wondering whether he was the anointed of the Lord whom they praised in today’s Psalm as one who for God would secure justice for the oppressed, give food to the hungry, set captives free, give sight to the blind, raise up those who were bowed down, love the just, protect strangers, sustain orphans and windows, and thwart the way of the wicked.
• Even in pagan terrorities, as we see in today’s Gospel, they were buzzing with what he could do and who he might be. That’s why when Jesus and the apostles journeyed into the pagan terrority of the Decapolis, or ten cities, on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, several people brought their deaf and mute friend to Jesus, begging Jesus to lay hands on him. They had high hopes and they were not to be let down. Jesus took the man away from the crowds to prevent him from being objectified by everyone as simply a deaf-mute or, soon, as someone healed, but more importantly to establish a personal relationship with him, so that the first voice he would hear would be Jesus’ own as he spoke to him, and so that the man would not to be disproportionately influenced by the pagan crowd. Once apart, the Lord Jesus put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Ephphatha!,” “Be opened!,” and the man’s capacity to hear and speak were healed. Once he started speaking plainly, amazement seized everyone. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t restrain themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
• I would like to pause on this phrase. “He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be the Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching, in his miracles, especially in his salvific passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really does know what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments. He continues to do infinite good and do it amazingly well.
• There would be many people at Jesus’ time, however, who would disagree that Jesus was doing all things well. Many of the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was a blasphemer destroying the sabbath and undermining the law of Moses. They would eventually claim that he would be a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday! Similarly, many of the zealots who were looking to evict the Romans or who had political ideas of who the Messiah would be likewise thought he was a failure. Little could any of these groups of critics fathom what his followers — a small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies — would do in his name throughout the globe.
• Today, too, many in our culture challenge whether the Lord in fact does everything well. They criticize his teachings and the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it,” and a modern irrelevancy. They, too, will be in for a surprise one day! But as our society is becoming less Christian, more of these false ideas have been invading the minds of believers, too, and this is a much greater concern. If Jesus were to ask us whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? I think all of us disciples would want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing; after all, if Jesus made mistakes, he could not be divine. But it’s helpful to turn to concrete issues to see whether we, like the residents of the Decapolis, truly praise him for doing some things well or all things well. How would we respond to these questions if Jesus were to ask us directly?
• “Do you believe that I did all things well in reiterating for you the Ten Commandments, or do you think I should have made some of them optional? Do you believe that I did well in establishing the Sacrament of my Body and Blood as the source of our personal loving communion and stating that unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you, even though so many of my followers walked away scandalized? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing the Sacrament of Confession on Easter Sunday night and do you come to me in the way I established so that I may forgive your sins? Do you believe that I did well in setting a high standard for discipleship, calling you to imitate me in living the beatitudes, love others as I have loved you, to be merciful to others just as I have been merciful to you seventy-times seven times and more; to humble yourself to wash others’ feet; to deny yourself, pick up your cross every day and follow me along the path to Calvary? Do you believe that I knew what I was doing when I ordained only men to be my apostles and priests? Do you believe that I did well in making marriage the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, in calling you back to God’s plan for marriage in the beginning? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing a heaven and a hell, or do you think I would have been more loving if everyone were to get to heaven no matter what he or she does in life? Finally, do you think I did well in calling you to become a saint, or a priest or a religious, or did well in calling that priest, or that religious, whom you don’t care for?
• Questions like these are important ones for us to ask, because sometimes we can begin to allow the devil to sow seeds of doubt as to whether Jesus knows what he’s doing. To believe in Christ means to trust his words and actions, to believe in what he said and what he did. This isn’t always easy to do and Jesus never promised that it would be. We can recall from the Gospel a couple of weeks ago how hard it was for the Twelve to believe in Jesus’ words that they needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood, a full year before Jesus made sense of these words by taking bread and wine at the Last Supper, changing them into his body and blood and giving them to his apostles to eat. When Jesus asked if they wanted to abandon him as a result this teaching, St. Peter, with real faith, said, not that he understood everything, but “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” In other words, Peter was declaring, “Jesus, you have done everything well until now and we trust that in this, too, you’re doing perfectly and precisely what we need.” Jesus calls us to trust in him in the same way.
• Now let’s return to the miracle, which has many lessons for us. Sometimes it’s good to ask why, for example, St. Mark would have included this scene in his Gospel. His fellow evangelist, St. John, said that if he were to try to describe all that Jesus had done, all the libraries in the world wouldn’t be big enough to contain the stories. Most of Jesus’ miracles were not described at all or described in summary, such as St. Luke did on Wednesday at daily Mass: “all who had people sick with various diseases brought them to [Jesus]. He laid his hands on each of them and cured them” (Lk 4:40), or what was the Alleluia verse today, “Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom and cured every disease among the people” (Mt 4:23). So why did St. Mark choose to include this healing of this deaf-mute in the Decapolis over so many that he chose not to include? Because, I think, there were lessons for every believer beyond the healing of one pagan man. The scene indicates in some way the mission of the Church. As Jesus did, the Church still goes into the “pagan territories.” At Jesus’ time, the ten cities were Gadara, Geresa, Scythopolis, Hippos, Raphana, Dion, Pella, Canatha, Damascus and what’s now Amman. But today they could easily be New York, Boston, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi of many others we could name. There are so many who have never heard the word of God and therefore can’t speak to God or about God. They’ve been made spiritually deaf and incapable of speaking by the noise of their secular environments. Many nevertheless seek God but don’t know where to turn. They need to go on a journey, to be led apart from the crowds, where they can begin to listen to God’s voice in prayer and in Sacred Scripture and there learn how to converse with him and speak his words to others.
• This experience has already happened in your life and mine. On the day of our baptism, Jesus, through a bishop, priest or deacon, worked a miracle similar to what he did in the Gospel. He didn’t use spit, but through his sacred minister, he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the minister said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the praise and glory of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to him and about him. He worked this miracle so that we might listen to him, treasure his word, and be so transformed by it that we would transform the world. We have ears and mouths opened so that we might hear God and then speak to him and speak of him. But we cannot really speak to God unless we hear him speak to us. And we won’t really be able to speak effectively of him unless we know his word.
• One of the proofs as to whether we are really hearing God’s word with faith is whether we’re acting on it. In Hebrew, the word to hear, shema, is also the word to obey. In Latin the word to obey, “ob-audire” is an intensification of the word to hear, “audire.” When we really know it’s God speaking to us, we listen with faith, attentiveness and a desire, as St. James spoke about last Sunday, to be a doer of the word. Today St. James gives us an application of that type of listening. When we really listen to God’s word about the dignity of every person whom he has pronounced very good, when we try to act on Jesus’ telling us, “Love one another as I have loved you,” his parables of the Good Samaritan and the Rich Man and Lazarus, and his reminder, “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me,” how could we possibly play favorites among people? And yet that’s what St. James was encountering in the communities of the first Christians. People were treating rich and poor differently, giving the finely dressed man with gold jewelry front row seats while telling those who were poor and shabbily dressed to sit on the floor or stand in the corner. St. James is brutal in saying that such distinctions are done by “judges with evil designs.” Yet we often still do this, treating the benefactor differently than the homeless person coming to Church on Sunday. We’re not supposed to treat the donor poorly, but to treat both the way we would seek to treat Christ. We’re not to play favorites between rich and poor, fit and fat, tall and short, beautiful and unattractive, coiffed and bald, celebrity or unknown. Since it’s so easy and natural to give attention to the rich, famous and good-looking, we need to prioritize caring for those who normally fall to the bottom of human favoritism. And that becomes easier when we remember what St. James says at the end of today’s passage, something that you, as Missionaries of Charity, are well aware of and most of the Church still needs to keep more firmly in mind: that God has chosen “those who are poor in the world to be rich and faith and heirs of the kingdom that he promised to those who love him.” In what matters, often the poor — economically or spiritually — can be affluent in the only wealth that can pass through the eye of the needle.
• Today, September 8, the Church normally celebrates the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Lady is one whose ears were always open to the word of God, such that, in medieval art, the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation was able to enter unobstructed into her through her ears. She was able, therefore, easily to speak with the words of God, as she shows us in her Magnificat, in which she wove together like a tapestry various verses from the Psalms and the sayings of the holy heroines of the Old Testament. She sought to live her whole live in accordance with God’s word. And hence she’s an example to us of how we are called to live out our baptism and the miracle that opened our ears and mouth so that we might live, too, in accordance with the Word of God. Our Lady plays no favorites. She loves and is attentive to every one of her children, and, as a mom, has a special love for those in greater need of her care. She’s praying for all of us now.
• At the very end of the Gospel, Jesus instructed the healed man and the crowds not to tell anyone of the miracle, lest everyone treat Jesus fundamentally as a free miracle worker and no longer listen to his word, which was calling them to repent and believe. But, St. Mark tells us, “The more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it.” At Mass today, Jesus will not tell us not to tell anyone, but, rather, to go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. May we act on those words and use the gift of speech he’s given us to share, one person at a time, the wonders that the Lord continues to do.
• Jesus has done all things well, and he wants to continue doing things well through us. And his greatest ongoing work is what we do at the altar in his memory. As we prepare to encounter him at Mass, may we imitate those in the Decapolis in not being able to restrain ourselves from speaking about all the good he does for poor, former deaf mutes, like us, who thankfully have entered this assembly and whom Jesus and his Church have welcomed and given us each a seat from which he seeks to make us rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Did not God choose those who are poor in the world
to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom
that he promised to those who love him?

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