We love and may often identify with St. John the Apostle; the young one, the one whom Jesus loved. But in today’s Gospel he messes up. Upon seeing someone drive out demons in Jesus’ name, he made two mistakes. First and most obviously, he thinks too small. Like Joshua in our First Reading, St. John failed to realize that the Spirit can reach beyond human boundaries of insiders and outsiders. The tolerance of Moses and Jesus toward those literally and figuratively outside their presumed inner circles confounds those who perceive themselves to be on the inside.
“Constant craving has always been” wrote k.d. lang in her haunting 1992 hit song. She muses that perhaps all souls are drawn by a great magnet toward truth. As Catholic Christians we believe that craving is our desire to be united with God, who alone can satisfy our hearts and souls. All three readings today however, show us that part of the human condition is that we often fail to recognize our craving desire for God, and instead pursue those things and act in ways that can never satisfy us. Worse still, in our misunderstanding, in our unsatisfied hunger and unhappiness, we sometimes commit deadly sins against those who are good and peaceful.
Today’s Gospel sets before us the central question of Mark’s Gospel, the whole New Testament, and quite frankly the central question for our lives—Who do you say that I am? When pressed by Jesus, Peter responded “You are the Christ”. It was a good answer. The disciples had witnessed numerous healings and miracles in their travels with Him so far.
Imagine watching a video of today’s Gospel passage on YouTube. Would you place it in the category of “Amazing Videos of the World—32 AD”, or “How To Cure Hearing Loss Naturally”, or maybe “Don’t Try This At Home”? On the face of it, the series of events are quite peculiar. Jesus is in a neighborhood where He doesn’t belong when strangers bring Him a man who cannot hear and whose speech is unintelligible. These strangers ask Jesus to lay His hands on the man. Jesus takes the man away from the crowd, first puts His fingers in the man’s ears, then spits on His fingers and touches the man’s tongue. All part of a single fluid moment, Jesus then prays from the depth of His heart, and commandingly says “Be opened!” And indeed, immediately the man’s ears were opened and his speech restored. The whole scenario begs us, as followers of the Lord, to ask “Why there?” “Why him?” and most of all “What is Jesus telling me?”
Traffic lights are unequivocal signs. Red means stop, green means go. We get it. Moses makes an unequivocal point in today’s first reading from Deuteronomy when he tells the Israelites to observe the commandments of God exactly as given to them with no additions or subtractions. They are to do this, for the same reason we observe traffic lights; so they/we may live!