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When the words quoted above were first spoken by Isaiah of
Jerusalem, the immediate reference was the hoped-for
return and restoration of Israel after the Babylonian
Exile. By the time of Jesus, those words were understood
as pointing to the further restoration of Israel in the
messianic age. Indeed, when the messengers from the jailed
Baptist ask Jesus if he is the “one who is to come,”
Jesus' indirect answer takes the form of an allusion to
this passage of Isaiah: “Go and tell John what you have
seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame
walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear” (quoted in
Lk 7:22). They ask who he is; he responds by telling what time
it is. Implication: if the end-time healings are
happening, maybe the end-time agent, the Messiah, is
indeed present among them.
 This passage from Isaiah 35, then, is the perfect First
Reading to prepare us to understand Mark's account of
Jesus healing the deaf-mute of Decapolis. Mark's choice of
a rare word to describe the man's speech impediment,
mogilalos (“mute, incapable of speech”),
demonstrates that he wants us to remember Isaiah 35 when
we read his account of this healing. That word appears
only twice in the whole Bible: in the passage from Isaiah
quoted above (Is 35:6, Greek version) and in the present account of Mark’s
Gospel.
This narrative is a parade example of the way all the
evangelists view the accounts of Jesus' healings—that is,
from two perspectives: (1) they describe Jesus' healing
the physically disabled, and (2) they also symbolize the
power of the risen Lord to heal from spiritual blindness,
lameness, deafness, and muteness. Mark's context helps us
understand both of these dimensions. The cue to look for
the symbolic dimension in this Sunday's
Gospel
(healing from spiritual deafness and muteness) comes in
the next chapter, at
Mk 8:17-18, where Jesus asks his disciples, “Are your hearts
hardened? Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not
hear?” This is followed immediately by the healing of
blind Bartimaeus.
Persons who are born deaf rarely learn to speak, and then
only with great difficulty.
It is not hard to catch Mark's application of this
experience to the life of faith. The summons to the life
of faith usually comes through a word that is heard.
Proper hearing of that word requires healing from
spiritual deafness, being freed up to receive the message
fully and deeply. That reception, in turn, enables us to
communicate to others what we have heard. It is difficult
to speak unless we hear.
The
Second Reading, the one from James, focuses not so much on the hearing
of faith as on faithful seeing. James warns against
prosopolempsia (root sense: “face-reception,”
i.e., taking people according to their prosopon,
“face”). The example James gives is that of giving a
well-dressed visitor special treatment while neglecting a
poorly dressed person, forgetting the beatitude about the
poor. Such a thing is, he implies, a symptom of spiritual
blindness.
There is probably no time in our life when we should not
ask for the healing of the blindness of our hearts. It is
likely, too, that any time is a good one to ask the risen
Lord to bless us with the prayer, Ephphatha (“Be
opened!”). The better we can hear the Gospel, the better
we can speak it.
Dennis Hamm, SJ
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