He is nameless and faceless. We know almost nothing about the man in today’s gospel portion. We know that he is deaf, and since he has “an impediment of speech”, it’s a fair assumption that he’s been deaf most of his life, at least since that stage of childhood when the miracle of organized speech develops in response to hearing the speech of those around us. It’s also a good assumption that he is not a Jew, since he lives in the gentile region of the Decapolis. But we really know nothing of this man and his life. We know nothing of his history, we know nothing of his future. We only know that some people—and again we assume—people who were family or friends, bring him to Jesus and ask Jesus to lay his hand on the man. And his ears are opened—and he hears! His tongue is released—and he speaks! And in that moment, his life is turned upside down.
The deaf man’s life is turned upside down after Jesus pokes his fingers in the man’s ears and touches the man’s tongue with a finger wet with his own saliva. What did the man expect as his family were bringing him to Jesus? We don’t know if they had to drag him there, or if he had any understanding of what might happen. Had they been able to communicate to him about the works that Jesus was doing? If he had been deaf most of his life, had he known that he was deaf? Had he known that his experience of sound was different than the experience of the people around him?
A friend once told me of getting his first pair of glasses. He was getting along just fine without them until he started school and began to try to learn to read. And it quickly was evident to his teacher that he was a little boy with significant visual problems. The note was sent home to his parents, pinned to his shirt so that he wouldn’t lose it, and within a few weeks, he found himself in the doctor’s office on the big day—the day he got his glasses. He was dreading the day, because his big brother had been teasing him, but it was a day he remembered with joy for the rest of his life. They put the glasses on his face, and he was shocked by the contrasts and the edges and the colors in the doctor’s office. And then he went outside. And he saw the trees. He’d never known how tall the trees were or how green the green was or that all that green mass was made of tiny little leaves, all moving and shimmering, each with a life of their own. This little boy had never really known that he couldn’t see until that day. It was all his mother could do to get him in the car.
Today is Homecoming Sunday, and many of us are coming home from the summer to the weekly routine of work, school and church that September and the beginning of the school year always seem to bring to us. Every homecoming—whether we are returning to the church family or to our families of origin—reminds us of so many things. We remember joys and sorrows, separations and reconciliations, losses and celebrations. And all those things, the very meat of our homecoming experience, sometimes bring us face to face with the pain that we usually can manage to ignore. Because each of us here, whether we speak of it or not, lives with woundedness—the woundedness that comes to all people who live on this earth. The woundedness that can become so much a part of us that we forget it’s there. Even the celebration of this Welcome home Sunday holds a sense of woundedness because it will always be tied by the calendar to 9/11—the day when the woundedness of the world became our deep wound in a way none of us could have imagined.
My friend who received the somewhat everyday gift of vision had no idea what kind of wholeness and life would come from the intervention he dreaded and feared. And the deaf man. Could he ever have begun to imagine the new life that would emerge from the thunderclap of God’s action in his life? He didn’t know he needed to be healed, and his life was turned upside down from the moment Jesus placed his hands on him.
And you, my friends, can you imagine that there is something in your own life that needs to be healed? A barrier that keeps you from wholeness, a sorrow that colors all the days and nights, a fear or concern that drags you down with the weariness of bearing that burden? Is there a wound that you’ve long since given up hope to have healed?
Perhaps this is the day when your life is changed in ways you never imagined possible. Because Jesus’ presence is with us today just as it was 2000 years ago. And he heals us just as he did in his time on earth. And, just as then, we have choices to make. God offers us grace with open hands—grace that can heal the wound, fill the empty heart and awaken us to the joy of life.
God offers us grace freely and in abundance.
Do you choose to accept it?