Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

GOSPEL MEDITATION

One of the most touching YouTube videos I’ve ever seen is one in which a deaf woman receives new technology to heal her hearing. She hears her husband’s voice for the first time — and her own, too — and bursts into tears of overwhelming joy. It must have been like an immovable wall between her and her loved ones came tumbling down.

We are all like this woman, to some degree. We believe in the presence of God’s love, but we can’t hear Him. We can’t speak well about Him. The deaf man who can’t speak properly in the Gospel today is an image of what God wants us to experience again and again. Jesus takes the man aside to a private place away from the crowd, touches his ears and tongue, and says, “Ephphata!” The man’s ears are opened, and he speaks clearly. Contact with Christ has this effect on us.

This experience happens to us in our baptism, almost exactly. It happens to us in the liturgy. It happens in our private prayer. It happens when we hear the voice of God in our conscience. The more we engage these privileged channels of Jesus’ healing, the more we are empowered to hear and speak of the presence of God’s perfect love.

 

– Father John Muir

A FAMILY PERSPECTIVE

Because the deaf man in today’s gospel recognized his disability, he could seek help from Jesus. Deafness abounds in families: in our children (Oh dad, not that again”) in parents (“It is just a stage”) and in spouses (“Are you listening?”). Before Jesus can enter your home and heal, you must first recognize your deafness.

– Bud Ozar

EVERYDAY STEWARDSHIP

“Thus says the Lord: say to those whose hearts are frightened: Be strong, fear not!” Our readings today offer us a mes-sage of hope – God is with us and wants to heal us. May this message come ablaze in our hearts so that we might live with unwavering faith.

The prophecy in our first reading and the story in our Gospel overwhelm us with comfort and peace because we have a com-passionate God who sees our physical needs. Yet if we reflect further on these readings, we see that God uses these moments of physical healing as opportunities to restore something much deeper – our souls.

This week let us seek God to heal our souls and transform our hearts. Let us pray that our eyes and our ears might “be open” to His workings, words, and promptings in our lives.

 2024 Catholic Stewardship Consultants

PRACTICING CATHOLIC – RECOGNIZE GOD IN YOUR ORDINARY MOMENTS

There are several moments throughout the calendar year when we are tricked into thinking we can reinvent ourselves. One of them is New Year’s Day. The barista at my coffee shop told me that they sell more decaf coffee in January than in the entirety of the remaining year, because everyone is swearing off caffeine. By February, she said, the trend subsides: folks have realized they’re not actually superheroes just because the last digit of the year has increased by one.

The beginning of a new school year is another of those moments. Every pencil is freshly sharpened, and every lesson plan is painstakingly plotted. Our heads are full of what we plan to do this year, how we plan to do it, who we plan to become. But by May, the wind is out of our sails. We’ve learned the concepts, we’ve used up the pencils, yes — but we’ve remembered that underneath it all we’re basically the same people, with the same shortcomings and the same obstacles as we always were. The only difference in September was we had new planners.

The truth is that we cannot reinvent ourselves. We can’t change ourselves at all, not on New Year’s Day or the first day of school or on our 40th birthday or after quitting a bad habit. We are what we are: blind in some ways, deaf in others, crippled in still more, moving through life with uncertainty, stumbling in the dark.

People don’t change. Not without miracles.

But being a Christian means believing in miracles and being ready for them at any moment — in January or in September, in the middle of a hopeless week or at the end of a bad day, when you feel strong and when you don’t, when you want to be better and when you feel too tired to try. No, we can’t change ourselves, but we can be changed. There is one who can change us if we will let him. He is waiting — now, tomorrow, yesterday, next week. The time is always right for a miracle. “He put his finger into the man’s ears … and said to him, ‘Ephphatha!’— that is, ‘Be opened!’

—And immediately the man’s ears were opened …” Mark 7:34-35