Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
February 9, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/020924.cfm

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, both our readings describe situations in which the fullness of the spiritual life is inhibited by choice or circumstance. In the readings from 1 Kings, we meet human beings crippled by moral incapacities. In Mark’s Gospel, we see a man handicapped by physical limitations.

What can we learn about God’s faithfulness from these passages? What can we learn about healing and spiritual renewal?

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The Division of the Kingdom under Rehoboam
by William Brassey Hole

In Solomon’s case, his unfaithful choices have brought him to spiritual collapse. 1 Kings tells us that Solomon committed all the sins forbidden in the Book of Deuteronomy. For example, he had over 700 wives and concubines from many alien nations. He built altars to their gods and allowed their idolatry to seep into Israel’s culture. As a result, God pronounced that the united monarchy, composed of the twelve tribes, would be ripped apart – symbolized in the cloak in today’s readings.

Today’s and tomorrow’s passages foretell the revolt within Israel that created the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, is corrupt. The people revolt against his cruelty. Jeroboam, one of Solomon’s political ministers, assumes kingship over ten of the tribes, creating the Northern Kingdom (the Kingdom of Israel).

However, despite Solomon’s and Rehoboam’s infidelity, God remains faithful to the promise to David, allowing two of the tribes to continue under the leadership of David’s house through Rehoboam – the Southern Kingdom (the Kingdom of Judah)

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So, are you bored with these snippets of biblical history? Don’t be. They are included in scripture to offer us lessons:

• God’s voice comes to us in the unfolding of our lives
• God expects our fidelity
• Our infidelity leads to disruption
• Still, God remains faithful and loving toward us
• It is never too late to open our heart to God’s grace

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Our Gospel can teach us similar lessons. For undisclosed reasons, our central character is hog-tied by the incapacity to speak and hear. Jesus’s healing of this man shows us that we too can be healed from any incapacity to hear God’s truth in our hearts and to speak it in our lives. All that we need do is what this man has done – to place ourselves in God’s Presence with faith and hope.

Notice that Jesus heals this man in a very human way – with fingers, spit, and guttural groans.

Jesus put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!” (that is, “Be opened!”)
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed,
and he spoke plainly.

Mark 7:33-35

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For the most part, healing comes to us in very human ways as well. God works through our circumstances and relationships to offer us renewing grace. As we live out each day, our life challenges us with a silent command: “Ephphatha!” Be opened to God speaking to you in this moment, in this person, in this situation, in this silence!

Sometimes, we just cannot hear the challenge or speak the truth. We are mute and deaf to the grace of the moment. Today is a good time to pray for openness – Ephphatha!

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Poetry: At the Kishinev School for Deaf and Mute Children – Katia Kapovich (1960), a bilingual Russian poet. Born in Chişinău, the capital of Moldova, she later lived in Moscow and St Petersburg. Unable to publish her work in the former USSR because she participated in a samizdat dissident group, she emigrated, moving in 1990 to Jerusalem, where she published her first collection, and then in 1992 to the USA. In 2001, US Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected her for a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and she has also been Poet-in-Residence at Amherst College.

My first autumn after college I worked
at the Kishinev School for the Deaf and Mute,
whose voices were not speech,
yet sounded like a language.

A foreign language, muffled and unknown
to the teachers. Its strange vowels,
born in their windpipes,
burned away in their throats.

I wrote the alphabet on the blackboard,
watched them move their lips as they
tried to articulate the sounds of Russian,
but no one could help them.

Yet there was a children’s god in the classroom
who guided them across quicksand
to where the Tower of Babel stood crumbling
and filled their mouths with the ABCs.

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Music: I Need Thee Every Hour – in American Sign Language