Ephphatha
[“ . . . and looking up to heaven with a deep sigh, (Jesus) said to (a deaf man hardly able to speak), Ephphatha! that is, ‘Be opened!’” (Mark 7:34).]
O Lover,
I frequently initiate one of these prayer posts to You having been blindsided by a word, image, or theme. While some of these finds over which I stumble are previously unknown to me, others are quite familiar and yet in the moment amazingly re-experienced as fresh and new. The power of such skewerings is that they repeatedly, later if not sooner, point toward You.
An example of such a pattern presented itself in the Marcan gospel reading this Sunday in the account of Jesus’s healing of the man deaf and speech-impaired. As part of his encounter with the man Jesus addresses him with the command Ephphatha (“Be opened!”), and the man is healed. This word is in the Aramaic language, the Levant’s lingua franca from the 8th Century BCE. While there is consensus that Jesus used Aramaic in his day-to-day exchanges, the overwhelming portion of words attributed to him in the gospel texts are translations in koine (“common”) Greek. That in our Mark 7:31-37 account but a single Aramaic word, Ephphatha, remains in transliterated Aramaic in both the original text and most translations only heightens the poignancy of its use.
Cutting to the chase, O Lover, via this word attributed to Jesus I hear You addressing me on all fronts of my being with Ephphatha (“Be opened!”). Earlier understood by me as a command central to an ancient healing, more recently as an expansive invitation in present time, I acknowledge that this Your word has been addressing me across my entire life. You have repeatedly been inviting me to surrender to Your opening of me, to Your drawing me far out beyond my provinciality, my rationalism, my dogmatism, my predilection for security, immutability, and settledness. Not unlike Jesus’s “Put out into the deep” to Simon (Lk 5:4), I experience Ephphatha as expressive of Your intrinsic converging of all into Yourself. Having long been both hot and cold on the journey, in my stronger moments I long to devote my remaining time embodying “yes!” to Your Aramaic invite.
But so often I require spiritual courage lest I hunker down in my theological or tedium redoubts rather than stride further into the Open Reality who is You. I confess that I continue to be drawn between codifying and otherwise “solving” you, on the one hand, and baring myself to You as Mystérium, as “No-thing” (Eckhart), on the other. What restrain me most are not pagan or “secular” values, but rather those rooted in the theologies, institutions, and cultus widespread within my own faith tradition. Ephphatha sharply undercuts any religious status quo, particularly on its planes of exclusivism, patriarchy, dogma, and penchant for certitude. Living attentive to Your invitation to “Be opened!” is often incompatible with the fabricating of systems and edifices, whether in terms of summa or “christian nationalism.” Via our Marcan text You are beckoning me to live increasingly attuned to Your subverting and inverting in-breaking, less to this or that fabricated comfort zone. The model for this is Your Christ, he via whom You are drawing all of us further into Your Divine Life.
I conclude in Interrogatívaville. Regarding Your Ephphatha invite, why do I hesitate? Why does my response run hot and cold? Am I afraid of You the whirlwind? Of Your presence as absence? Of the loss of my fabricated self and its “autonomy”? Of being bedazzled by Your largesse and splendor? Does part of me want to welcome into my center a deity more manageable, less overwhelming, a tamed lap-deity? Am I fearful that the cascading implications of Your Ephphatha! are simultaneously too hazardous and too good to be true? Do I thus stop my ears lest I hear Your Christ’s ubiquitous “Fear not!”?
O Lover, I long to embody a fuller “yes” to Your Ephphatha!; aid me in my hesitation (Mk 9:24).
