God Touches our Ears with his Word and our Tongue with the Holy Eucharist Enabling us to Speak to and about God

Today on the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Readings for the Day) Jesus says to the deaf and mute man, "Ephphatha, be opened!"

Listen to my homily for the day:

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Eve listened to the serpent with her ears and believed his lie to look at the fruit with her eyes, grasping it with her hands, smelling it's odor, and tasting it, she used all senses to fall away from God and with her all her children.  Since then, the senses have always been a doorway for sin.  With the senses the disordered appetites, passions, and emotions also are a gateway to sin.  For this reason Isaiah the prophet in the first reading prophesied of the Messiah:

The eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared; then will the lame leap like a stag, then the tongue of the mute will sing.

And Jesus came to heal us.  Each of us needs to be healed of blindness, but the way Jesus does this is by putting his finger in our ears with his Word and touching our tongues with the Holy Eucharist.  When he does this, we come to a very powerful realization that we cannot trust our senses, our emotions, our judgments, our very self.  We see the truth of his words, that unless we deny our very self we cannot pick up our cross and follow him.  "Cursed is the man who trust in himself and blessed is the man who trusts in God," (Jeremiah 17:5).  This is why we can deny ourselves because we understand that we do not see by sight but by faith, believing more the revelation of Jesus Christ more than the revelation of our own senses, our thoughts, and judgments.  This is the true moment of freedom, when the senses that lead us astray no longer bind us and instead we are bound to God by the darkness of faith.

We are proud and arrogant.  Like Eve, we tend to believe our own ego rather than God.  We therefore need to be humbled.  A lot.  Sufferings are sent our way all the time so that we are humbled before God and start to believe him rather than our own foolish rash judgments and spurious thoughts.  Let's make it easy on ourselves and humble ourselves before God first, accepting the words of Jesus, "those who say they can see are truly blind."

Only in the blindness of faith, where we accept as true the revelation of God's Word, transmitted to us faithful and fully only by the triple cord of the Scriptures, Tradition, and the Magisterium, do we truly see God.  When our eyes are adjusted, then we begin to see God everywhere and in everyone all the time.  St James speaks of the spiritual blindness in the second reading of not greeting Christ in the poor. You will see his poverty all day long if you want to.  He is in your neighbor waiting and thirsting for your love.  Only by the Word spoken by Jesus in the Scriptures proclaimed in the Liturgy and by the frequent and devout reception of the Holy Eucharist will we be given the strength to love Love's Poverty in the disguise of human poverty.  Look therefore in your spouse, in your children, in your parents, in your family, friends, co-workers.  See God in them and respond to their needs thus loving God disguised in your neighbor.

May Our Lady help us to respond generously to the poor.