BILLTESKA

Healing miracles are signs of the Messiah. The lectionary makes sure we remember this by pairing the secret cure of the deaf/mute with the beloved, exquisite passage from Isaiah. While it seems clear that WAS on the Evangelist’s mind (Jesus as Fulfillment of prophecy) perhaps the meaning of this passage is not exhausted by this fact. I would like to try to imagine something in addition.

The “silence of God” is a theme of modern art and literature. Maybe God spoke to humanity in olden times, but God is silent in our own. “Where was God,” we ask, “when the Nazis murdered the Jews? Where was God when the Serbs murdered the Bosnians? Where was God when fanatics murdered three thousand people o fall nationalities in the World Trade Center? There is an answer, surprisingly well-put by the priest in the harrowing HBO series, OZ: God was the same place He was when they killed His own Son. But this is unsatisfactory to the modern ear. “Oh, it may satisfy superstitious people of dark ages past, but not us! Our pain is more acute than theirs, and what’s more, we know better.”

And there is a hint at what is going on in modern consciousness: we consider ourselves too smart for the old consolations. As modern people, we are individualists, and as individualists we have difficulty identifying with other people and their pain, especially those who differ from us in important ways. And people in the past are REALLY different. I don’t mean that we are entirely self-absorbed and hard-hearted, just that the more different others are the harder it is to identify with them. We are appalled at the suffering of the Jews and the Bosnians, but a little less so over that of Africans (Tutus and Darfurians), and as Hannah Arendt observed, who even remembers the 12 million and more killed in the Congo by King Leopold of the Belgians just one hundred years ago? We all saw Apocalypse Now, but did anyone notice that the Conrad story on which it was based, Heart of Darkness was about the last century’s first genocide? No. But Jews and Bosnians are Europeans, closer to home, more like us.

My point is that even our compassion can be tainted by egoism. The giveaway is when we blame God for letting it happen, rather than taking responsibility ourselves. This is really nothing more than a recapitulation of Adam’s lame defense: “The Woman YOU gave me gave it to me and I did eat.” Our sin is somehow God’s fault! Or, “a just God would have stopped the genocide. Auschwitz shows that He doesn’t exist.” An entirely egotistical sentiment. As is “The world has changed after 9/11.”

No it didn’t. I am weary of that cant. All that changed was the illusions of some fatuous Americans ~ illusions about out own exceptional righteousness and invulnerability. We are exceptionally righteous, you see, and therefore God-protected and invulnerable. To attack us is to attack the very idea of righteousness (“the terrorists hate freedom”). This notion is fundamental to a certain kind of American patriotism, which is really a kind of idolatry. It is for that mindset that the “whole world changed with 9/11.” For idolaters of America, the shock of our vulnerability was the worst kind of outrage: an assault upon Goodness itself, blasphemy! This kind of nationalism is a bad and false religion, a religion deaf to the Voice of God. It is also the twin of the mindset that says God is silent in our age. One worships a false god, a projection of ourselves, the other stops its ears and blocks God out and then says God is silent. They are two sides of one coin, and the coin is pride. As today’s Collect says, God “always resists the proud who confide in their own strength.” Insofar as we trust our own strength – either as a nation or as individuals – we are like the deaf man in today’s Gospel. We cannot hear. We cannot hear God. God is silent to us ~ not because God will not speak, but because we stop our own ears and shut out His Voice.

Jesus opens the ears of the deaf. The Word of God, you see, pierces his deafness and conquers his isolation. But not against his will. Never against our will. In order to hear God’s Word, we have to shut up. We have to stop talking. We have to stop listening to our own voice and start listening to the Silence ~ or what we call the silence of God. We cannot hear unless we are willing to listen. Maybe that is the significance of the “silence of God” in modern times. We are distracted by our own words, our own explanations, our own thoughts; and what Meister Eckhardt knew seems to us nonsense: there is nothing in the world so like God as silence.


Jesus commanded silence. According to the story, “the more He commanded, the more zealously they proclaimed it.” On one level, a bit of joyous irony. On another, perhaps, an allusion to the difficulty we have in shutting up so that we don’t shut out God’s Voice, God’s Word. God can do for us what He did for the deaf/mute in Galilee, for us as a global society as well as for us as persons, but only if we shut up and listen – only if we will be silent, only if we will trust in God’s mercy with all our hearts.