Week 23 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Isaiah 35.4-7a; Psalm 145; James 2.1-5; Mark 7.31-37

We might be forgiven for thinking the prophet Isaiah was a Christian. He was, of course, a Hebrew prophet, a Jewish poet, who lived many centuries before Jesus Christ. But his poetry has so influenced how Jesus himself spoke about his mission, and how the first Christians understood the person and work of Jesus, that the mistake is understandable. 

The beautiful passage we read today, for example, anticipates the resurrection of Jesus. 'My ways are not your ways', God says through Isaiah elsewhere, and so when God's vengeance and retribution take effect, as is promised in today's first reading, it is not through violence and destruction that this happens, but through various kinds of transformation - the healing of blind, deaf, dumb and lame people; a new fruitfulness in parched, abandoned and sterile wastelands. The climax of all this is the resurrection of Jesus when the anger of God, his vengeance and retribution, is once again, and uniquely, expressed in an act of transformation, an act of new creation, putting the fullness of life where there had been only the empty silence of death.

Baptism introduces people into this way of being, making them members of Christ and so people who live by his life, people who participate in his death and resurrection. Such people, therefore - we the baptised - ought to live in God's way, to think as God thinks, to have the mind of Christ.

One of the most tender moments in the celebration of Baptism is the rite called Ephphatha, which repeats what Jesus does in today's gospel. Touching the ears and mouth of the one being baptised, and using the same Aramaic word which Jesus used - ephphatha, be opened - the Church prays that the baptised person will have ears open to hear and understand the Word of God, a mouth open and willing to testify to their faith in that Word. In other words, that the baptised person will be fully alive with the life they are receiving.

One sign that people are alive in that way is pointed out to us by James, in the second reading. Ever concrete and practical, James calls us to recognise the radical equality between people that belonging to God's kingdom entails. Believing in Jesus, and then treating people in a worldly and discriminatory way, are not compatible. The healing transformation promised by Isaiah, and fulfilled by Jesus, affects all human relationships, establishing them on a new basis. In the kingdom of God all stand on the same ground. All are in need and healing is promised to all. Not only that, a new kind of fruitfulness is promised to all, the ability not only to receive the gifts on offer, but the Spirit (water in a parched land) that enables us to understand those gifts and to share them, in love and service, with others.