Today’s readings: Isaiah 35, 4-7; James 2, 1-5; Mark 7, 31-37.

Connecting with God appears to be a major challenge in our culture. Strictly speaking, connecting with God is not something we can achieve. The God we believe in is a God who himself took the initiative, entered history, and established the connections with humanity.

Karl Barth, the 20th century Lutheran theologian who struggled so much to clear up our confused ideas about God and his way of communication, distinguished clearly between ‘religion’ and ‘faith’. Religion for him is our struggle to find God. But our God is a God who revealed himself and who himself is in search of us.

There is much more in the mission of the Church than merely to communicate the gospel. The Church’s mission in the world is to facilitate connection with God, to set up the network so that more and more people may find it easier to establish the connection. The Church is called primarily to be a catalyst in helping people connect with God particularly those out of range.

Today’s gospel account of a deaf and dumb man is not to be read simplistically as one of the routine miracles worked by Jesus. The geography of the region Jesus was passing through at the moment, the pagan region of Tyre and Sidon, is more telling than the miracle itself. Mark here is speaking of the reality of unbelief in the region, and the ‘ephphatha’ pronounced by Jesus is the magic word powerful enough to change people’s hearts and to surprise onlookers.

Non-belief seems to characterize so much our times. It is not the same as non-practice. The remedies for both are very different. At times we attempt cosmetic adjustments to look cooler and think that addressing the issue of people leaving religion is pivotal. But non-belief demands an overhaul in approach, a more in-depth operation that has to do with the heart not the image.

We’ve just bid farewell to Cardinal Martini, a man of God who lived and carried within himself intensely this drama of non-belief in our times. In private and in public, he worked miracles where connecting people with God is concerned. His remedy and his strength was the word of God which he so ably knew how to scrutinise and let it speak out. He taught us all that God’s word is still powerful enough to speak out for itself even to present-day generations.

Evangelisation is not about preaching or a matter of reformulating doctrine. The world needs gestures. If God is missing but not missed, we need to excogitate ways and means how to surprise people with the gift they don’t know they need. In today’s gospel we read that “They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech and they asked him to lay his hand on him”. It was not the man who went to Jesus, as very often we read in the gospels themselves.

Reaching out is not waiting for people to come or laying out the pre-conditions for people to be eligible to join us. I know there are rules, but the Sabbath was made for man. Pope Benedict XVI said in his inauguration homily when he became Pope “There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the gospel”. If faithfulness to tradition means being stuck in time and in fossilised doctrine, then that would be more a betrayal of tradition. If the church is unable to move on, then it is part of the drama of humanity and cannot offer a remedy.

‘Apartheid’ was for so long synonymous with Mandela’s South Africa. It was also the strategy of the Jews at the time of Jesus and often is also our strategy. Jesus is truly the liberator because he escapes the human constructions, even if they are religious rules. In line with Isaiah’s prophetical program, Jesus addresses all faint hearts and proclaims courage rather than judgment.

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