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

The history of humanity has known very rough times and has memories of dull moments when human dignity was put to question in the name of shallow interests. But at every such juncture of history, people in politics, in the religions or in the arts came forward and were bold enough to provide a vision and bring history back on track.

Our time is tainted with a tragedy of perhaps unprecedented dimensions, that of the global dispossess­ed. It’s one of the worst tragedies un­folding before our very eyes which daily behold thousands of thousands of displaced people who seem to belong nowhere and to nobody.

I acknowledge that there is also a gradually growing awareness about what’s happening. But by and large, we’re still like the man put in focus by Jesus in today’s gospel, deaf and dumb. Today’s scriptures speak loud and clear on our collective responsibility. We cannot afford a spirit-ualistic reading of the scriptures that make of us “lonely selves in search of purely personal fulfilment”, leaving things around us as they are.

We go through endless and futile debates on religion and its role and relevance in people’s lives today. We spend our energies and resources upholding the cultural aspect of the religion that has been handed down to us. In this way we prove right Sam Harris when he wrote The End of Faith, which he began writing in what he described as a period of “collective grief and stupefaction” following the September 11 attacks.

The times we live now are, for specifically different reasons, a time of collective grief and stupefaction. To date, any political strategy whatever to face and overcome such a massive tragedy seems to be utterly lacking. The world seems helpless in the face of such massive displacement and we can hardly come to grips at where all this is taking us in the near future.

All this I consider mostly relevant and provoking for a thorough reading of today’s scriptures. The scripture, on this world scenario, calls for a greater awareness of our collective responsibility.

As Will Hutton wrote last week: “The choice is between building walls and electrified fences, creating mass detention centres, organising mass repatriation and conceding to the fear of the other, or it is to find a way of sustaining openness while doing the very best that can be done to allay the natural fears and apprehensions of host populations”.

The prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading is addressing a displaced people in exile. His words sound apocalyptic: “Your God is coming, vengeance is coming, the retribution of God.” But his message is one of hope and courage. His fantasy is stretched to extremes. The eyes of the blind opened, the ears of the deaf unsealed, the lame who leap like a deer are all symbolical images that give expression to the hope of a fractured world.

They are also strong images to give assurance that there is an alternative to sustained selfishness and injustice. The apostle James, also in the second reading, addresses a culture of prejudice that adopts different weights and measures with different people, and hence generates injustice and sustains unjust social structures.

The world needs to be healed, and from what we gather daily, it is becoming more and more fragile and fractured. In today’s gospel, Mark’s Jesus is no longer in Jewish territory. He is returning from the district of Tyre and going by way of Sidon, a land foreign to religion and to religious stereotypes.

The man they brought in front of Jesus can easily represent our collectivity, unable to listen to the cries of so much suffering and speechless in the face of so much injustice. Jesus can heal this fractured world. But as rabbi Jonathan Sacks claims, we need to overcome the excessive preoccupation with our individual needs that has become a barrier that hinders our being open to the other.

We need an ethics of responsibility, we are called to be more concerned with the life we live together. We are called to a more profound engagement with the human condition today. If we remain deaf and dumb, it is not our religion that we are losing, but our human face.

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