Tongue-Tied | Sunday Reflection | 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Some topics have the power to make even the most eloquent and voluble speakers tongue-tied. Think of the brilliant science professor capable of holding whole lecture halls spellbound suddenly stumbling and stammering when asked to talk about his feelings. All of us can talk up a storm about some things while finding other topics terribly awkward. For many people, including church-going Catholics, religion is one of those subjects we would rather avoid in conversation. We may be able to declare with some confidence that we are, in fact, Catholic, but when it comes to explaining why, we find that words fail us. What we do manage to share never seems to come out right. Then we walk away from the conversation concluding that we must have sounded pretty foolish. The hard truth is that many of us suffer from a kind of speech impediment when it comes to talking about Christ, His Church, and the life of grace. Matters of faith leave us tongue-tied.

This brings us to the heart of the miracle recorded in today’s gospel. Christ’s healings are never simply about alleviating physical burdens. Deeper than this, they are meant to be signs of the interior restoration He desires to work in our souls. Today’s miraculous healing of the deaf man with the speech impediment is no different. In this man we are meant to recognize a reflection of ourselves. In his speech impediment, we are meant to see something of our own incapacity to speak the words of God. The fact that he is deaf is, of course, deeply related to his speech problem. We cannot clearly pronounce what we have not first clearly heard. Anyone who has ever attempted to speak a foreign language knows this truth painfully well.

This gives us an important lead in understanding our tongue’s sluggishness in God talk. First we have to have our ears opened to the Word of God by the Word of God before we can echo Him. The rough physical mechanics of the miracle show us that the opening of our heart’s ear to the Word is not a clean and neat operation. It involves letting the Lord get up close and personal, sometimes uncomfortably so.

It’s no accident that the Lord takes the man away from the crowd so that he can be alone with Him in order to open his ears and loosen his tongue. Crowds are loud and their chatter can be deafening. In that uproar, it is so hard to notice the still whispering Voice that Elijah heard on Mt. Horeb. In a more subtle way, the crowd also bears some responsibility for our speech impediment. It is, after all, the fear of their disapproval that weighs down our tongues when we attempt to speak about the Faith. We know that the crowd doesn’t tolerate talk of God beyond the most vague and banal generalities. This keeps us silent.

To hear and to speak the Gospel freely we must have the courage to be led away from the crowd and so be alone with the Lord Jesus. Only after letting Him open our ears and loosen our tongue can we return to the crowd and share with them what we have heard in the silence. What better topic could there be for conversation? What better subject could there be than this Divine Word for which our ears and tongue were made to hear and sing?