The Music of God: Ephphatha!

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after the Octave of Pentecost

By Father Richard Cipolla

At once the man’s ears were opened: he was freed from the impediment and began to speak plainly. (Mark 7:36 ff)

And what do you think he heard?  And what did he say?  What hath God wrought?  To be or not to be?  Awesome!  Cool! Amazing! When God frees you from silence, when God releases your tongue in this singular way:  he put his fingers into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue. Then he looked up to heaven and groaned. That is the first thing the man heard, but it was not a groan. This is what the crowd heard. The crowd never hears what is really going on. The crowd is too busy gawking at what just happened, trying to figure out how this was done.  So the first news anchor comments: he touched his ears first. Touched his ears, responds his female co-anchor. She goes on: but look at what happened next, he spit and touched the man’s tongue.  He should have known better.  Has this guy never heard of Covid or monkeypox?  Back to the male half of the team:  but it worked.  But I forgot the groan. That was weird. Why don’t we cut back to the tape and listen to it again?

The sound that came from Jesus before the Ephphatha was indeed strange. And so the man host commented:  that was really strange. Maybe it’s an Amazonian mantra.  Could be, his other half said, but whatever it was it worked. The man can hear. The man can speak.  But what were his first words?. I couldn’t make them out. It sounded like a groan but it sounded almost musical to me, but not ordinary music, nothing like I have heard.

Not ordinary music indeed. Groaning indeed. The problem was that all these people were deaf, deaf to what was really going on, what was being said, or rather, sung For the first thing this man heard was music. What the crowd heard as a groan from Jesus was music and that music echoed echoed  in the man’s head, in his ears the notes in the form of neumes, square neumes, diamond shaped neumes, neumes with little squiggles and tails, these neumes converged and exploded in the man’s ears and in his head he heard what Jesus was singing:  Kyrie eleison. And that song of prayer unblocked what had been blocked for so long: and the ears of the deaf were unstop-ed. Unstopped so that he could reply, so that the first thing he could do as a response to the chant of Ephphatha was to cry out in a glorious melisma: Christe eleison!  What other fitting response to Lord, have mercy, than Christ, have mercy?  Listen, the crowd said, he does not know how to speak so he is uttering this strange sound. A groan for a groan, someone said in the crowd.

The same crowd—perhaps not the same but they all look alike—was standing on that hill where the three crosses were. Ah, the noise this time. The wind was picking up, there was distant thunder, there was the smelly noise of the crowd.  And then they heard what they thought was a groan from the man on the central cross.  Some had heard that groan before but couldn’t quite place it. If the co-hosts of the news channel had been covering this story, they may have remembered this sound, but it would not matter for this guy on the Cross was old news. Death is not news unless it is the death of someone famous, someone important.

And this groan shook the cross, and the neumes poured out of the man’s mouth like one of those medieval cartoon-like paintings where the words are written on a scroll coming directly out of the person’s mouth.  Listen! someone said. He is crying to Elijah!  But they were deaf. Their ears were not unstop-ed. All they could hear is what they wanted to hear. Their ears were tuned to hear only what would satisfy them, what would make them happy, whatever would confirm them in their willful ignorance, whatever would block out the silence, the quiet, the still whisper of God.  The noise in their heads which contained not only their own manufactured noise but the noise of the world itself blocked out anything else, so they could not and would not hear what was being sung on the cross: Eli! Eli! Lama sabachtani?

But listening closer, listening with unstopped ears, with the ears of the spheres, one could hear psalm tone 2:  Deus, deus meus, quare me dereliquisti?  The sung prayer was borne aloft into the dark sky by angels carrying each of the neumes, and straight into the presence of God who recognized the tone, the music played at the brooding orchestration of the big bang, when the neumes of God’s song of going out into the void coalesced into quarks, and the quarks coalesced into protons and neutrons, and the chant of atoms was born, spinning and singing, inventing the eight tones leaving room for one more, causing the whole universe to vibrate with the song of the life of God: Exsúltet iam angélica turba cælórum!

And the mother standing at the foot of the cross, stabat mater dolorosa, that plaintive chant, turned itself inside out, for in her heart at this hour of her son’s death, in this darkness, in her heart she heard the most joyful of the tones. And she sang, O how she sang, in the happiness of tone 8:  Magnificat anima mea dominum!  Ah, she heard the music, she whose ears and heart and body and soul were unstop-ed, whose tongue was loosened to ponder all of these things in her heart. She knew how to sing the Lord’s song, she whose womb had been opened with the word:  Ephphatha! Be opened!. Whose womb was filled with the song of the Word of God, and who gave birth to the Song of Songs, He who alone can unstop our ears to make us hear the truth and sing with joy, he alone who can put his divine spittle on our tongues to witness to his truth and life, he alone who can open our eyes to see the goodness, truth and beauty that lies at the heart of our lives that have been transformed by his grace.

Richard Cipolla