Those of you who took part in the Lent discussion groups on the five senses earlier this year may recall one session when we thought about the sense of hearing. The Wednesday morning group was an especially chatty group, as I recall. Often everyone talked at once. But for this session I particularly wanted us to listen to each other. So I produced a shell and said that people could only speak when they were holding it – so only one at a time. It’s known as a magic microphone in the trade. You might think that everyone in this chatty group would have made a mad grab for it, but that’s not what happened. Instead a deathly hush fell. No one seemed to want to hold that shell. A few people made contributions, but many, suddenly, stayed silent. Why? As we talked about it after the exercise someone hit the nail on the head. “The thing is that if you are holding the shell, and everyone’s listening, you feel you really have to have something worth saying!”
Speaking and listening ought to be simple – we do them all the time, but often they’re not. Today’s Bible readings might help us to understand why.
In the first reading, the prophet Isaiah looks forward to a time when God will rescue his people from exile in Babylon. And what will it time be like? It will be a time when the “ears of the deaf will be unstopped… and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” This isn’t really about physical healing; it’s about the healing of a whole nation, the restoration of hope.
Deafness and speech impediments can often leave people feeling cut off and marginalised, disempowered, unable to take part in conversations that shape the future, unable to make their opinions known, and that’s how Israel feels, says Isaiah. No one is listening to their voices. They aren’t hearing words of hope, words that give them dignity. They’re at the mercy of the powerful rulers of Babylon. But it won’t always be so, says Isaiah. God hasn’t forgotten them. He has been listening, and he has a message for them - “Be strong, do not fear”. And God’s word will be the word that will prevail. It will turn out to be far more powerful than anything the Babylonians say to them. Babylon will be defeated, and they will indeed go home. God’s word, after all, had brought Creation into being – “Let there be light”, he had said, “and there was light” – so why should his word be any less powerful now? He is the one who can make the deserts of their hearts, the deserts of their hopes, blossom with new life.
There’s a lot of hearing and speaking going on in the Gospel reading too. A deaf man is healed and enabled to “speak plainly”. A Syrophoenician woman’s voice is heard – eventually – and honoured.
But the Gospel writer tells us that even for Jesus this can be a struggle. To understand why, we need a bit of background.
Jesus is in Tyre, a seaport on the Phoenician coast. What’s he doing there? We’re not told. It’s a puzzle. Tyre was outside Jewish territory. Like most seaports, it was a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural place, with sailors and travellers from all over the world passing through it. There would have been temples to pagan gods and goddesses on every corner, food that was unclean for observant Jews, behaviour they would have found offensive. This isn’t a seaside holiday.
Jesus is deliberately, putting himself outside his comfort zone, quite literally going to a place where he knows he will be challenged. It’s a bit like the forty days he spent in the wilderness – the wild place, the haunt of demons, before his ministry started. Tyre is another wild place, but Jesus knows he needs to be here. He’s been preaching that God’s love is for everyone, but it seems as if he feels the need to test out how deeply he believes that. But they say you should be careful what you wish for because you may get it, and that’s exactly what happens.
Perhaps he’s prepared for the foreign temples and unclean food, but for a Gentile woman – apparently on her own – to throw herself at him, as this woman does is clearly more than even he is expecting. In a society where respectable women kept to the home, and their male relatives normally spoke for him, there is something suspicious about this woman from the start. Perhaps her daughter’s father is a sailor, long departed across the sea? Whatever has happened, Jesus is clearly uncomfortable at first. His words to her seem harsh. They are harsh. People have tried to suggest that he is just testing her faith, but what kind of person tests someone who is so desperately in need of help. The most likely explanation for them is the obvious one – that Jesus needs to learn something from her. This is the lesson he has come to Tyre for. Her refusal to be fobbed off and his acknowledgement that she is right to persist is the challenge he needs, the confirmation that God’s love is indeed as broad as he has said it is.
The surprising thing is that this story is here in the Gospels at all. It shows Jesus in a bit of a bad light, after all. But the Gospel writers evidently believed that their readers needed to hear about this moment when Jesus learned something from a Gentile woman, so they were prepared to put it in anyway. Their readers were struggling to make a new community in which Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slave and free, were all included on the same terms. This story tells them that even Jesus struggled to do this, but that the struggle was worth it because if we don’t listen to the voices that disturb us, we will miss the voice of God that speaks through them.”
In the second part of the Gospel reading we meet a man who is literally speechless, and deaf as well. Imagine what his life might have been like. There was no sign language at this time. There were no hearing aids. He’d never have the chance to join in a conversation. He’d have been vulnerable to abuse and exploitation – after all, he had no way of complaining. After he’s healed, we are told he “spoke plainly”. I often wonder what he said. I’m sure he would have expressed love and gratitude to some people, but maybe also there were wrongs to be righted, as well. Maybe some people heard painful home truths from him. Just like the Syrophoenician woman, his voice might not have turned out be one everyone wanted to hear. Jesus didn’t just give him the power of hearing and speech; he gave him the power to challenge, to confront, to make his opinions known, and there’s always an element of danger in that.
Both these stories ask us powerful and disturbing questions. Whose voices do we pay attention to today, and whose do we discount? How willing are we to do what Jesus did, to put ourselves in positions where we might be challenged, or have to change our minds? Can we bear to hear the voices of people who don’t share our politics, who don’t see the world as we do? Can we bear to the hear the voices of people who may have hurt or offended us in the past, and who we now can’t believe could ever do anything right or good? We may like to think of ourselves as loving and inclusive, but there will always be people who we close our ears to, whose opinions we disregard before they’ve even opened their mouths. These stories call us to be honest with ourselves, to ask God to show us where our unconscious biases are. They call us to accept that we need to hear voices that disturb and challenge us if we are to grow into the people he wants us to be. If Jesus needed that, then how can we not?
But I think these stories might also ask us how we feel about our own voices and how we use them. Like those who were so reluctant to take hold of that shell in our Lent Group, we may not be sure that we have something to say that is worth hearing.
We may have learned that lesson early, if no one seemed interested in what we had to say as we were growing up, or if we have been repeatedly ridiculed and silenced by powerful voices around us – a domineering parent, sibling, friend or partner. We may have been shouted down by a society which looked down on us or disapproved of us for some reason - poverty, gender, lack of education, mental health issues, family circumstances, sexual orientation. We may have learned that it was safer to keep our mouths shut. We may talk endlessly about everything and nothing, but never take the risk of saying what we really mean.
If that’s the case, then these stories are a reminder that the voice each of us has is unique, and God-given. Jesus enables the deaf man to speak plainly, to say what he needs to say. And in honouring the voice of the Syrophoenician woman, in letting her teach him, he gives her a dignity which her society would never have done, recognising her strength and her courage.
The world needs to hear what each of us has to say, however tongue-tied and insignificant we feel. The medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, said that “every creature is a word of God, and a book about God.” That means you, and me. You’re a word of God. I’m a word of God. Each of us is something unique that God is saying to the world. When we speak our God-given truth with our God-given voice, however hesitant and inarticulate we feel, God speaks through us, and God’s word is a word which brings worlds into being, which makes streams flow in the desert, which heals the broken-hearted and gives hope to the hopeless.
So, today, tomorrow, this week, let’s be aware of the people we hear and the people we fail to hear, of the words we speak, and the words we fail to speak. Most of all let us be open to the voice of God which tells us to “Be strong, and do not fear!” and let’s encourage other people to hear that message too, in what we say and in what we do. Amen
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