The Gospel Reading for this Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
in Cycle B comes from Mark 7:31-37, and concerns the event that took place in the district
of Decapolis. The text tells us that the people brought a man who was deaf and
also had a speech impediment to Jesus, and begged Him to lay his hand on him.
We then read that [Jesus] “took him off by himself away from the crowd. He
put his finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue; then he
looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him, “Ephphatha!”– that is, “Be
opened!” — And immediately the man’s ears were opened, his speech impediment
was removed, and he spoke plainly. He ordered them not to tell anyone. But the
more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it. They were exceedingly
astonished and they said, “He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear
and the mute speak.”
There’s nothing I
hated worse as a kid than wet kisses from my aunts, or when my mother would use
her own spit as a cleaning agent or cosmetic for my face. UGH! I still get
grossed out thinking about it today. I’m not bothered by my own excess saliva,
but other people’s spit on me is downright disgusting! In fact, the Hebrew
Bible not only informs us that spit from a person afflicted with genital
excretions is unclean (Cf. Lev. 15:8), but that spitting on someone is
considered to be an insult (Cf. Num. 12:14; Dt. 25:9):
Leviticus 15:8 – If the man with the
discharge spits on a clean person, the latter shall wash his garments,
bathe in water, and be unclean until evening.
Numbers 12:14 – But the LORD answered
Moses: Suppose her father had spit in her face, would she not bear her
shame for seven days? Let her be confined outside the camp for seven days;
afterwards she may be brought back.
Deuteronomy 25:9 – Thereupon the elders of his
city shall summon him and speak to him. If he persists in saying, “I do not
want to marry her, his sister-in-law, in the presence of the elders, shall go
up to him and strip his sandal from his foot and spit in his face,
declaring, “This is how one should be treated who will not build up his
brother’s family!”
Spitting, as an
intentional insult, still has a place in Judaism today. We find it in Chapter
33 of the Shulchan Aruch, known in English as the Code of Jewish Law, is a
written manual of halacha (Jewish law), authored and published by Rabbi
Yosef Karo in the 16th century:
No. 4: A person
should always remember that, to smell food, you should spit ascended saliva,
rather than swallow it, because if he had swallowed, may expose themselves to
danger, Gd forbid.”
We also find
spitting included as part of the Aleinu Prayer, which concludes every service for
Chabad Jews. They spit immediately after the first stanza that ends “For
they worship vanity and emptiness” (Hebrew: שֶׁהֵם מִשְׁתַּחֲוִים לְהֶבֶל
וָרִיק). There is also the Jewish custom to spit three times in reaction to
something especially good or evil, by either literally spitting or figuratively
by saying “pooh, pooh, pooh.”
So how do we
understand Jesus using His own spit as a healing agent in the light that
spitting on someone is an insult? The first thing point out is that there are three
spitting-miracles narratives in the Gospels (two in Mark 7:31-37
and 8:22-26 and one in John 9:1-41), and the fact that the Gospel
of John accounts for one of those events is very important. Theologians
like to pay close attention to the Gospel of John because it was
written a generation after Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
That being the case, we find that the stories contained in John
informs us about what particular events in Jesus’ life that the more mature
Christian communities found to be most meaningful. It’s comparable to the
memories I would share about my father to my daughters, versus the stories that
my daughters would tell about my father a few decades after my death. The
stories they tell about him would be the ones that they heard from me that had
the most impact on their life, or the stories they found had the most
significant meaning. Therefore, because John includes a
spittle-miracle, we know that this is a narrative that has rich theological
meaning.
I believe that
the more Scripturally consistent way to understand the spittle-miracles would
be in same way that we understand Jesus doing things on the Sabbath that were
considered to be against the law, or how we understand His teachings to correct
the Mosaic Law (e.g. on divorce). Jesus did these things to not only to
establish His authority, but to also demonstrate His authority, which often
came by the way of giving teachable paradoxes. Jesus’ teaching method can be
summed up in this way: What you think is real, is NOT actually real, and what you
think is true, is actually NOT true. And the spittle-miracles fit right into
that didactic construct. Essentially Jesus was saying, ‘So, you think spit is
an insult – you think spit is unclean? Well, let me show you what spit was
capable of from the beginning – before sin came into the world.
I think the best way to take this
teaching and apply it to our daily lives is not going out and spitting on
people with cancer and impaired vision, but, rather, by the way of another
paradoxical saying; that, who you are is not who God is drawing you into being,
and who you are is exactly who you will be. Meaning that we ought not
understand this teaching through the one who spat, but, rather, by the one who
was spat upon. In the way we will see that what Jesus is saying here is that
all that I AM and all that I HAVE is what you are and will be, and do have and
will have, if you would just faithfully live with your eyes fixated on my
Father through Me.
God Bless
Nathan
Nathan
