Up Close and Personal

This week's Gospel is Mark 7:31-37.  In the reading, people bring a deaf and mute man to Jesus and Jesus heals the man by "putting his finger into the man's ears and, spitting, touching his tongue" and, looking to heaven, saying, "Be opened."

This is intimate contact.  Especially since there is no indication that Jesus had ever met the man before.  Imagine such close physical contact these days.  Or any days, frankly.

What's striking here is the degree of intimacy of the contact.  Perhaps this is parallel to the degree of the man's affliction, being deaf and mute, which is significant.  Jesus can heal however He wants, from a distance, up close, whatever He chooses.  But with this affliction, which was severe, he got very close.

Do we let Jesus get this close?  Or do we pick and choose when and how we will allow Jesus in, and to what extent?

It's not easy to allow Jesus to be that close.  To be that integrally involved in our lives.  But when we can, His presence seeps in and becomes part of us.

Think of the reason we generally don't let people put their fingers in our ears or touch our tongues.  Because then what is in that person, or on that person, can become part of us.  But with Jesus that's no problem; we want Jesus to become part of us.  As with the Eucharist.

So what keeps us from letting Jesus become part of us?  Sometimes, it's because we know that when He becomes part of us, He can displace something else within us.  Something that we think we need.  Money, "power", "comfort", whatever.

But when we think that, when we think that Jesus would displace something more valuable to us than Him, we are wrong.  The key is to make that choice, to allow Jesus in close, to know that there is nothing that He can displace that would be more valuable than He is.  In reality, when Jesus enters us, that which is displaced is necessarily less valuable than He is.

- The Older Brother