What Christ's seven steps in healing the deaf and dumb mean for Christians today
When Christ heals a deaf-mute, he uses seven preparatory acts, culminating in the 'ephpheta' – which the Church retains in Baptism today.
When Christ heals a deaf-mute, he uses seven preparatory acts, culminating in the 'ephpheta' – which the Church retains in Baptism today.
Editor’s Notes
The following passage deals with the Gospel read on the 11th Sunday after Pentecost.
It towards the end of the period Fr Coleridge calls “the training of the apostles,” and before that in which Our Lord’s preaching becomes more focused on the Cross. It is immediately preceded by the healing of the Syrophœnician woman’s daughter, and followed by the second multiplication of loaves for the four thousand.
Taking place in the Gentile Decapolis, this miracle points to the Gospel’s reach beyond Israel. Coleridge explains how the incident is used to teach the Apostles the virtues of prudence and discretion in their ministry.
It is also a crucial event in the life of every Christian, in that the “Ephpheta” in the solemn rite of Baptism is taken from this event.
In this first part, Coleridge presents Ludolph the Saxon’s interpretation of how the miracle demonstrates the seven steps by which God gives grace to the soul.
The Deaf and Dumb Healed
The Training of the Apostles, Vol. IV, Chap. XV
St. Mark vii. 31-37
Story of the Gospels, § 77
Burns and Oates, London, 1885
Headings and some line breaks added.
Our Lord in Decapolis
We are not told how long our Lord remained in the place where He had delivered the daughter of the Syrophœnician woman, but it is not likely that He lingered there, inasmuch as the miracle must have made Him an object of general curiosity among her neighbours. The Evangelists do not say that she was commanded to keep the deliverance of her child a secret, and this makes it still more probable that our Lord went away at once.
His course now lay, as far as we can gather, along the extreme northern skirts of Galilee, passing from the sea-coast towards the interior of the country, and crossing the Jordan high up above the place where it entered into the Lake. The region of Decapolis, into which He now passed, lay on either side of the stream, and He could pass at will to either side of the Lake if He chose to turn His steps southwards.
This Decapolis has already been mentioned by St. Mark, who is our only authority for the miracle of which we are now to speak, as being the country of the man who had been delivered from the legion of devils by our Lord, when He had crossed the Lake from Capharnaum, after having finished His first series of parables. This poor man had implored our Lord to be allowed to join himself to the holy band which accompanied Him. Our Lord had refused him the permission, and had told him to go to his home and his friends, and tell them how great things God had done for him.
‘He went his way,’ St. Mark tells us, ‘and began to publish in Decapolis how great things God had done for him, and all men wondered.’ Thus our Lord had prepared for Himself a herald for His short visit to this outlying district on the present occasion, though here also His chief object seems to have been to keep Himself concealed. But his efforts were in great measure in vain.
St Mark’s account
We owe our knowledge of this miracle, as has been said, entirely to St. Mark, that is to St. Peter. It is the same with the account of one other of the few miracles of this period, of which we shall presently have to speak.
There is a carefulness and minuteness of detail about these short narratives, which give them a charm of their own, and suggest to us the thought that it is highly probable that, if it were possible for us to have the accounts of the almost innumerable miracles wrought by our Lord in anything of the same kind of detail, we should find something special and particular in the narrative of each, which might contain great and beautiful instruction for us.
The time of which we are now speaking was a time when our Lord was keeping Himself back from the public gaze, and it was perhaps for this reason that those whom He did heal on such occasions as the present came to Him singly, and so received from Him that special attention and delicacy of treatment, according to their peculiar needs or states of mind, which those who came to Him in large companies could not enjoy. In any case, this feature in these miracles is that on which we naturally fasten, in our considerations concerning them.
Let us hear the account of the present miracle as it is given us by St. Mark.
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