As exceptions they announce extraordinary moments

My grandmother immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands when she was a young girl. Her parents left the northern region of Friesland and settled in southern Minnesota. For the time, it was a huge move and an enormous transition. In more ways than we can imagine today, with more depth of meaning, they left an Old World behind them, in order to begin life again in a strange but promising New World. My great grandparents took almost nothing with them, no remnants of a former time: no photographs, no treasured books, no heirlooms to pass on. In their minds, everything meaningful was strictly ahead of them. They even left their language at the docks. No Dutch was spoken on the farm. It too had lost its use. English was the language of the future.

For nearly all my years growing up, my grandmother lived within our household. It never occurred to us that we were anything but Americans, pure and simple. There was never any talk about former ways or different customs or far away places. All the stories we heard were strictly Midwestern, and all our connections, whether relatives or friends, were contained within the radius of a few hundred miles. This was the entire world to us – with one exception.

For every once in a while, suddenly and surprisingly, my grandmother would utter a word in her native tongue – just a word, not a sentence, not a phrase, just a word. And she would utter it almost as if muttering, under her breath. She wouldn’t speak or declare or offer a pronouncement in Dutch. These were words that just seemed to slip out. And once out, they were never translated for us. We didn’t need translation. We somehow knew already what they meant. We could feel their sense. Just as we knew that whatever the word meant, any translation would be inadequate. We could intuit that no other word, in any language, was substitutable for what she had expressed.

This was our only and infrequent indication that there was more to our past than was generally acknowledged, and we found these moments intriguing. It was also clear to us that we had touched upon something grave or deep – something sui generis, all of its own, which was impressed on us by my grandmother’s recourse to a language that had been retired decades before. When these words arose, we learned to pay attention, because if our common vocabulary wasn’t up to the task, then the circumstances weren’t common either.

In the Gospel according to Mark there are three stories in which Jesus’ words were recorded not in Greek but in his own language, Aramaic, one instance we have heard this morning. In doing so, Mark left no clue as to why he made these choices. In any number of places, Jesus’ original tongue could have been similarly quoted. So it is logical to surmise that these three occurrences are exceptional cases and that as exceptions they announce extraordinary moments, disclosures somehow outside the ordinary sense of things. The implication may be that we should pay special attention, because something outside the usual is at stake, something grave or deep.

The most memorable of the utterances that Mark set down in Aramaic is the cry that Jesus let out at his crucifixion, when it had become brutally clear that he had been utterly abandoned. , “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.” My God, why have you forsaken me? It’s a statement of wrenching gravity, for it thrusts before us the depths of human despair. This is precisely what we presume God would never do. Even if all else fails, God is supposed to be sure. God is supposed to save. God is supposed to smooth out all the rough edges and offer gracious consolation. So it is supposed. But Mark makes sure that in this moment the tremendous cost of being human is fully plumbed. Jesus’ exclamation holds true for all of us. This cry might be ours. It fits our mouths. It sometimes fits the stubborn realities of our world: in the streets of Baghdad, in the refugee camps of Darfur, amid the shanties of the Bateys in the Dominican Republic. It will fit the obstinate eventuality of our death. And here God surprises us with stark honesty, giving voice himself to the far edge of human life.

It is a cry that is matched, however, by a contrasting summons, made in an earlier story, in the first statement left by Mark in Jesus’ own language. Jesus comes to the home of Jairus. When he arrives there, all the household is gathered, crying because Jairus’ young daughter has died. Death seems especially cruel when it strikes children; it seems particularly immune to consolation. Yet it is in this moment of intense grief that Jesus, behind closed doors, gently says, “Talitha cumi.” “Little girl, I say to you arise.” This was Mark’s announcement of our opposite edge, delivered by God in person, in the depth of a native tongue. Jesus declared the promise that our lives are met, not lastly by death, but first and ultimately in this divine beckoning: rise up. At the far edge of our humanity, beyond the scope of our own language, beyond proof, beyond the possibility that this can become mere assumption or common belief, this is God’s word to us: arise. This is the mysterious exaltation, in which we may trust. God surprises us, by giving us ourselves, completely, both first and abidingly.

The third Aramaic quotation of Jesus lies between these other two, and it declares a freedom that lies between as well – it speaks not of the edges of life but about the freedom by which we can live in the midst of it. A man was brought to Jesus who for the entirety of his life had been both deaf and mute. Unable to hear, unable to speak, he was closed off and shut down from the world. Taking hold of him, Jesus sighed. It is a moment of compelling resignation. This too exemplifies us. We are so often like this man, trapped, stopped up. We can’t find the words that work. We often don’t know how to understand what we face. We live muddled and bound up, in a hundred different ways, small and great. But in this very moment the word of Jesus resounds, “Ephphatha:” “be opened,” he said. How dazzling this is if we truly hear it: be open. Look, speak, listen, discover and explore, don’t be afraid. It’s a magnificent imperative. This is the way to live, he said. God gives us this immense possibility. Be unstuck.

We tend to miss the magnitude of this command. We dismiss the message as blithely as we deny the miracle – an empty fable in our educated times, say the enlightened. Yet here is the strange irony – in so doing, we do not hear the actual story nor do we have words by which we can engage it. In rejection, the story renders us deaf and mute – when this need not be. From now and always, Jesus said, pay attention. Be aware. Absorb the world. Make this your habit, be ceaselessly, unabashedly, open. This is the very heart of the Christian message, this courage and this excitement.

What really counts in life? Over the course of years, in many ways both direct and indirect, my grandmother asked this question of her grandchildren. And we listened to her – she was, after all, more than seventy years ahead of us on the path. What really counts? Nothing but the present tense? Securing some vague notion of happiness, borrowed wholesale, from one moment to the next? In the words of the Prayer Book, being so immersed in things temporal and material that there is no room, no time, and no language left for things eternal and spiritual? Mark’s answer might better be framed in this way. What really counts is learning how to live as close as you can to these words: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani – bearing the question that discloses our soul. Talitha cumi – trusting that the life that God gives is the life that God will eternally lift up. And Ephphatha, moving always toward this marvelous imperative invitation.

Be open, says God, in words that erupt from the core of his being, words so fitting that they are untranslatable. Be open all the way down to the real anguish of betrayal, all the way up to the redeeming of God. For our purpose as persons, as Christians, as the communion of the Church, is not to press upon the world a tight and constraining order, clamping down and binding up. It is rather to live in such a way that others look on us and are astounded by glimpsing a deep and uncommon heritage, an inheritance of faith that can be seen in the constancy of our compassion and the resilience of our joy. It is to act with such love that others may say with amazement as they said of Jesus, look, they do everything well; they even make the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. Ephphatha – no translation needed. It’s meaning and profundity is simply evident.