Pavens søndagspreken – 10. september

«Mennesker har vanskelig for å høre Guds stemme i vår tid,» sa paven i sin tale i München i dag. … «I evangeliet hører vi at Jesus sa ‘Effata’ og åpnet den døves ører. Det samme gjør han i dag i dåpens sakrament.» Det var interessant for meg å se at paven også var en hel del inne på dåpen, ut fra evangelieteksten om å åpne ørene til den døve. Her er litt av talen i engelsk oversettelse fra Bloggen Closed Cafeteria:

There is a hard-of-hearing towards God which we suffer from in this age. We simply cannot hear Him anymore – there are too many other frequencies in our ears. What is said about Him seems pre-scientific, no longer fitting for our time. With this hard-of-hearing, or even deafness, towards God we naturally lose our ability to speak with and to Him. Because of that, we lack a decisive perceptive faculty. Our internal senses are threatening to die off. With this loss in perception the radius of our relation to reality is drastically and dangerously curtailed.

The space of our live is reduced in a threatening manner. The Gospel tells us that Jesus put his fingers in the ears of the deaf man, with some saliva, and said «Ephata – open!» The Evangelist has preserved the original Aramaic word for us that Jesus spoke and thereby leads us straight into the moment it happened.

What is recounted is unique and still does not belong to a distant past: Jesus does the same in a new manner today, over and over again. In baptism, Jesus performs this gesture of touching and says Ephata – open yourself to be able to listen to God. By that he also gives us the ability to speak with/to God.

This process, the sacrament of baptism, is nothing magical. Baptism opens up a path. It leads us into the community of the listening and speaking – a community with Jesus himself who is the only person to have seen God and is able to tell us about HIm: Through faith, he wants to share with us this seeing of God, listening to God and speaking with the Father.

The path of being baptized must become a process of growth, in which we grow into life with God and thereby gain a new perspective on people and creation. The Gospel invites us to realize that there is a deficit in perception in us, a lack that at first we do not experience as one, because everything else insists on its urgency and logic; because everything is apparently happening normally, even when we no longer have ears and eyes for God and live without Him.

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