NOTES for Mar 7:31-37
The healing of the deaf man with a speech impediment would seem to be one of many similar healings. Yet his affliction is special: it is connected with the word, for it prevents him from hearing the word and speaking the word. And what is the word? It is the precious means by which we touch God and by which God touches us. “The Word was God” (John 1:1). For God cannot be seen with bodily eyes or touched with hands, but the word is the thread that connects us with Him. It is difficult for us now to identify the precise reason why the evangelist decided to preserve the Aramaic word here. Yet seeing that Aramaic words occur in other cases when something exceptionally poignant in spiritual and human terms is at stake, such as the raising of the girl or the cry from the Cross, we may cautiously suppose that here too the sacred writer wishes to invest an apparently ordinary healing with something special. Perhaps this is precisely why the medieval poet, when praising the Lord in an akathist composed of twelve ikoi, placed the remembrance of this miracle in the first ikos: “Creator of angels and Lord of hosts, open my perplexed mind and tongue to praise Thy most pure name, as Thou didst of old open the hearing and tongue of the deaf man whose speech was impaired.” The thirteenth-century monks’ perception of this miracle may be close or distant from our own, but we must not forget one thing: both in communion with God and in communication with people, the gift of speech and the gift of hearing are given only together, not one or the other separately.