Homily: Be Opened

Year B / Ordinary Time / Twenty-third Sunday (Catholic Education Sunday in Singapore)

Readings: Isaiah 35.4-7a / Psalm 145. 6c-7, 8-9a, 9bc-10 (R/v 1b) / James 12.1-5 / Mark 7.31-31

Dear sisters and brothers, have you ever wished that you had courage, or a bit more of it? More grit and guts to face a problem or challenge, your family and friends, the world?

Perhaps you wished for courage on your first day in school. Or, for all your school examinations and competitions You might have wished for courage during first camp or overseas trip away from home. Courage might have been your need growing up with bullying, falling in love, and considering life’s options.

Some of us here might be praying for courage to face our present struggles, pains and troubles.  

Today, we are asked to have courage in our lives. We hear it in Isaiah’s call in the first reading. “Courage. Do not be afraid”.  There’s no need to fear anymore because the Lord is coming, he proclaims to the Israelites. Coming to heal the sick and restore their health. Coming to water the desert, revive the barren, and refresh the lands. Coming to save.  

Isn’t this the kind of hope we need to be courageous in our everyday struggles, temptations and challenges? Hope in a God who saves? Courage because this God saves us?

Courage and hope. Don’t we want these for our children when we enrol them in school? Yes, they come to learn how to learn but, more so, to learn how to live. Isn’t this why we entrust them to teachers to prepare them for a bright future?

Aren’t words of courage and hope what you say to your sons on their first day in school? Aren’t these the words you offer your daughters as they sit for those examinations?  Aren’t courage and hope what teachers want for students to excel in studies, at play, as they work? 

Indeed, aren’t courage and hope important values for life?  Values that some overlook because they choose schools for grades, for connections, for name. 

All of us would agree that right values for life are foundational to becoming better persons, to living purposeful lives and to making the world a better place. They count for much more than any certificate, diploma or degree can. Values are the wellspring for the good and happy life. 

Indeed, every school is a good school because all schools teach values.

Catholic education, which we celebrate today, has the same aspiration. But it offers all a little more for life, particularly, the clear call to participate in building up God’s kingdom.

Many of us here value Catholic education for the good work it does in forming the character of students, rooting it in gospel values and orientating it for service. We believe this is how students become the persons God desires them to become.

They grow up like this because in Catholic schools they learn to respect each person as God’s gift, value everyone’s uniqueness as God’s design, celebrate the community’s diverse richness as God’s abundant care for the common good. 

They also grow up like this because Catholic schools are holy ground. Holy ground where everyone is enveloped in the awesome reality of God’s holy presence. And on holy ground, every student and teacher comes to know a God who always reaches out to them first, who never rejects them, even in sin, and who stays with them no matter the lights and shadows of life, the order and messiness of each day, the saintly and sinful choices that make up their lives. 

In truth, all in Catholic schools will have that “aha” moment or two of God dwelling with us because God values our goodness, no matter how little or much it may be, and its potential to help us become holy.  Isn’t this what you and pray for ourselves and our children: to know that we are good enough for God?

All these are good reasons to celebrate Catholic education, including these truths. 

First, that our 35 Catholic schools serve a wide range of students, from primary to JC levels, in every stream from normal technical to express and IP, with opportunities for O and A levels, as well as IB. No matter if one is gifted or handicapped, or if one has less or more, everyone can have a place in the family of Catholic schools. 

Second, that every child in every Catholic school is given the chance and support to achieve those excellent grades needed to graduate and to do well in life.

Yes, Catholic education is about nurturing the whole child.

Today’s gospel story presents a more fundamental reason to celebrate. It is about Jesus healing a deaf man. It is a curious way of healing but it reveals the heart of Catholic education.

People bring a deaf and dumb man to Jesus. Unable to hear, he is cut off from the community and its possibilities for him.  We might think that the young who don’t know enough are like the deaf man. Sometimes however we are the deaf man because we choose not to listen to our community and its possibilities for us. 

Jesus heals by touching the ears of the deaf man with his fingers and the tongue of this mute man with his salvia. He breaks open the silence of being deaf and mute. “Ephphatha!”; “Be opened!” Jesus’ gestures and words express extreme acceptance. Jesus feels the man’s deafness and tastes his muteness. 

Here is an encounter between one who wants to communicate and the listener who really does everything to hear it, to feel it. Between Jesus who wants to share God’s saving love and humankind who yearns for God’s redeeming life. Here is divine love communicating to meet human desire. This is a most curious exchange. 

Aren’t encounter and exchange with Jesus at the heart Catholic education? 

An encounter of love – of God’s love through the Christian ethos of a Catholic school and the Christ-like care of its teachers that answer not just a student’s yearning for knowledge but his search for the Truth. 

An exchange of hope – of Christian hope in God that each child is God’s child, intrinsically good, abundantly gifted, anointed for God’s greater plan. 

And it begins when all in Catholic schools heed Jesus’ call “Ephphatha!”,“Be opened”, and do so in life.  

If we agree that this encounter and this exchange is distinctive of Catholic schools, then, let us treasure, support and promote Catholic education. We must do these because here students learn to hear, to speak and to enact in their lives and those they serve not just what they have learnt to benefit the common good, but why an education in Catholic schools really matter.

It matters because it opens every student, like Jesus opened the deaf man’s ears and mouth, to firm courage and sure hope in God. In God who is always constant and true. In God who is always good. In God who makes all things beautiful, even in the messiness of our mistakes. I believe Catholic education’s most enduring lesson is this: God is with us, loving us to live fully.

How can we savour God’s presence if we do not heed Jesus’ call to open ourselves to God?  It would do us who are gathered a lot of good to invite Jesus to come and open those parts of our lives that we have closed to God, especially those we had shut long ago.

The deaf man Jesus healed did not just hear and speak again. I believe Jesus’ healing taught him the value of prayer. I believe that when Catholic education helps our students know they can always have faith in God, faith in their innate goodness and faith in the community’s care, prayer – especially of thanksgiving - will become part of their lives. 

And aren’t we here praying with thanksgiving too, as we once did when our children began their schooling, when we passed each examination as students, when our schools won competitions and championships and when you and I overcame life’s pains and sorrows because our hope and courage were rooted in the enduring truth of God who said to us, “You are mine, I am with you always”.

Preached at St Ignatius Church

photo: teaching and learning by adrian danker, sj, october 2016, sji