Overview:

Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

“If only my people would hear me.”

“He put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
‘Ephphatha!’ (that is, ‘Be opened!’)
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed.”

Find today’s readings here.

I am struck by the tone of pleading in today’s responsorial psalm, in which God laments that his people do not hear him. “I am the Lord, your God: hear my voice,” says the refrain, with one verse crying out, “If only my people would hear me, and Israel walk in my ways, Quickly would I humble their enemies; against their foes I would turn my hand.”

Just as people have cried out to God for centuries, “Lord, hear us!” and struggled with their inability to hear God speaking, God, it seems, struggles with the same. The veil between heaven and earth is thick and heavy. Even an omnipotent God struggles to be heard, much less heeded.

The miracle of Jesus healing the deaf man with a speech impediment shows us that it is possible for God to be heard, which challenges us: If God can do it, why doesn’t he? Why do we pray and hear silence in return?

I do not have a satisfying answer, but I take some comfort in the effort we see Jesus exerting in today’s Gospel to make this miracle happen. It is incredibly “fleshy”—something many of us would be uncomfortable with. Jesus spits, puts his finger in the man’s ears and on his tongue; he groans to heaven. (In that groaning, as in all of these displays of his fleshliness, Jesus makes clear just to what extent he has become a human, one of us: He, too, groans to the Father to be heard. He is both a human crying to God and God crying out to be heard.) And when the man’s physical deafness is healed, the first voice he hears is Jesus’—God’s.

My takeaway from all this is that it is a miracle that any of us ever hear God’s voice, or that God ever hears ours. 1 Corinthians says that we see God “indistinctly, as in a mirror,” and I think we hear God that way too, the few times we do hear him. It can be indistinct, or muffled, or come through as only a feeling, or as words someone else says to us. But these are miracles, the results of God’s best effort—of groaning and touching and spitting and lamenting that we cannot hear him. We cry back out to God here below, trusting that God still hears us and that one day, as Corinthians promises, we will be “face to face” and hear each other as clearly as the man in the Gospel today heard Jesus.

Colleen Dulle is the Vatican Correspondent at America and co-hosts the "Inside the Vatican" podcast. She is the author of Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter (Image, 2025).