Friday of the Fifth week in Ordinary Time
Commentary of the day
Saint Ephrem (c.306-373), Deacon in Syria, Doctor of the Church
Sermon “On our Lord”, 10-11
“He put his fingers into the man’s ears and… touched his tongue”
Divine strength came down, which we humans cannot touch; it covered itself with a palpable body so that the poor might touch it and, in touching Christ’s humanity might perceive his divinity. The deaf-mute felt that his ears and his tongue were being touched by means of fingers of flesh. Through those palpable fingers he perceived the intangible divinity when the bonds of his tongue were broken and the closed doors of his ears opened. For the body’s architect and artisan came to him, and with a gentle word, without pain, he created openings in deaf ears. Then, too, the mouth that had been closed and until then incapable of giving birth to the word, brought forth into the world the praise of him who thus caused its sterility to bear fruit.
In the same way, the Lord made paste with his saliva and spread it over the eyes of the man born blind (Jn 9:6) so we might understand that, like the deaf-mute, he was lacking something. An inborn imperfection in our human dough was removed thanks to the leaven that comes from his perfect body… To complete what was missing in these human bodies of ours he gave something of himself, just as he gives himself to be eaten [in the Eucharist]. By this means he causes our deficiencies to disappear and raises the dead so that we might recognize that, thanks to his body in which “the fullness of deity resides” (Col 2:9), the deficiencies in our humanity are brought to completion and true life is given to mortals by this body in which true life resides.