"He makes even the deaf to hear and the mute to speak"
Some years ago when I was in Parish life, the Parish was involved in a fundraising effort for some worthy cause. Each element of the Parish was asked to raise money in some way which was appropriate, and the children in our Sunday Club, which is our organisation for very young people which met on Sunday mornings in church, decided they would raise money by holding a sponsored silence.
The idea was that while the parents and other parishioners were having coffee after church on the Sunday morning the young people would sit on the stage of the Parochial Hall in absolute silence for a full hour. As you can imagine, it was all very funny at the beginning as the young people made faces with one another.
But gradually, the adults there watching realised that keeping silence for any period of time was really very, very difficult for the children, and eventually by common consensus they agreed that the silence would end after 30 minutes to save the children any further discomfort. Children have a exuberance - they want to talk and engage incessantly and it is almost impossible for them not to speak for any period of time.
That parish situation came back to my mind when I heard today's reading from St Mark's Gospel. The crowds had seen Jesus performed a miracle. A person who is deaf and a mute had now been made to hear and to speak. Despite the fact that Jesus told the crowds, the assembled people, not to say anything, they couldn't hold back. They wanted to tell everyone the wonderful events that they had seen.
Much the same situation is reported in the Gospel on the first Palm Sunday as Jesus arrived into Jerusalem. The crowds couldn't resist hailing him as the Messiah and celebrating his arrival as the King of David.
That's the way faith ought to be for us too. It should be almost impossible not to talk about it or to celebrate and to share the good news of what we have known with those around us. At its very heart, I believe that when Cardinal Kasper used the phrase "ecumenism of life" he was speaking about the common faith that we all share and that bubbles-up within us and which we wish to share with the wider world.
And we do that as Christians together, not simply as members of different Christian traditions. At its very basis, ecumenism today is about sharing the transforming good news of the Gospel of Christ which is power to change the world and change the lives of all of us. From that shared reality as Christians together we witness to a divided world. Today the fact is that denominational differences are becoming far less important than this underlying uniting reality of the faith which we wish to preach to a modern world.
