Empathic

Again, Jesus left the district of Tyre and went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, into the district of the Decapolis. And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment and begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him off by himself away from the crowd. 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, and he spoke plainly. He ordered them not to tell anyone. But the more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it. They were exceedingly astonished and they said, “he has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” (Mark 7.31-37)

To begin our study today, I’d like to offer a word that is more often found in a psychology textbook or as an answer to a crossword puzzle but less often heard in ordinary conversations. The word is empath. Not empathy, but empath, although both words have a lot in common. The word empath refers to a person who easily relates to what another person is feeling. 

There are several strong signs that a person is an empath. The first is obvious. They have empathy, the ability to understand how someone else feels and to relate to the other person’s circumstances. Empathy is not to be confused with sympathy. A sympathetic person can feel pity, but is happy not to have the same problems. An empathetic person finds nothing to be happy about in another’s person’s grief or pain.

An empath also cares about others, attentive to other people’s needs, often making personal sacrifices to ensure another’s well-being. Similarly, an empath is sensitive, quick to read a situation, picking up cues that an ordinary person might overlook. Finally, an empath has good intuition, responding without the need for reason or logic. 

Seeing its opposite may help us better understand an empath. So, the polar opposite of an empath is a psychopath, someone who is unaffected by the distress or despondency of another person, unmoved and uncaring about how another person feels. A less severe instance of someone who is not an empath is the rational and logical person who filters a person’s situation through the left half of the brain, leaving feelings on the floor like clips edited from a movie. Mr. Spock, the first officer of the spaceship USS Enterprise in the Star Trek series is the epitome of the completely rational person, often befuddled by the feelings that his human counterparts felt.

So, why in the world am I talking about an empath? Well, the reason is simple and it has much to do with the story we hear today at the conclusion of Chapter Seven of Mark’s gospel, the healing of the deaf-mute man. By this point, we are halfway through the gospel and we have seen Rabbi Jesus perform any number of miraculous healings.

In many ways, the story has a strong familiarity about it. We have watched Jesus move from place to place, teaching and healing. So, the fact that he performs another healing, this time of the deaf-mute man, does not strike us as particularly unusual. That desire to dump the story into the bucket of similar stories of healing does a disservice to us.

The first point to be made is that this story only appears in the Gospel of Mark. Matthew and Luke, who otherwise borrowed freely from Mark’s writing, do not include this story in their gospels. Why they chose to bypass this story while keeping many other stories is open to scrutiny. Some scholars suggest that they avoided this story because it carried overtones of pagan magician stories.

Frankly, I think that suggestion overlooks two very important points. One, the first thing Jesus does is to remove the man from the onlookers, or as Mark says, “Jesus took him aside from the multitude, privately.” Magicians, on the other hand, liked to show off their skills. Another thing. After Jesus heals the man, he “commanded the man and his friends not to tell anyone” about the miracle. Again, magicians were only too happy to have their powers broadcast.

So, I am happy to read the story as a continuation of Jesus’ desire to heal those who suffered in any way as we have seen many times before, not as a story with magical overtones to it. Bottom line–I have no idea why Matthew and Luke skipped the story, but the aforesaid argument limps, at least in my mind. I think Mark is making an entirely different point.

And that point is found in one word that Mark uses in this story, a word that does not appear anywhere else in the gospels, at least not in reference to Rabbi Jesus. The word is groaned. Mark tells us that after Jesus has put his finger into the deaf man’s ears and has touched his tongue, he looked up to heaven and groaned. 

The closest parallel we can find in the gospels is when Jesus is confronted by the death of his friend Lazarus. The evangelist John tells us that when Jesus arrived at the home of Lazarus and saw Mary his sister weeping he became greatly troubled. Later, standing before the tomb of his dead friend, he wept. But even here, these clear expressions of pain and loss do not carry the punch to the gut that the word groan does.

As we know, to groan is to feel pain so deeply that one cannot even speak, only make an inarticulate sound in response. It is a word almost without parallel, although the words sigh, moan, and whimper are sometimes suggested as synonyms. But we know from personal experience that they are poor substitutes. To groan is to experience pain at an entirely different level.

So, here Mark says Jesus groaned as he looked up to heaven, the deaf-mute man standing at his side, unable to hear even this utterance from deep within the chest of Jesus. The question we want to answer is why Jesus groaned at that moment. The answer, of course, is not all that difficult to find. He groaned because he felt so deeply the pain of that man who could not hear and who could not speak. 

In that moment, Jesus showed clearly the depth of his empathy for someone who was suffering. He felt not only that man’s pain, but the pain of all humanity. He had traveled far and wide by this point and he had seen pain of every sort at every stopping place. An empath, he truly personified the prophecy of Isaiah who had spoken of a suffering servant whom he described as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

Surrounded on all sides by the scourge of human suffering, the inestimable cost of the sin of the world, Jesus could find no words to express his sorrow at the pain and the pestilence that plagued humanity on the pathway of life. What he felt at the sight of so much suffering could not be spoken in words, but only in a sound that escaped from his soul, a groan so great and so gravelly that it reverberated across the abyss that divided the heavens from the earth, shaking the earth underfoot and summoning the heavens above to provide some answer to the ever-present, ever-consuming pain of human suffering.

We find in that groan that escaped from his soul the most primal of all prayers, a prayer without words, a prayer filled instead with the sound of a heart breaking. In that moment, Jesus showed the fullness of his humanity, becoming one with us, taking on himself the weight of humanity, a people whose days are riddled with tears, terrors, and trepidations so many that most can only crawl on all fours, brought low by the burdens that come from nowhere and are everywhere. 

In telling us that Jesus groaned as he looked to the high heavens, Mark informs us that Jesus has now become the same as the mute man who stands at his side, the two of them one and the same, sharing a common humanity, both of them beaten down and beleaguered, a groan the only protest that can be mustered as they stare at the sky overhead, wanting and awaiting some answer to the question above all questions–why.

Nor should we overlook the point Mark is making when he tells us that Jesus encounters the man in Gentile territory, in this way reminding us that all human suffering feels the same even if it looks different. And in helping and healing the deaf-mute man, Jesus shows his identity with this foreigner and his intention to bring the good news to humanity as a whole, not only to a certain few or to a chosen group.

As we saw, the exhaustive groan that escapes Jesus’ lips is finally followed by the utterance of a single word, “Ephphatha,” an Aramaic word usually translated as “be opened,” or “open up.” Placed side-by-side, we are left to wonder which prayer was heard most clearly by the Most High God, the groan or the one-word. 

I choose to believe that it was the groan that spoke the loudest and reached the throne of God before any words because it was the most real and the most honest, expressing something that could not be put into words, a guttural sound that said more in that short space about need, pain, and want than any slew of syllables that might have been spoken, however articulate it was. 

In the end, as we saw, the heavens answered the groan and the deaf-mute found both his ears and his mouth had opened, no longer condemned to the utter loneliness of a person who cannot hear or speak, always left on the fringes as others around him find connection through shared speech and mutual listening. Gifted by that gracious groan of Jesus, the deaf-mute man hears for the first time the good news that others in the crowd have been blessed to hear with their own ears.

So, there are many things for us to take from this story of a healing, perhaps the most important being an awareness that we also must provide the same empathic response to others in need that Rabbi Jesus gave to that man. If we are to become Jesus for others, then empathy is the sine qua non. It is essential, not optional.

Some decades ago, the writer Roberta Israeloff reminded us what it means to be empathic. She wrote, “I can’t count the number of times I’ve begun to complain only to have my friend cut me off after two or three sentences with a well-intentioned but nonetheless misguided, ‘I know exactly what you’re going through. The same thing just happened to me.’ Suddenly, we’re talking about her ungrateful kid, her lousy boss, her leaky fuel line, and I’m left nodding my head in all the right places, feeling angry and ripped off.”

She continued, “What we all hope for when we turn to a friend because we’re feeling low or agitated or wildly happy is to find someone who sounds as if she has all the time in the world, someone who doesn’t rush us. We don’t always want answers or advice. Sometimes we just want company. I’m learning to follow the other person’s lead, to pay attention to body language, facial gestures, tone of voice, to hear what’s left unsaid, to recall relevant details and make helpful associations and connections.” 

She concludes, “This ability to be with someone in her pain and happiness is the cornerstone of genuine empathy. We have to immerse ourselves in another’s experience, to sustain attention to the other person, to listen.” She makes a strong argument, one that Jesus also makes in the story that Mark provides us today.

In other words, unless we become empaths like Rabbi Jesus, we’re as deaf and mute as the man in the gospel, regardless of how well we think we hear or how many words we can spout off. Rabbi Jesus reminds us that empathy does not require words so much as it requires heart.

–Jeremy Myers