Liturgical Study - Usus Antiquior - 11th Sunday after Pentecost - 1962 Missale Romanum
THEME — Received and Handed On: The Kerygma, the Resurrection, and the Word That Opens
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost presents one of the most concentrated doctrinal passages in the Pauline corpus alongside one of the most vivid healing miracles in Mark's Gospel. Their conjunction is not accidental. The Epistle transmits the earliest formulation of the Christian kerygma — the death, burial, resurrection, and appearances of Christ — and grounds it in Paul's own transformation from persecutor to apostle entirely by grace. The Gospel shows Christ opening the ears and loosing the tongue of a man who could neither hear nor speak, and commanding silence with a word that the crowd could not contain.
Together the readings present the Word of God in its two fundamental modes: the Word received, transmitted, and believed — the apostolic deposit handed on by those who saw and heard; and the Word that acts physically and directly upon the body, opening what has been closed, setting free what has been bound.
The Collect frames everything: O almighty and everlasting God, who in the abundance of Thy loving-kindness art wont to go beyond both the merits and the desires of Thy suppliants. What God gives exceeds both what was deserved and what was asked. The kerygma Paul received was not earned by his persecution of the Church. The healing the deaf-mute received was not requested — his friends brought him; his own mouth could not ask. In both cases, the divine initiative exceeds every human category of expectation.
READINGS
Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:1–10
Gospel: Mark 7:31–37
EPISTLE — 1 CORINTHIANS 15:1–10
The Received Gospel: Death, Burial, Resurrection, Appearances, and Grace
The fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians is the longest and most sustained treatment of the resurrection in the New Testament. Some members of the Corinthian community had apparently denied the resurrection of the dead — not the resurrection of Christ, which they seem to have accepted, but the future bodily resurrection of believers. Paul's response is to press the logical consequences of that denial backward onto the resurrection of Christ itself, and then to ground everything in the earliest credal formulation he possesses.
"Now I make known unto you, brethren, the Gospel which I preached to you, which also you have received, and wherein you stand; by which also you are saved, if you hold fast after what manner I preached unto you, unless you have believed in vain."
The opening is remarkable for its insistence on the structure of tradition. Paul distinguishes between the Gospel as received and the Gospel as preached: which I also received... which I delivered unto you. He is not presenting his own theological construction. He is transmitting something that was given to him — something that preceded him and will outlast him, something that has an objective content independent of his own interpretation.
The formula that follows is almost certainly pre-Pauline, predating the letter by fifteen or more years and representing the earliest stratum of Christian confession:
"How that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures; and that He was seen by Cephas; and after that by the Eleven."
Four verbs, four facts: died, was buried, rose, was seen. The according to the Scriptures attached to both death and resurrection indicates that these events were not contingent historical accidents but the fulfillment of a divine plan inscribed in the Old Testament. The burial is included — and the tradition has consistently noted its importance — because it establishes the reality of the death: the One who was buried was genuinely, biologically dead, not merely unconscious.
The sequence of appearances Paul then catalogs — Cephas, the Eleven, five hundred brethren at once, James, all the Apostles, and finally Paul himself — functions as testimony of the most legally rigorous kind.¹ The risen Christ was not seen privately by one credulous individual. He was seen by Peter, by the apostolic college, by five hundred people simultaneously (of whom many remain until this present — verifiable witnesses, still alive at the time of writing), and by James, whose prior skepticism about his brother's ministry makes his post-resurrection conversion among the most evidentially significant in the list.
"And last of all, He was seen also by me, as by one born out of due time."
Ektrōmati — the word Paul uses for born out of due time — is a medical term for a miscarriage or an abnormal birth, something untimely, incomplete, outside the natural order.² Paul applies it to himself with unflinching precision: he did not receive the resurrection appearance through the normal channel of being among Jesus' followers during the ministry. He received it violently, on the Damascus road, as a persecutor. He was not gathered into the apostolic community through the ordinary path of discipleship. He was arrested by the risen Christ in the act of destroying His Church.
"For I am the least of the Apostles, who am not worthy to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am; and His grace in me hath not been void, but I have laboured more abundantly than all they: yet not I, but the grace of God with me."
The final verse is among the most theologically loaded in all of Paul, and its structure must be followed carefully. Paul makes three claims in sequence.
First: by the grace of God, I am what I am. His apostolic identity, his conversion, his entire existence as a minister of the Gospel — none of it is self-produced. It is entirely the product of divine grace operating upon a man who had given God every reason to leave him alone.
Second: His grace in me hath not been void. The grace that made him what he is did not remain inactive. It produced fruit — prodigious, apostolic, missionary fruit, more abundant in labor than any of the other apostles could claim.
Third, and crucially: yet not I, but the grace of God with me. The abundant labor is real. It belongs to Paul. But the source of the labor's fruitfulness is not Paul's own energy or capacity. The grace of God worked with him — a cooperative language, synergēsasa, that Augustine, Aquinas, and the tradition have treated as one of the key loci for the theology of grace and freedom.³
The Pharisee of last Sunday's Gospel said, in effect: I, and not God, am what I am. Paul says the opposite: God, and not merely I, am what I am. The structure of authentic apostolic existence is the precise inversion of Pharisaic self-attribution.
GOSPEL — MARK 7:31–37
Ephpheta: The Word That Opens Ears and Looses Tongues
The healing of the deaf-mute in Mark's Gospel is unique in several respects. It is among the most physically detailed of Christ's miracles. It contains one of the two Aramaic words that Mark preserves untranslated in his Gospel — Ephpheta, be opened — a word that has entered the Church's baptismal rite as a direct inheritance of this passage. And it closes with a command to silence that the crowd immediately, joyfully, and entirely disregards.
"And they bring to Him one that was deaf and dumb, and they besought Him that He would lay His hand upon him."
The man is brought by others. He cannot request the healing himself — his inability to hear means he cannot respond to what he may have been told about Christ, and his inability to speak means he cannot cry out as Bartimaeus will cry out in the next chapter. He is entirely dependent on the initiative of those who bring him and on the compassion of the One to whom he is brought.
This passivity is itself theologically significant. Augustine identified the deaf-mute as a figure of the human soul in its pre-evangelized condition: unable to hear the Word because the faculty of spiritual hearing has been damaged, unable to confess because the faculty of spiritual speech has been bound.⁴ The man does not seek Christ. He is sought — brought by those who have already heard and believed.
"And taking him aside from the multitude, He put His fingers into his ears, and spitting, He touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, He groaned, and said to him: Ephpheta, which is, Be thou opened."
The physical actions Christ performs are extraordinary in their particularity. He takes the man aside — an act of privacy and intimacy, removing him from the spectacle of a public healing. He puts His fingers into the man's ears — directly engaging the closed faculty. He uses spittle to touch the tongue — the ancient world attributed healing properties to saliva, and the gesture is a condescension to the conventions of the man's own culture, a meeting of divine power with human expectation.⁴
He looks up to heaven — orienting the act explicitly toward the Father, establishing the healing as a divine rather than a merely human act. He groans — a word (estenaxen) that carries the weight of genuine interior movement, the same register of divine compassion that Paul uses in Romans 8 for the Spirit's intercession with sighs too deep for words. And then:
Ephpheta.
One word. An imperative addressed not to the man but to the condition: Be opened. The ears that have been closed are commanded open by the One whose word created them. The tongue that has been bound is commanded free by the One whose breath animated the first human being.
"And immediately his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke right."
The healing is instantaneous and complete. Not gradual improvement — immediate restoration. The ears that have never processed sound now process it fully. The tongue that has been tied now speaks orthōs — correctly, properly, in the right way.
The Fathers, particularly Ambrose and Augustine, read this passage as the definitive image of what happens in baptism and in the proclamation of the Gospel.⁵ The Ephpheta rite — in which the priest touches the ears and mouth of the catechumen and says Ephpheta — enacts sacramentally what Christ performed physically. Baptism opens the ears to the Word and looses the tongue for confession and praise. The spiritual deaf-mute — the soul that cannot receive the Gospel and cannot confess the faith — is opened by the same imperative spoken by the same Lord through the ministry of the Church.
"And He charged them that they should tell no man. But the more He charged them, so much the more a great deal did they publish it. And so much the more did they wonder, saying: He hath done all things well; He hath made both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak."
The command to silence is not obeyed. The tradition has offered various readings of why Christ commanded it and why it was irresistible.⁶ The most theologically compelling: the command to silence tests whether the crowd will obey even good news, and the crowd's joyful disobedience reveals that the proclamation of the Word, once unleashed, exceeds every human effort to contain it. The Gospel cannot be kept quiet by those who have witnessed its power.
He hath done all things well. The crowd's acclamation echoes Genesis 1 — and God saw that it was good — and places the healing within the framework of divine creation. What Christ does in restoring hearing and speech is what God did in creating them: He makes all things well.
THEOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS — THE WORD RECEIVED AND THE WORD THAT ACTS
The Epistle and Gospel illuminate one another from two directions.
Paul's kerygma is the Word received and transmitted — the objective content of Christian faith, the four facts of death, burial, resurrection, and appearance, handed on through the apostolic chain from those who saw to those who believe on their testimony. This Word demands reception by faith, which is itself a form of hearing: the ears opened to what has been proclaimed, the heart responding to what the testimony attests.
The deaf-mute of Mark's Gospel shows the presupposition of that reception: without the Ephpheta, the Word cannot be received at all. The closed ear cannot hear the kerygma. The bound tongue cannot confess. The opening is a grace — the prior act of divine compassion that makes every subsequent act of faith possible.
Paul's closing confession — by the grace of God, I am what I am — is the apostolic counterpart to Ephpheta. Paul's conversion from persecutor to apostle was the opening of a man who had shut every available faculty against the Gospel. The risen Christ appeared to him as the Ephpheta spoken into the most aggressively closed ears in the early Church. And the grace that opened him was not void: it produced the most abundant apostolic labor in the history of the Church.
The Collect's claim — that God goes beyond both the merits and the desires of His suppliants — describes both passages exactly. Paul merited nothing and desired the destruction of the Church. The deaf-mute could not desire what he could not hear. In both cases, grace exceeded every human category of expectation.
PRACTICAL APPLICATION
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost calls for an examination of two fundamental postures.
The first is the posture toward the received kerygma. Paul's insistence that he received what he delivered — that the Gospel is not his construction but a deposit entrusted to him — is a standing challenge to every tendency to treat the faith as a personal spiritual project whose contours are determined by individual preference. The four verbs of the earliest creed — died, was buried, rose, was seen — are not negotiable. They are the content of what Paul received, what the Corinthians received, and what the Church in every age is commissioned to hand on intact.
The second is the posture of the deaf-mute brought to Christ by others. There is a form of spiritual humility that acknowledges one has been brought to the faith rather than having arrived by one's own resources — that the grace that opened the ears preceded every subsequent act of hearing, and that the loosing of the tongue for confession is as much a divine gift as the content of what is confessed. The person who prays by the grace of God, I am what I am has grasped what Paul grasped.
Finally: the crowd that could not contain the proclamation. The healing of the deaf-mute produced witnesses who exceeded their own commission to silence. The proper response to the Ephpheta — to the grace that has opened the ears and loosed the tongue — is exactly that: the proclamation that cannot be kept quiet, the witness that goes beyond what duty requires, the He hath done all things well that spills out of those who have actually experienced what they are describing.
CONCLUDING MEDITATION — EPHPHETA
The word was addressed to a condition, not to a person.
Be opened — spoken into closed ears, into a bound tongue, into the long silence of a man who had never heard his own name spoken aloud in a way he could receive it.
And immediately the ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke right.
Paul was a closed system — a man of such aggressive closure to the Gospel that he organized his considerable energy and intelligence toward the destruction of the community that carried it. And the risen Christ appeared to him and spoke a word that opened everything.
By the grace of God, I am what I am.
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost asks the faithful to locate themselves in these two figures — the man brought by others, opened by a word he could not request, and the persecutor arrested by the risen Christ on a road he thought he owned — and to ask where the Ephpheta has been spoken in their own history.
And then to speak right.
ENDNOTES
The pre-Pauline character of the 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 formula is recognized across the tradition; cf. Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Corinthians, ch. 15, lect. 1. The legal weight of the multiple witnesses — particularly the five hundred of whom many remain — is developed by Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians, Hom. 38.2.
The term ektrōma (1 Cor 15:8) is analyzed by Origen, Commentary on 1 Corinthians, fr. 74, and by Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, I.1.12, who connects it to Paul's violent conversion as outside the normal pattern of apostolic calling.
Augustine, De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, ch. 5; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 111, a. 2 (on synergēsasa — the cooperative operation of grace and human freedom in apostolic labor; the distinction between grace as the source and the human act as the instrument).
Augustine, Sermons, 272 (on the deaf-mute as a figure of the pre-evangelized soul; the Ephpheta as the divine act that precedes and makes possible all subsequent reception of the Word).
Ambrose, De Sacramentis, I.2 (on the Ephpheta rite in baptism; the connection between Christ's physical act in Mark 7 and the sacramental opening of the catechumen's senses); Augustine, Confessions, I.1 (the theme of the soul that cannot hear until grace opens it).
The messianic secret in Mark's Gospel — the pattern of commands to silence that are consistently disobeyed — is analyzed by Jerome, Commentary on Mark, VII.36, who reads the disobedience as the irresistibility of genuine witness rather than as simple failure of command.
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost readings in the 1962 Roman Missal: 1 Corinthians 15:1–10; Mark 7:31–37.
