Who knows why this man couldn’t hear and speak? Imagine how much suffering he underwent! The isolation, the misunderstanding, feeling cut off from relationship. Regardless, now, he is before Jesus: “Here is your God, he comes with vindication… The will the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared” (Is. 35:5). And in our own spiritual deafness and inability to speak, the Lord asks us to let him heal us, to speak His “ephphatha” to us, in three ways.