I learned recently, while listening to NPR on my lunchbreak, that the best sign-language interpreters are hearing children with deaf parents. Imagine for a moment growing up as a hearing child in a deaf home. I would assume it’s a rather isolated existence.
The only way for the child to meaningfully communicate with his or her parents would be to learn their signs. These children go on to make the best adult interpreters because from a young age, even five or six, they begin interpreting for and speaking on behalf of their parents. They are the best qualified mediators of the hearing and unhearing worlds.
In this passage from the Psalms we see a reckoning at work: the blind will see; the prisoners will be freed. Scholars call this an “eschatological reversal,” meaning, in the end, all will be made right. We hear that longing within the words of the psalmist.
When we read this Psalm in the light of Christ, we find that it’s about His redemptive work in us. Furthermore, as redeemed people, we have a role and a mandate to help others. We are called to empathize with the parentless child, minister to the one who has recently lost a spouse, and be advocates for the victims of injustice.
There are times, in a broken world, when we must wonder if God is present. It’s in these times that we must remember God incarnate—the Word made flesh, who came to us in the most paradoxical of ways.
In His humanity, Jesus ate; He drank. He laughed; He cried, just as we do. In his divinity, He healed the lame, gave sight to the blind, and opened the ears of the deaf.
In His humanity, our Lord knows betrayal, hunger, exhaustion, temptation, and He certainly knows suffering. Yet, in this simultaneous human and divine existence Christ stands as the unrivaled mediator between God and mankind, bridging once and for all Heaven and Earth.
Corey Fuller