Of my mother’s nine siblings, two of her sisters are deaf, and each one married men who are hearing impaired. As a child, I was fascinated watching the hand signs that my mother used to communicate with her 2 sisters. Simple hand actions conveyed entire concepts.
She’d grasp the imaginary visor of a ball cap to signify “boy.” A rocking action of the arms meant “baby.” When they greeted each other in the morning, my mother would make her hands into fists and rotate the right fist over the left fist, and then point to one of my aunts with a questioning look, and that meant “Would you like some coffee?” By a simple action that simulated the cranking of an old coffee bean grinder, an entire question was asked without words.
One of the most powerful signs in hand language is the sign for “Jesus.” The middle finger of the right hand is place on the open palm of the left hand, and then the middle finger of the left hand is placed on the open palm of the right hand. When a communicator wants to talk about Jesus in the language of the deaf, she points to the places where the nails went into Jesus’s hands upon the cross.
With all the words we have at our command in the hearing world, many of us have missed the central act of the life of Christ. But without any words at all, when the Deaf communicate Jesus, they rivet attention to the cross.
The Bible says that the cross was God’s way of establishing peace with us. Our moral failures separate us from the one who created us, but Jesus took the record of those failures and died for them as our substitute. As Paul put it in Colossians 1:21-22, though we were “alienated from God…he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death.”
This is the message of Christianity. We become a Christian when we embrace this message, and we mature as a Christian when we reflect on this message. Everything else we’re told to believe and practice springs from the fundamental truth of God’s redeeming love.
--Tom
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