I have always loved the stories of Jesus. I know that for many folks in the Church and beyond the Church, the natural world, the majesty and intricacies of creation, is the main place where God is met, and for others God is primarily a companion met in life’s most difficult times, and while both of those are important to me, I mostly learn about the heart and intent of God by watching and listening to Jesus. Christ’s desire for healing, his words that both comfort and challenge, his choice of disciples and dinner partners from the margins of society, all tell me what God-informed behaviours look like as we move toward the kin-dom of God. Shannon and I were blessed by the opportunity to take a trip to the land of the Holy One in 2018, and actually experiencing the lands around the Sea of Galilee makes these stories of Jesus even more real.
It is with great
anticipation, then, that I engage today’s story of Jesus and a Syrophoenician
woman. My anticipation is fueled by the
story two chapters earlier in Mark’s gospel, in which a woman with a flow of
blood is cured by touching the hem of Jesus’ garment, with Jesus proclaiming “Daughter,
your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your
suffering.” In the story adjacent to
that one, the synagogue leader Jairus asked Jesus to heal his daughter, and
Jesus did so. And I recall also the classic exchange in John’s gospel between
Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, where Jesus topples all manner of
social and religious conventions, as a man talking to a woman, as a Jew
interacting with a Samaritan, and as a spiritual guide opening up the potential
of life made new, unfettered by old thinking.
So when the woman in today’s
reading, described as “a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin” begs Jesus to enact
a healing by casting a demon out of her daughter, I just know what Jesus is
going to do and say: he’s going to affirm the woman, he’s going to heal her
daughter, he’s going to proclaim that the ethnic and religious background of
this woman and her girl makes no difference in the kin-dom of God. She asked for healing, after all, and restoring
people to right relationships is what Jesus in all about.
But that’s not how Jesus
answers. He says, instead, with some of
the harshest words to cross his lips, “"Let the children be fed first, for
it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." What the heck, Jesus. A woman with a sick child comes to you and
because they’re not from your religious and ethnic background, you not only rebuff
her request for healing, you insult them. This doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know and
love.
I’d like you to sit with that
disconnect for a moment, for this is a gospel story not to be ignored. What Jesus says to this woman is pointed and
insulting. She is immediately dismissed,
as is her daughter’s illness, because they’re of another religion and
ethnicity, and quite possibly, because they’re female. These hurtful words, words that come too
quickly, remind me that in Jesus we see both God and human nature at work
simultaneously and oh boy, is this ever a human moment. For as I am stunned by Jesus’ response, I
recall many regrettable moments in my life when my first response has not been
based on love and inclusion and a spirit of welcome, times when my first immature,
xenophobic thoughts have been mean-spirited, or when I have reflexively blurted
out something truly unworthy: racist, sexist, elitist. I think of those words from this morning’s
reading from James, of the importance of not mistreating common folks in order
to make things easier for the elites, yet that’s the first thing Jesus blurts
out: others are more worthy than you, lady, you don’t even get to line up for
crumbs from the table.
So there’s that: in Jesus’
first answer, his humanness comes out.
Unflattering, yes, and so very human. And fortunately, his first word is not his
final word. Unwilling to be dismissed as
“one of them”, the woman makes a clever reply to Jesus, pushing back with his
own example, replying “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's
crumbs." She creates a moment in which Jesus can stop,
and look again, and truly see her humanity and dignity. And to the woman’s reply to him, Jesus says, "For
saying that, you may go--the demon has left your daughter." Not just, “yes, sorry about that first
response, I will come and heal your daughter” but, “thanks for jarring me out
of that. Your daughter is already well
again– go to her with my blessing.”
As the woman pushes back,
Jesus changes his mind, he recalibrates his thoughts. Three months ago I was on a baseball trip to
California, seeing no fewer than nine games in eleven days, and while I was down
there I actually skipped a game and instead took the opportunity to go to the
Saturday evening service at St Mark Presbyterian in Newport Beach. Their minister, Rev Dr Mark Davis, does a
weekly online Bible commentary in which he goes deep into the original Greek
text, work that is insightful and infused with a pastor’s heart. At that evening service he was preaching on
this same scripture lesson, and made the point that in the gospels, especially
Mark, we don’t get a true sense of time.
These exchanges between Jesus and people are presented as if they are
brief, snappy exchanges, over in the blink of an eye – or “immediately”, to use
the gospel of Mark’s favourite word. But, as Mark Davis reminded me, that’s not how
human conversations actually unfold, and especially not as we think of Jesus as
a traveling Rabbi who would have been well-versed in the rabbinical tradition
of verbal jousting, good-spirited but edgy arguments on theological points of
interest. So Mark Davis imagines that
after the woman pushes back on Jesus’ first insulting words, there might have
been a lengthy silence as Jesus reconsiders his position. Those of you who use GPS to help you find
your route when driving are familiar with the “ungh-ungh, you made a mistake”
sound that Google Maps or similar apps make when you have made a wrong turn and
a recalibration is needed. Well, posits
Mark Davis, that’s what Jesus does here: pauses for a moment, recalibrates, and
answers with love the second time, in so doing he respects the agency of the
woman, restores a child to health and hope, and demonstrates the power of
changing our minds, our words and our behaviours, when we are truly motivated by
love.
Last Sunday in this pulpit, Rev Steve
mentioned the way that our old notions of God as almighty, all-powerful,
never-changing, are ideas that many of us were raised with, but which have
faded over the years as we experience what God’s amazing love looks like,
applied over and over again in even the most challenging of circumstances. This encounter in the gospel of Mark
underlines that. Jesus is open to the
circumstances of this woman’s life, he’s willing to be challenged by her, he’s
willing to admit that the first thing out of his mouth was not good enough, he
is willing and able to change. And as we see Jesus change his mind, it dawns
on us that God’s mind can change and does change as well, as the heart of God
is moved by love.
Though standard Christian
dogma over the centuries forbids that God should ever change, I do not believe
this to be the fact of the matter. In
stories as dramatic as the story of the great flood and the rainbow placed in
the sky, God’s heart is changed by the reality of human suffering. God steps back from anger and replaces it
with a promise of peace. God, the author
of creativity itself, never leaves us and is moved by our sufferings. God, who gave living beings the ability to
adapt, also has this adaptive ability. When caught in a moment when he says
something easy and hurtful, Jesus changes his mind, and in our faith history we
see that God does too, always in the direction of something more just and
loving than before. As put by the Rev
Dr Martin Luther King and others, “the arc of the moral universe is long – and it
bends toward justice.”
In these next two years with
you, Shannon and I will learn from you the story and culture of these
congregations and this pastoral charge, we’ll investigate what it means to be
in relationship with our neighbours, and we will be discerning God’s calling for
your future. You’ll hear more about that next week, as
Shannon introduces you to the three primary questions that direct an
Intentional Interim Ministry, but for now I want you to notice the adaptiveness
that Jesus shows in getting past his first automatic response in order to find
something more positive, productive and faithful. That’s a skillset that all of us will need in
our two years together: the ability to hear one another, to be moved and
changed, and at times to change our hearts and our minds if long-held
attitudes, beliefs and hopes need to be cut loose in order to make room for
something new. In the same way that
Christ Jesus got past the snippy reply he blurted out without thinking, resetting
in such a way that he could set aside old deeply ingrained prejudices and bring
wholeness into a young girl’s life, so we are called to be open to new ways, and
to change our minds and actions if that’s what’s needed for life to emerge in
all its fullness. Even as we see Jesus
and God, our eternal creator adapting and changing, so must we.
God never leaves us
stranded. Jesus does not want us to stay
stuck, any more than he would let himself stay stuck. The Holy Spirit is always nudging and
irritating and running ahead of us, encouraging our curiosity and our love and
our heart for inclusion. As we continued
to be challenged by the needs of the world around us, and as we discern the calling
that God has waiting for this pastoral charge, may we with God’s help be thoughtful,
courageous, nimble and faithful. Amen.
References cited/consulted:
Coohill, Joseph – includes MLK quote. https://professorbuzzkill.com/2022/05/23/martin-luther-king-jr-the-arc-of-the-moral-universe-is-long-but-it-bends-toward-justice-quote-or-no-quote/
Davis, Mark. https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2012/09/comparing-humans-to-dogs.html
Hunt, Janet. https://dancingwiththeword.com/what-to-make-of-jesus-and-the-syrophoenician-woman/
Steelman, Austin. https://harvardichthus.org/2016/01/jesus-and-the-syrophoenician-woman-a-lesson-on-refugees-and-law-school-seals/
© 2024 Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos/Oliver United.
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