Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
September 9, 2018
Scripture Reading: Mark 7:24-37
I just want to say,
the Syrophoenician woman in today’s reading is my hero. What a fierce woman! Her daughter is sick, and she will do
anything she possibly can to make her well again.
In the eyes of the
world that she was living in, she was in a very vulnerable position. First of all, she was a woman living in a
very patriarchal culture. Women were
considered to be property, and not given a voice. Secondly, there is no mention of any husband
here. In a time and a place where a
woman didn’t have her own voice, her husband would have been the one expected
to speak for her. Is she widowed? Is she a single mother? We don’t know these details, but from the
story, she and her daughter seem to be alone in the world. And finally, she is both ethnically and
religiously “other” from the perspective of the story. The New Testament is written from a Jewish
perspective; and here is a woman who is of a different religion (Gentile), and
a different ethnicity (Syrophoenician) than Jesus.
And yet, despite these
multiple layers of vulnerability, our unnamed heroine of the story dares to
approach Jesus and ask him, beg him, to heal her daughter. And even when Jesus refuses, she doesn’t lose
her cool. She stays respectful, but she
doesn’t give up. She argues back.
Seriously. This woman is my hero!
Jesus, on the other
hand. I’m not so impressed with Jesus in
this story. Not only does he refuse to
heal a sick child, but he insults both her and her mother by calling them
dogs. Really Jesus, if you were going to
refuse to heal her, couldn’t you at least have been polite about it, and
respected their human dignity?
On one hand, Jesus is
acting exactly the way his culture would have expected him to act. A Jewish man in that time and place would be
expected to have nothing to do with an unaccompanied woman, and definitely have
nothing to do with someone of another ethnicity and religion. So really I shouldn’t be surprised at his
response.
But on the other hand,
I expect more from Jesus. What’s
happened to our nice kind loving Jesus?
The Jesus that we like to make stained glass windows of, tell stories
about in Sunday School, sing hymns about.
Jesus, Friend of Little Children.
Jesus, Lover of my Soul. What a
Friend we Have in Jesus. Jesus,
Priceless Treasure. Jesus, Joy of Our
Desiring. Jesus Loves Me, this I know. What’s happened to this Jesus?! Is Jesus having a bad day here? Did he get up
on the wrong side of the bed?
But then I have to
remind myself that while he was fully God, Jesus was also fully human. This is part of the mystery of our
faith. This one whom we follow wasn’t
half God and half human like some sort of strange hybrid. Jesus Christ was, at the same time, both
fully God and fully human. And in
stories like the one we just read, we get to see both.
Jesus was fully
human. He was born as a baby who wet his
nappies and who probably kept his mother awake at night with his crying. He had to learn how to walk and how to talk,
just like all toddlers. He had to learn
how to help his father in his carpentry business, and as the first-born child,
he probably also had to learn how to take care of his younger siblings.
And even though he is
grown up by the time we get to today’s story, Jesus is still human and still
learning. And we see him learning in
today’s story.
When the
Syrophoenician woman begs him to heal her daughter, his initial response is to
refuse her and insult her. How dare she
– she who is so totally not one of us – how dare she ask for healing.
But she
persisted. She didn’t take Jesus’ first
answer as his final answer. She stayed
calm and respectful, but she argued back.
And in the end, her logic won the day.
And this is the point
where Jesus stops acting the way his culture would expect him to act. In the culture where Jesus lived, the most
important thing for individuals and for families was saving face. If you lost a battle of the wits, it brought
shame to you and to your family. Nowhere
else in the bible do we see Jesus losing a battle of the wits. He argues with scholars and religious
leaders, and always, always Jesus comes out as the winner of these debates.
Except here. After a short verbal exchange with this
unnamed foreign woman, Jesus concedes that she has won. And he doesn’t hold a grudge against her –
instead he repents of his earlier response.
Now repentance is a
word that we sometimes like to throw around in the church. It comes up a lot in certain parts of the Bible. But the word repentance means more than just
feeling sorry for what you have done. It
means feeling sorry, and then changing our ways, turning back to God, aligning
what we do with God’s vision for the world.
And at the end of the
argument with our heroine, we see Jesus, fully human, repenting of his
actions. We see Jesus opening up to a
new way of thinking, a new way of doing.
Jesus’ love was opened up to include more people, become more universal. And just as Jesus, fully human, repents of
his actions, we also see Jesus, fully God, healing the woman’s daughter.
And the story doesn’t
end here. On the surface, it might seem
as though the two stories in our reading from Mark are two separate stories and
not connected in any way; but I see them as a continuation, one from the other.
After Jesus has opened
up and expanded his understanding of love, he travels from Tyre, north of
Galilee, to the region of Decapolis, the Ten Cities, to the east of the Sea of
Galilee. He’s traveling from one Gentile,
or non-Jewish, region to another Gentile region. And when he gets there, he encounters a man
who was deaf and who couldn’t speak clearly.
Again, this is a
person that, culturally, Jesus should have nothing to do with. His deafness would have put him on the
margins of society, and again he is from a different religious and ethnic
background.
But Jesus has learned
his lesson. He doesn’t question whether
or not he should heal this man. Jesus
takes the man aside, he touches his ears and his tongue, and he says, “Be
opened.”
And I see so many
layers of opening going on in this story.
The man in the second part of the story had his ears and his mouth
opened. Jesus had his heart opened to
expand his understanding of love. And
the people who saw their friend healed had their mouths opened and their
tongues loosened to proclaim praise of Jesus.
So many layers of opening up to God’s love.
And opening up to God’s
love continues in our world today. We
can see it in churches like Two Rivers Pastoral Charge who open their hearts to
a broader understanding of love by becoming Affirming. We can see it in communities who open their
hearts and their homes to refugees. We
can see it in people who volunteer their time and their talents to care for God’s
creation – this Community of Creation that we are a part of.
So what can we learn
from this story? I think with this
story, there’s no lack of things we can take away.
From the
Syrophoenician woman, we can learn from her gift of prophecy. If the job of prophets is to speak truth to
power, then she is a prophet through and through. She stood up for and spoke out about what she
believed in; and even if she was quaking on the inside, she was able to keep
her cool and get her message across.
From this nameless women, we receive the gift of courage to be prophets.
And the other people
who were able to speak up were the crowds who watched Jesus heal their
friend. Even though they were told to
keep quiet, they couldn’t keep themselves from singing God’s praises. They were so excited about what they had seen
they just couldn’t keep quiet. From the
crowd, we receive the gift of evangelism – telling others about all of the good
things God has done for us.
And finally, from
Jesus, we can see how he models repentance for us. When he realized that he had done wrong, he
didn’t stubbornly insist on his own way.
He admitted that he was wrong, and he changed course. He opened up his heart to a broader understanding
of love. From Jesus in today’s story, we
receive the gifts of permission to admit when we are wrong, the courage to
change our course, and the opening up of our hearts to include the whole world.
Are we called to be
prophets, speaking the truth to power?
Receive the gift of the Syrophoenician woman.
Are we called to be
evangelists, sharing the good news of God with those closest to us? Receive the gift of the crowds.
Are we called to
repent, to change our course, to open up our hearts to the world? Receive the gifts of Jesus.
May it be so.
Amen.
Do we want our hearts to be locked up, or opened to love?
Photograph by Petar Melosevic
CC BY-SA 4.0
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Love_padlocks_on_the_Butchers%27_Bridge_(Ljubljana).jpg
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