Scripture: Mark 7:24-37
The scripture reading you have heard is once again, as it was last week, the lectionary gospel reading for the day, so that makes twice in a row that I will be preaching on the lectionary. I still don’t promise to make a habit of it. But I found when I read this passage that I didn’t want to just shelve it in favor of something else. Although it’s certainly not a favorite passage, it’s a passage that I find I can’t ignore. It’s a passage that, for me, rings both shockingly false and uncomfortably true.
First the part which rings false; it has to do with Jesus. The Jesus in this story is not the Jesus I learned about in Sunday school, nor the Jesus I began to form a picture of on my own as I read the gospels, certainly not the Jesus who has come to play an important part in my religious faith. The Jesus I learned about from others as I was growing up was kind and compassionate and good. His heart went out to people who were sick or poor or who for whatever reason had a hard lot in life. He made some people feel better physically, offered encouraging words to those who most needed them, and counseled us to be kind and compassionate and good to each other. He could be sort of mean to some people, but only really to the people who were themselves mean to others.
The Jesus I came to have a picture of by reading the gospels on my own turned out to be more edgy than that. He said things that were sometimes wise, sometimes challenging, often cut to the heart of things; he offered an alternative vision of what human life was all about, and was courageous in living by that vision. The Jesus who eventually became central to my being a Christian was all of the things I just mentioned—kind, compassionate, good, wise, challenging, courageous in teaching and living a way of life radically different from many of the ways of the world—and he was someone who preached the idea of a reign of God, a beloved community, if you will, and who began to gather around himself an inclusive community that aimed at nothing less than transforming the world.
The Jesus we encounter in this morning’s passage, you may have noticed, is none of those things. He is mean-spirited, small minded, and exclusive. That may be a little harsh, but that’s pretty much the way he seems to me. A woman, a foreign woman, a non-Jewish woman comes to Jesus in great distress begging him to help her daughter who is suffering from some illness—physical or mental, it doesn’t say—she has an “evil spirit”. Jesus refuses to help. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” The clear implication is that he doesn’t want anything to do with her because his first concern is to his friends and his fellow Jews, the “children”, and helping the woman and her daughter would be like offering food to dogs rather than human beings. Not at all a nice thing to say. Not kind, not wise, not inclusive. Even in the eventual happy ending of the story where Jesus does heal the daughter, Jesus doesn’t come off looking all that good. The star of the story is the woman, who persisted on behalf of her daughter, groveled on behalf of her daughter, took insults on behalf of her daughter and finally won the day. Jesus did do the healing, but he never said a warm word to her, never said, “I’m sorry I called you a dog.” Just “you can go now…your daughter is well.” Who is this Jesus? What are we to make of this story?
As you can imagine, people have gone to some lengths and come up with quite a few theories trying to account for Jesus’ behavior here. All of them begin with the reminder that whatever a person may believe about Jesus’ godlike nature, he was after all a human being and therefore…Well, maybe he was having a bad day. We all do sometimes and it might cause us to say things we don’t really mean. The “Jesus misspoke” theory. Give him a good night’s sleep and when he woke up he’d be embarrassed, probably horrified at what he had said.
Or…People are constantly wanting a piece of him, following him around, tugging on his clothes, pleading with him to pay attention to their sad story. It says right in the scripture, “He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” He needs some down time. A beer. A soccer game on TV. A movie. A massage. A nap. But what he gets is one more person who wants something from him. He loses his cool. He calls the woman names, but what he really meant to say was, “What part of leave me alone do you not understand?” In the end he heals her daughter, but he still invites her to leave. “You may go” could be read, “OK now will you leave me alone.
Or…Jesus really did mean what he said. He really did have a narrow conception of what his mission was. He said it in other places, that he had come to save the lost sheep of the House of Israel, maybe to reform the Jewish religion, remind his fellow Jews of where they had come from, and what their core values were and what it meant to be a Jew. And he really did believe that he didn’t have a whole lot to say to or have much to do with other people. Except that this woman wouldn’t let him get away with it. She insisted that he pay attention. As a non-Jew she pressed her simple humanity on Jesus. And as a result, Jesus began to see things in a different way. His mission was not just to the Jewish people after all. His compassion and his vision had a wider reach, a larger purpose. Seeing that, he healed the woman’s daughter. This is the “Jesus was converted by the Canaanite woman” theory.
Finally there is the “Jesus was being sarcastic theory”. He wasn’t really referring to the woman as a dog. He was saying it more with the tone: “You want me to heal your daughter, do you? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to do that? Don’t you know that you’re thought of as no better than a dog?” At which point the woman persists and Jesus drops the sarcasm and essentially says, “I know you’re a child of God. Let your daughter be healed.”
I’m sure there are other theories too. Frankly, I’m not convinced by any of them, not in the sense that any of them succeed in making the way Jesus treated the woman seem ok. It is just not ok, and Jesus is never going to be the one I learn from in this story. Which makes the story unusual. Jesus is usually the one setting the example or speaking some truth, not just providing us an example of how human beings can act when they’re tired or stressed. He is not supposed to be the one we need to make excuses for. You and I are not supposed to be explaining away his unacceptable behavior. So it makes this scripture stand out for me. It says, “You’re not done thinking about me yet.” Which is why I said at the outset that I couldn’t just put this passage aside. What I have to do though is bracket Jesus, because I don’t quite know what to do with him here.
So what about the woman in the story? Maybe she is the one we are supposed to be learning from here. It’s a little hard for me to imagine Mark or Matthew intending to put in a story that made Jesus look bad and that asked the reader to learn from an unnamed woman character, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it, and that approach does seem warranted here. There’s a lot to admire in the Canaanite woman. I’ve already alluded to some of it. She took it upon herself, maybe at some risk, to suggest to Jesus that his mission statement needed to be revised and that he really ought to be more inclusive. She knew that her daughter deserved to be made well as much as any Jew and she didn’t give up until she got, or rather until her daughter got, what she, the mother, knew she deserved. She acted assertively, daring to approach this man of God from a different religion and ethnic group with no reason to think that he would pay her any attention, and she stuck to her task until it was accomplished. She acted selflessly, enduring the humiliation of being called names, submitting to that in order to keep the focus where she wanted it to be: on her daughter’s well being. There’s a lot to admire in her, and we could lift up those personal qualities she exhibits and suggest that they are good qualities for all of us to have: courage, determination, a willingness to cross boundaries, a certain audacity especially when it is engaged in on behalf of others.
I would be willing to go even a step farther. Suppose we look on Jesus in this story not just as a human being with all these human foibles that lead him to act as un-nobly as any of the rest of us do from time to time, but instead look on him as we often do in the gospel stories, as a kind of a stand-in for God. If we do that, then we could see Jesus acting the way God seems to act from our limited human point of view. Jesus at first refuses to intervene on behalf of the woman’s daughter. There are many situations where from our human points of view God might intervene to prevent or relieve human suffering, but doesn’t. If we read the story this way, the woman does more than exhibit some admirable human qualities. She stands up to this man of God. She stands up to God. She talks back to God. She confronts God (Jesus) with the reality of her daughter’s condition and in effect says to him, “You must do something.” And she won’t take “Sorry, not my job” for an answer. “It is your job,” I hear her say. “Don’t you dare turn away.”
My point here is not that the woman has the most sophisticated theology in the world and that we should imitate her in that respect. My point is not that God should be held responsible for all the evil spirits there are in the world, or held responsible for not doing something about all the evil spirits there are in the world. It is not that we should expect that God would intervene in our lives wherever we ask God to intervene. I’m not making any grand theoretical or theological statements about who God is or how God acts. I simply want to call attention to this woman who is willing to be called names, but who is not willing to shrink away in the face of God’s power, who confronts God and says, “This is my world. This is my life and the life of my daughter and millions of other of your children. They are your children, not just mine. I lay it all at your feet.”
Too often the Christian faith has been presented in such a way that it encourages human beings to have a kind of a passive stance in relation to God. God is all powerful and could, if he so chose, change the way things are in the world. Therefore, the way things are must ultimately be the will of God, and it is our job to try to understand God’s will for the world in general, for us in particular, and if we can’t understand it, then at least to accept it. God has certain ways we are all supposed to act toward one another and a certain role in mind for each of us in the divine scheme of things, and it is our job to be obedient, to follow the ways of God that God has laid out for everyone and that God has in mind for each of us. As faithful people, we are supposed to be above all accepting, obedient, compliant. Those are the Christian virtues.
The Canaanite woman in the story is none of those things, not accepting, obedient, or compliant. It is not just that she has some admirable personal qualities. She has a different notion of how people ought to relate to God. She gives me permission not to be accepting of what ought not to be made acceptable. She not only gives me permission. She suggests to me, forcefully suggests to me, that when the hardships and afflictions of our fellow human beings are at stake, being accepting is not a faithful way to be. Compliance is not a virtue. It doesn’t matter if ultimately we decide that God is not a being who wills suffering on people and is not the kind of a power who works some kind of magic on the world’s sorrow. It doesn’t matter if ultimately our theology could stand some refinement. We have a right and a calling to lay the world’s brokenness, not all at once either, to lay little pieces of the world’s brokenness at the feet of God and ask God, demand of God, that she not turn away.
The part of the story that is uncomfortably true is of course that we live in a world in which children are afflicted, and grown-ups too, with evil spirits, in which people must beg for health care, in which where you are born makes a huge difference in how rich or how painful your life is likely to be, in which all over the world people who are seen as foreigners are treated poorly, in which words are used to demean, in which people without power are forced to grovel for life’s basics, in which…This story says to me that the harshness of the world should not be glossed over in order to make it more presentable to God or God more presentable to us. We are better off if, in interpreting this story, we don’t spend our energy trying to rescue Jesus from the way he comes across in the story, better off if we don’t turn it into a feel good story of how the underdog acted with great determination and skill and beat the odds in this particular case and won the day, and that any of us could do this if we put our mind to it. We are better off if we leave the questions it raises unanswered, the issues it raises unresolved. After all, when we lay the harshness of the world at God’s feet, we lay it at our own feet as well. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 6, 2009