Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?

James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

September 9, 2012

 

Many of you know that some folks gather here at the church every Friday at noon to study the texts that I will be preaching on that week.  It is not a rare occurrence for me to leave the lectionary bible study with a deeper, richer understanding of our scriptures.  Unfortunately – but probably not unrelated – it’s also not rare for me to leave a little disoriented.  The ideas I brought in are shaken up a bit when I hear what others have to say.  But, I have come to trust that this experience is a good thing:  a good thing for my sermons, and a good thing for me as I try to be a faithful person.  And I can hope that it’s as helpful for others in the group.  This week was no exception.

I was late; I came in about half way through, and the group was grappling with this story from Mark about the Syrophoenician woman.  They were struggling to make sense of it, which is understandable.  It is not straightforward; it doesn’t fit our expectations; the conversation is hard to follow; and it’s one of those passages that probably makes a lot more sense if you are a Jew or Gentile living in 1^st century Palestine than a Grinnellian in the 21^st century.

Let me recap the passage for you…  The whole thing starts with Jesus trying to get away from everyone.  He was literally hiding.  But a Gentile widow finds him.  A widow whose daughter is suffering – she is possessed by a demon.  The woman begs Jesus to help her.  Begs. 

And this is Jesus’ bread and butter.  It’s what Jesus is all about – he loves the Gentiles, the widows, the suffering.  So Jesus reaches out, looks compassionately into her eyes, says because of your faith, your daughter is healed.

Oh wait.  That’s not what happens.  He is hiding out.  She does beg him to help her daughter.  But he says – somewhat cryptically – “Let the children be fed first, for it’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  She replies – somewhat cryptically – “sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  Then Jesus says, “because of what you said, your daughter has been healed.”  And sure enough, when the woman goes home, her daughter is free of the demons that had taken over her life. 

That’s the story.  And it is hard.  Not least because Jesus doesn’t act like we expect him to.  Add to that this conversation about the dogs, which confuses pretty much every scholar that has tried to tackle this passage, not to mention me and most of us in the bible study Friday.

It seems like Jesus initially tells her “no, I won’t heal your child because my priority is elsewhere…to people who deserve first dibs” – which doesn’t seem like the Christian response.  But worse, it also seems like he calls them a most offensive name.  He calls them dogs.  Now, I love dogs, and wouldn’t mind such a comparison, but I assure you, this was not meant as a compliment at that time.  Dog was an epithet commonly hurled at the Gentiles…it meant mangy, annoying, scavenger, sub human.  The reason, Jesus says, they did not deserve help was because they were less than human. 

So, I think it’s understandable that we all struggled with this passage.  Jesus doesn’t do that, right?  He would not respond to a women whose daughter was suffering by calling them a name and refusing to help.  As we talked in our bible study, we all agreed that this is a really challenging passage.  When we’re honest with ourselves – and this is probably true for most of scripture, all we can do is take our best guess in the end – there’s no way around this, unless we can time travel back and ask the author of Mark what he meant.  Some guesses are better than others, and we are responsible for doing the best we can – but they are guesses nonetheless.    

At the risk of misrepresenting my bible study cohorts, I want to share some of our guesses:  I went in thinking Jesus really did call her a dog.  That he really did insult her – and we should recoil in disgust.  And we have to face the fact that Jesus was human.  When he walked this earth, he wasn’t perfect.

Someone else suggested Jesus wasn’t calling them dogs, he was indicating that this was a commonly held attitude toward Gentiles by people in his faith tradition.  In other words, it isn’t what Jesus believes, but what Jews in general believed and Jesus wants to dismantle this terrible attitude as much as the woman does.

We also wondered if there wasn’t an actual dog there that they both were using as a kind of metaphor, but that Jesus wasn’t directly calling the woman and her daughter dogs. 

And another suggested Jesus was testing her. He knew the right answer all along, but he wanted her to come to it herself.

Each of these gives a little different picture of Jesus.  All of them are reasonable and possible, and all of them have their own limitations.  But the bottom line is that this discussion on Friday left me with a richer, deeper connection to this story – for which I credit this weekly gathering of rag tag Christians who are willing to wrestle with the hard stuff in order to have a deeper connection with God.  I credit them with reminding me yet again of the importance of walking this journey together, sharing our thoughts, experiences, and faith with one another – because no one person’s perspective is sufficient.  I also blame them for disorienting me, making me less confident in what I had been thinking, and for making me reevaluate my sermon – on a Friday…at 1 p.m. J

Interestingly, after being so disoriented on Friday, I think my sermon title, which I came up with on Thursday, still makes sense.  With all those plausible interpretations of the story, with all those ideas about what Jesus was doing in this story, I left this bible study yearning to know, “Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?” 

I yearn to know this because the answer to this question really matters to me.  This is what I stake my life on.  Yes, it’s a big question, ultimately unanswerable question, but it is important for me to keep exploring it.  It’s important for me not because I think it should be important for everyone in the world; it’s important to me because I have chosen this story, his story, as the one that I will wrestle with, believing that learning about, engaging with, wrestling with his life will shape me more and more into the person I want to be…in the person I believe God wants me to be.  Is it the only story that will do this?  No.  But I have come to trust it implicitly over the course of my life.  And over the course of my life, I have developed a sense of who I think Jesus is.

And for me, no matter how many different ways I looked at it, the Jesus in this odd story doesn’t match the Jesus in my head and heart. That Jesus looks at people with the most compassionate eyes in the world and responds immediately to their suffering with healing; not with cryptic riddles.  The Jesus I carry around challenges the religious elite with his stories and questions – he doesn’t challenge someone who is begging for her daughter’s life.  The Jesus of my heart eats with, reaches out to, goes to the poor, the orphan, and, yes, the widows whose daughters are suffering.  He meets them where they are and changes their lives.  He doesn’t hole up in a secluded place hoping no one notices him.

So I walked out of bible study less clear on what this story means, but with much greater clarity that I yearn to know what this story says about who Jesus is.  Given that, where I landed on all of this surprised me.  It disoriented me once again. 

It dawned on me that as much as I want to know who the real Jesus is, so I can know who I’m supposed to follow, not every passage in the bible is necessarily answering that one question.  The Harry Potter books are in large part about revealing who Harry Potter is to the audience, but if the author didn’t also spend time revealing history, other characters, the rules of Quiddich, there would be no way to fully understand Harry or, more importantly, the meaning of the whole story.  While we don’t often think about this, it’s possible that not every passage in the New Testament is trying to tell us something about Jesus. 

When I could let go of my question – what is this story trying to tell me about Jesus? – I was a bit more open to seeing that maybe this passage isn’t about Jesus at all – or at least very much.  And it’s only in letting go of my need to figure Jesus out that I can learn from the true star of this story:  The Syrophoenician woman.

It’s her love of her child that sends her out looking for help.  It’s her courage that allows her to approach a Jewish rabbi, who’s hiding away, and have the nerve to beg him to help her.  It’s her persistence that keeps her from letting Jesus have the last word.  And, most importantly, we are told, it is because of what she said that her daughter was healed.  She healed her – not Jesus.

Which translated to our day means it’s up to US, not Jesus, to bring healing into this world.  It’s up to US to cast out demons. 

If that’s the case, and if her words bring about the healing, maybe we should figure out what she was saying.  Again, I’m not sure why she has to be so cryptic, but I think in a general sense we can agree that her response denies a world where some are fed and others aren’t.

The author of James drives the point home, and, in my humble opinion, much less cryptically.  “If a rich person walks into church at the same time a poor person does, if you fall all over yourself to welcome the rich person while ignoring the poor, you have become judges with evil thoughts.”  James says when we make distinctions, when we show partiality, we dishonor God.  And more drastically he tells us that in drawing distinctions we reveal a faith this is not alive – and, worse, gives no life to the world around us. 

Whatever we think about Jesus, the point of calling the Gentiles dogs in the first century was to make very clear distinctions, and to show partiality:  children of Israel first, Gentile dogs second.  When the women responds, she manages to dismantle that worldview in one sentence. 

And what we find out is startling:  When you challenge the system and assumptions, when you are persistent in convincing others that we can make no distinctions, when you are like the women, daemons are cast out.  The demons of prejudice.  The demons of hunger.  The demons of war.  The demons of poverty.  The demons of injustice.  All the demons that are rooted in distinctions and partiality are cast out when we refuse to accept a world full of distinctions, no matter who is trying to tell us otherwise.

Maybe learning about the woman does reveal something of Jesus in the end:  Namely, that Jesus didn’t believe it was all about him.  We are participants in God’s saving Grace.  Who we are matters to this world, to the possibility of healings, to our children, our neighbors, our enemies.  The character and nature of the human Jesus may not be clear in this passage, but the character and nature of God is revealed in the woman’s actions – and can be in ours.  Amen.