Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
RCL - Proper 18B, Sunday 07 September, 2009
Isaiah 35:4-7a
James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17
Mark 7:24-37
The St. Francis Garden at Holy Cross Monastery
Originally Uploaded by Cloister-Walk
Today’s two Gospel stories are connected by one of the most famous geographical puzzles in scripture. If Jesus is going from Tyre, on the Mediterranean, northwest of Galilee, by way of the Sea of Galilee to the Decapolis, why does he go to Sidon first? The northwestern edge Sea of Galilee is a good 35 miles southeast of Tyre, and the Decapolis is the region stretching away from the eastern side and far beyond, a straight 10 mile shot across the water, or farther around. But Sidon is 25 miles or more north of Tyre, and by going there, you miss the best east-west pass through the hills to the valley going south. If getting from Tyre to the Decapolis in good time is the goal, a 50 mile detour makes no sense. It’s like you want to get to New Haven from West Park, so you start by going 25 miles north, toward Albany. Now that’s a challenge!
Today’s Gospel also contains one of the most disturbing of all Jesus’ sayings. You may remember how abrupt he was to the Samaritan woman at the well, in John 4, when with no polite preliminaries he said, “Give me a drink”. A privileged patriarchal male need not say please, I guess. But this is worse: A Greek-speaking Syrophoenician woman comes to him in desperation because her little daughter has a demon, and she has heard Jesus can heal. What does Jesus say to her? As with the Samaritan woman, not a single polite word falls from his lips. I don’t know where he learned his pastoral theology, but he would not get an A for this: "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." Offensive to her, and to us. When is the last time someone you respected and believed in told you that you are the lowest form of life, and in such a way as to make it clear that you need to bow down to his sort of people because you are, well, you are your sort of people, and we just can’t have anything to do with you, and in all likelihood, neither can God. And who is saying this? The Son of God no less. This is problematic, to say the least.
There are other issues in these stories as well, but these two will do for today.
One of the problems with Sunday morning scripture is that we just hear bits. We don’t listen to the larger sweep of the text. It is useful to put these two stories into context. They come directly after Jesus has fed the five thousand who were so excited that they came out to hear him in the wilderness unprepared. Famously, the disciples do not understand what is going on. Then he walks on the water, past their boat, at night. The disciples do not understand what is going on. When he gets to shore, the people find him again and get him to perform a mass healing. Then the religious authorities arrive from Jerusalem to scope out what is happening. They accuse him of breaking the laws that delineate clean from unclean. Jesus lets loose with a half-chapter diatribe against Jewish religious people who think that observing rules of ritual purity can substitute for the real cleanness of observing God’s holy law in its much larger sense.
There are other issues in these stories as well, but these two will do for today.
One of the problems with Sunday morning scripture is that we just hear bits. We don’t listen to the larger sweep of the text. It is useful to put these two stories into context. They come directly after Jesus has fed the five thousand who were so excited that they came out to hear him in the wilderness unprepared. Famously, the disciples do not understand what is going on. Then he walks on the water, past their boat, at night. The disciples do not understand what is going on. When he gets to shore, the people find him again and get him to perform a mass healing. Then the religious authorities arrive from Jerusalem to scope out what is happening. They accuse him of breaking the laws that delineate clean from unclean. Jesus lets loose with a half-chapter diatribe against Jewish religious people who think that observing rules of ritual purity can substitute for the real cleanness of observing God’s holy law in its much larger sense.
And that is what brings Jesus, and us, to Tyre, and the annoying Greek-speaking woman, and the confusing roundabout journey, and finally to the healing of a deaf man in the Decapolis.
Mark seems to be saying that Jesus is fed up with Jewish disciples who see and see and do not understand, and with Jewish officials who are looking for nits to pick in order to derail his ministry. His success is with the crowds of ordinary people. It is the non-powerful, the badly connected, those without resource, who seem to understand. And in the Jewish world of Jesus and his ministry, there is no one religiously less powerful, no one worse connected with God, no one with less of a foothold, than a Greek speaking pagan woman, and her not even a real Greek, but a Syro-phoenician to boot! Jesus seems to have decided to give the Jewish thing a rest for a bit. If the garbled geography means anything, it means that he was taking the really long way around, spending a lot of time in Gentile territory, avoiding Jewish areas. He is represented as not wanting to be recognized, but as Mark says, “Yet he could not escape notice.” I imagine he knew this.
We know a little about the people for whom Mark wrote. We don’t know where, but we do know when, not more than a few years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. We know they were Greek speaking. They were almost certainly not Jewish by origin. They would have listened to the failures of Jewish disciples and officials as people who had perhaps been on the receiving end of the Jewish ritual purity stick in the early Church themselves. And perhaps they were also on the receiving end of the neo-Pharasaical leadership in the Church which St. Paul tells us so much about. At any rate, they likely would have sympathized with the Syrophoenician woman and with the deaf man in the Decapolis. They might even have taken Jesus’ insulting remark to that woman personally.
But they would also have noticed something wonderful in what follows. Far from bristling with pride and defiant self-assertion, as I imagine most of us in our culture would have been if this had happened to us, the woman accepts his description of her as a dog. She humbles herself, but without losing her native wit and energy. And then she turns it back on Jesus: "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Is this a sharp retort or an acceptance of who she is in the scheme of things – a non-Israelite, not of the chosen, but still a creature with a claim on her creator? In either case, Zing.
As Jesus does with the Samaritan woman, so he does with the Syrophoenician woman: he takes her seriously. Our translation says simply, “For saying that...” But the Greek is more interesting. Dia touton ton logon: “on account of this word”. Logos is also the ordinary term for “word”, so we shouldn’t make too much of this. But, still, there it is, this very charged word logos, with all it may have implied in early Christian tradition, right here, in Jesus’ response to her. Jesus at last has found a person who immediately accepts the truth and power of kenosis, of self-emptying, of accepting the cross that God gives. At last someone who might understand what he is up to. At last someone for whom the word of God speaks and evokes a response of creaturely humility, with the intelligence to carry her case forward and the faith not to let it go when things get rough. Jesus did not find this with his disciples, and he sure didn’t find it in the religious leadership. He had to go to Tyre. Maybe that’s why he took the long way back. Maybe he was hoping to find some more.
Mark seems to be saying that Jesus is fed up with Jewish disciples who see and see and do not understand, and with Jewish officials who are looking for nits to pick in order to derail his ministry. His success is with the crowds of ordinary people. It is the non-powerful, the badly connected, those without resource, who seem to understand. And in the Jewish world of Jesus and his ministry, there is no one religiously less powerful, no one worse connected with God, no one with less of a foothold, than a Greek speaking pagan woman, and her not even a real Greek, but a Syro-phoenician to boot! Jesus seems to have decided to give the Jewish thing a rest for a bit. If the garbled geography means anything, it means that he was taking the really long way around, spending a lot of time in Gentile territory, avoiding Jewish areas. He is represented as not wanting to be recognized, but as Mark says, “Yet he could not escape notice.” I imagine he knew this.
We know a little about the people for whom Mark wrote. We don’t know where, but we do know when, not more than a few years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. We know they were Greek speaking. They were almost certainly not Jewish by origin. They would have listened to the failures of Jewish disciples and officials as people who had perhaps been on the receiving end of the Jewish ritual purity stick in the early Church themselves. And perhaps they were also on the receiving end of the neo-Pharasaical leadership in the Church which St. Paul tells us so much about. At any rate, they likely would have sympathized with the Syrophoenician woman and with the deaf man in the Decapolis. They might even have taken Jesus’ insulting remark to that woman personally.
But they would also have noticed something wonderful in what follows. Far from bristling with pride and defiant self-assertion, as I imagine most of us in our culture would have been if this had happened to us, the woman accepts his description of her as a dog. She humbles herself, but without losing her native wit and energy. And then she turns it back on Jesus: "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Is this a sharp retort or an acceptance of who she is in the scheme of things – a non-Israelite, not of the chosen, but still a creature with a claim on her creator? In either case, Zing.
As Jesus does with the Samaritan woman, so he does with the Syrophoenician woman: he takes her seriously. Our translation says simply, “For saying that...” But the Greek is more interesting. Dia touton ton logon: “on account of this word”. Logos is also the ordinary term for “word”, so we shouldn’t make too much of this. But, still, there it is, this very charged word logos, with all it may have implied in early Christian tradition, right here, in Jesus’ response to her. Jesus at last has found a person who immediately accepts the truth and power of kenosis, of self-emptying, of accepting the cross that God gives. At last someone who might understand what he is up to. At last someone for whom the word of God speaks and evokes a response of creaturely humility, with the intelligence to carry her case forward and the faith not to let it go when things get rough. Jesus did not find this with his disciples, and he sure didn’t find it in the religious leadership. He had to go to Tyre. Maybe that’s why he took the long way back. Maybe he was hoping to find some more.
And he did. East of the Sea of Galilee a man is brought to Jesus by his friends to be healed. Think of the man at the pool of Bethesda who could find no one among the devout Jews there to help carry him into the water, but here the Gentiles in their caring act for their friend are putting them to shame. Jesus performs an exorcism, which Mark describes in clinical detail. He is healed. He is asked not to talk about it, but of course he does. Suddenly he can talk and then not tell people about it? Get real! And what is the upshot? It is the Gentiles of the Decapolis who first publicly proclaim Jesus in messianic terms: "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak." Lots here for Mark’s Gentile readers to identify with, to ponder.
And what about us? Even if we are dwellers in the richest and most prosperous culture the world has ever dreamed of, we are not, most of us anyway, the Chosen People. We live in the Tyres and Sidons, the gentile Decapolis of the modern world. I wonder if we would have the courage and faith of that woman, that wonderful woman, who understood her situation with God. She had no claim, no rights, no standing in the Covenant. But she had faith that in her humility, using what God had given her, a logos-inspired intelligence, she, in taking the lowest place, would find salvation. This great woman, the first in the Gospels to understand Christ in the path of humility, to bow to him, to ask him, who himself took the form of a slave, and who will die disgraced on a cross before very long, she is the first to ask to share his table, even a crumb. She is the hero, the spiritual mother, of every one of us when we come in our own unworthiness to God’s table.
And what about us? Even if we are dwellers in the richest and most prosperous culture the world has ever dreamed of, we are not, most of us anyway, the Chosen People. We live in the Tyres and Sidons, the gentile Decapolis of the modern world. I wonder if we would have the courage and faith of that woman, that wonderful woman, who understood her situation with God. She had no claim, no rights, no standing in the Covenant. But she had faith that in her humility, using what God had given her, a logos-inspired intelligence, she, in taking the lowest place, would find salvation. This great woman, the first in the Gospels to understand Christ in the path of humility, to bow to him, to ask him, who himself took the form of a slave, and who will die disgraced on a cross before very long, she is the first to ask to share his table, even a crumb. She is the hero, the spiritual mother, of every one of us when we come in our own unworthiness to God’s table.
In our culture, even more in our Church, humility like hers is not widely admired. There is more talk of rights and self-respect and assertion and pride than of acknowledging our lowliness. But perhaps humility should be more widely admired, more widely imitated. It is, after all, simply an acknowledgment of the truth. We are not worthy.
Many of us say, as we come to God’s table in the Eucharist, I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table. Say but the word and I shall be healed.
May it be so. It is the path to salvation.
May it be so. It is the path to salvation.
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