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Pentecost 14, Proper 18 Lesson: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23
September 13, 2009 Psalm 125
The Rev. Karen Evans Epistle: James 2:1-17
St. James’ Church, Marietta Holy Gospel: Mark 7:24-37
I speak to you in the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I do not want to say anything, but I think the writer of the Gospel of Mark was geographically challenged. His description of Jesus’ travels in the two stories we heard this morning is like some of the flights I have decided not to take. You know the ones that take you from Atlanta to Miami via Detroit. Going from Galilee to Tyre, back to the region of the Decapolis via Sidon, meant going east in order to go south, or something like that.
At the same time, geography is important because at the beginning of these stories Jesus left Jewish territory for the coast, which was a Gentile region. These stories carry forward the lesson we heard last week that talked about what was clean and unclean.
Bill and I were driving home the other day and he was telling me about a rival to our Thrift Shop that he had heard about. The directions were to drive south on Atlanta Road until you got to a neighborhood you would rather not be in, and then look for it on the right. That is one way of looking at what it meant for Jesus to go to that region. As a Jew, it was a region you would normally rather not be in.
I guess that is one reason why Jesus went there. He was exhausted. He had been preaching and healing, and teaching and working miracles, and he was worn out. He needed a break. When he had tried to get one by going off by himself, like the paparazzi after a celebrity, the crowd followed him and he ended up having to feed them. So, I imagine he thought that if he went to the Gentile region and he did not let anyone know he was there, he might be able to get some rest.
But it was not to be. He no sooner arrived in Tyre than a woman whose daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit heard that he was there and came to see him. Since a Gentile woman was by definition unclean, Jesus was immediately confronted by how he would respond to her.
What does it mean to be unclean? The spirit that possessed the girl was unclean because it did not recognize God and it sought to harm the girl. The mother was unclean because she was a women, she belonged to the wrong ethnic group, she grew up in the wrong place, and she was of the wrong religion.
Kathryn, our daughter, can tell you about that. She was invited to go on a trip to Eritrea. The only way to get there involved changing planes in Saudi Arabia. Because she was not going to be traveling with her father or her husband, she would not have been allowed to leave the airport. Though they would not have said so in so many words, she met the definition of unclean. In the end, she decided not to go.
Before we pat ourselves on the back, however, we do well to remember those people who we would have treated as unclean and unwelcome not so very long ago – and, maybe also, those people who are treated that way now.
This woman who epitomized everything unclean came to Jesus looking for help. She fell to her knees and begged him. How did he respond? “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
This is one of those quotes that is characterized as “the hard sayings” of Jesus. Some have tried to soften it by suggesting that the farmers of Galilee provided the food for the cities along the coast. So, when times were tough, they literally would have been taking the food out of their children’s mouths to feed the woman and her compatriots.
In this view, what Jesus said was a quotation of a Galilean proverb that was about the urban/rural conflict – a conflict that is certainly not unique to first century Palestine. But I think that is too simple an explanation and it misses the point. However, if we see Jesus as fully human, if we allow him to grow and to change his mind, then the story takes on a different character.
Jesus answered the woman with a proverb, yes, but it was the kind of saying that would have been a putdown. It was the kind of thing a Jewish man would have said to a Gentile woman – and we do not expect that from Jesus.
But then, neither did Jesus expect the answer he got back from the woman. He did not foresee that she would engage in what one writer called “verbal combat” with him. Picking up on the derogatory term “dogs,” she replied that while you would not feed the children’s food to the dogs, in his country as in hers, the dogs could be found under the table feeding on the scraps or crumbs that accidentally (or in the case of children and vegetables, on purpose) fell to the ground.
Her answer taught Jesus something. He saw her differently. Her words and her attitude may not have been the typical expression of faith that he was used to, but he recognized that an expression of faith is what they were. And he changed his attitude and healed her child.
Why would Mark include such a story in his Gospel? By the time the Gospel was written, the Church had spread far beyond the lands that Jesus travelled and knew. The Church was increasingly made up of Gentiles who had converted to the faith. They wanted to know if they were acceptable to God. Mark’s Jesus let them know that in the end, by healing the woman’s daughter, he had come to see that they, too, had a place in the Kingdom of God.
That brings us to the question of what does this mean for us. Some of us have been on the receiving end of the kind of insult and disdain we see in Jesus’ original statement. All of us, I suspect, have at one time or another been guilty of that kind of attitude.
When I went back to school to take the Philosophy courses I needed to be accepted into seminary, I encountered a young woman who had severe birth defects that disfigured her face and twisted her body. My initial reaction when I saw her was horror, and I am sorry to say a certain disgust. As I continued through the semester, I was humbled by the young men and women who were this woman’s friends. I could see that for them, her infirmities did not matter, and mostly, they did not pay attention to them unless she asked for help.
That is what this lesson is about for me. Who do we consider to be unclean? How do we treat those people? What would it take or us to change our attitude? Amen.
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