Mark 7:24-37
More
and more, in recent months, whenever I listen to the news or read the material
coming over my news feed, I have a strong urge to curl up on the couch, pull an
afghan over my head, and shout, “Make it go away! Just make it go away!” I have tried to turn it all off. I have tried not to look at the newspaper for
twenty-four hours or read any article that does not include a recipe. I still feel on-edge because I’m half-afraid
of something awful happening and not knowing about it until it’s too late. What if a war starts? What if the dollar crashes? What if lead is discovered in our local water
system, or if a hurricane forming in the Atlantic is headed this way? What if football is outlawed or ebola is
discovered in New Jersey? I know I’m not
the only one, either. Consider this
cartoon by Lila Ash that was in The New
Yorker last week:
“You can have the pillow fort back
When you bring Mommy some good
news.”
Here’s
some good news: even Jesus felt overwhelmed at times. More than one place in the gospels describes
him doing what he had to do to manage the demands that the world put on
him. Today’s gospel lesson tells of a time he went all the way up into Lebanon, near present-day
Beirut. He
“went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not
want anyone to know he was there.” [Mark 7:24]
He tried to arrange some down-time. Why should you or I feel bad about trying to
do the same thing?
Now back to
the harsh realities. Jesus’ attempt to
hide away for a few days didn’t work.
Even outside Jewish territory, somehow he was recognized. He
“could not escape notice, but a woman
whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and
she came and bowed down at his feet.” [Mark 7:24-25]
One
summer when I was in college, I worked in Acadia National Park in Maine and I
was manning the cash register at a gift shop one evening when somebody handed
me a credit card with the name “Paul Nitze”.
(This is geeky, I admit.) I
recognized the name as belonging to the man who six years earlier had led some
groundbreaking talks with the Soviets on reducing nuclear arms. I didn’t saying anything to him, but got some
really weird looks afterward when I said to the other workers, “Do you realize
who that was?” Another time, at the same
store, I sold some bedroom slippers to Carter Heyward, one of the first women
to be ordained an Episcopal priest. (I
had seen her give a lecture about two months earlier.) In that case, I did thank her by name as I
handed her the bag, and watched her try to figure out if I was someone she
knew. And every Wednesday morning we
sold a package of cocktail napkins to a certain Miss Wanamaker for her
afternoon bridge club. If those people
could not fly under the radar, then how unlikely is it that Jesus could go
unrecognized for long?
If it was bound to happen, though,
the woman who found him found him a little bit too soon. He had not had enough time to rest and (I
trust he’ll forgive me for saying this) he comes across in Mark’s retelling as
a little bit cranky, which goes along with being seriously tired.
“Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician
origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to
her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s
food and throw it to the dogs.’” [Mark 7:26-27]
Again, he’s trying to set boundaries.
He is telling her, “Look, lady!
My job is to reach out to the people in Judaea. Sorry, but you just don’t qualify as part of
my assigned demographic. I work with
Mac, you’ve got an Apple.”
And here’s where the absolute genius of this woman comes into play, and
she becomes the only person in all the gospels who argues with Jesus and wins. For one thing, she has compassion on
him. We can only guess where it comes
from. Not many people would take a
rebuff like he offered lightly. But she,
too, probably knew what it was to be tired to the depths of her soul. Here was a mother who was troubled for her
young daughter, scared of what was going on.
You can hear the sleepless nights in her voice and imagine what terrible
scenes she had had to witness helplessly.
There must have been a mixture of exasperation and hope or desperation to
drive her to approach a foreign man, one she had never met, and to keep pressing
him for help after a pretty clear, “No.”
My guess is that she heard something in his voice that was regret at his
own answer, or that she sensed that her weariness and his weariness were alike
on some level. She saw a connection that
was deeper than the surfaces of their lives would suggest.
On that basis she persisted, overlooking his analysis of his own ability
to help. Jesus said that
“‘it is not fair to take the children’s food
and throw it to the dogs,’ But she answered him, ‘Sir, even the dogs
under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’” [Mark 7:27-28]
He was not
uncaring. It took this woman whose need
and weakness mirrored his own to open his eyes to a depth of calling beyond
what he had yet fully grasped. You know,
the Bible says that when he was a child,
“Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in
divine and human favor.” [Luke
2:52]
His wisdom never
stopped increasing. She did not deny his
understanding of his calling, but she offered him a chance to broaden it, and
he had the wisdom to learn from her.
“Then he said to her, ‘For saying that, you may
go—the demon has left your daughter.’ So she went home, found the child
lying on the bed, and the demon gone.” [Mark 7:29-30]
He came, he had realized,
to save his people. He came, he now
realized, to save the world.
I suspect that this interchange stayed with him whenever
he might have been tempted to see his human limits as a limit on the power of
his Father. Jesus would later tell a
parable about having compassion on those in need that started this way:
“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple
and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay
a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to
satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs
would come and lick his sores.” [Luke 16:19-21]
All that talk about
dogs and tablescraps, and sharing what is on the table! Where had he heard that before?
Notice, though, that when he talked about the poor man in need, he gave
him a name, which he didn’t do for anyone else in any of his other
parables. We use the translated name “Lazarus”,
but it comes from the Hebrew name “Eleazer”, which means, “God is my help.” I suspect – and here I am speaking for myself
and not from the text – I suspect that Jesus also learned in his interchange
with the Syrophoenician woman how to recognize the depths of God’s Spirit at
work within him as a help not only for the people, Jew and Gentile alike, who
had been coming to him and who would continue to come to him with all sorts of
problems and demands, but also as the help that he himself needed to respond to
them without the shortness he showed to that woman outside Tyre.
Jesus would continue to go off by himself to pray, often early in the
morning before other people (including the disciples traveling with him) were
even awake. And we would see him pray
about his own weakness in the Garden of Gethsemane. Still, those were moments when he opened his
heart to the Father’s renewal through the Spirit, and he always came away from
them prepared for whatever awaited, knowing where his help lay.
Odd, isn’t it? -- how it may be
better sometimes to lose an argument than to win?
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