Sermon for St. Francis’ in Dunellen

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 6, 2009

The Rev’d Joan E. Fleming

 

Readings

Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9, 22-23

            James 2: 1-10, [11-13], 14-17

            Mark 7: 24-37

 

The woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin.

 

            Our gospel story today, about the Gentile woman who had the courage to challenge Jesus, challenges us also.  I rather think that it must have challenged the Gospel writers (the story appears in Matthew as well as Mark, but not in Luke or John) and the compilers of the New Testament canon even more.   For the Jesus we see in this story is human through and through.  He actually changes his mind. 

He is susceptible to a good argument, he yields to persuasion, and he changes not only his mind, but his whole mind-set.   Nor is Jesus’ shift in thinking over a merely minor matter, simply a change of preference.  Given the cultural context, it is major.

 

            The woman who comes to Jesus is desperate.  Her little daughter is “possessed by an unclean spirit,” which could mean that she suffers from any one of a number of possible conditions—today we might label her severely autistic, ADD, or emotionally withdrawn.  At the least, we can deduce that her “normal” behavior includes some kind of hyperactivity, perhaps uncontrollable rage, for when the mother returns home from her encounter with Jesus she finds her daughter healed, for at last she is perfectly tranquil, just lying down, resting quietly. 

 

            By this point in Mark’s gospel narrative, we have seen Jesus respond to literally thousands of people in need, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, extending a helping hand to all comers, exhibiting only compassion.  So it comes as a jolt to see Jesus ready to turn someone away, especially someone so urgently, desperately in need.  But as the woman lies literally prostrate at his feet, Jesus gives her a rough reception with a distinctly ironic edge,  “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

We want to protest that it is precisely a child’s welfare that is at stake; but there is a back-story here that we must explore if we are to take in the full significance of Jesus’ change of heart.

 

            The “children” of Jesus’ rebuff are simply the “children of Israel,” and, to put it baldly, Israelites, the Jews of Jesus’ day, were programmed, in line with the direct instructions of Yahweh to their forebears the ancient Hebrews (and you can read all about it in many texts of the Old Testament) to hate, despise and shun Canaanites.  The curse on Canaan goes back to the very beginnings of Hebrew history.  It is murky back there, but in the pages even of Genesis Noah put a curse on “Canaan” his youngest son-- because he had witnessed his father’s nakedness.  [Genesis 9: 25-27]

 

Canaanite is one of the terms (Amorites is another) used to refer to the indigenous peoples that the Hebrews were to subdue and drive out of the Promised Land [Judges 1: 1-3]; and intermarriage with them was strictly forbidden [Nehemiah 13: 23-27].  Today’s state of Israel is eerily similar in its relations with the indigenous Palestinians who were already inhabiting the land before the state was created:  they could never be completely eliminated.  The “Canaanites” lived on too, despite their harassment by the invaders, primarily in what is modern Lebanon, the Phoenicia of today’s gospel.  The way all these names keep switching on us does get confusing, but according to the Oxford Companion to the Bible, “the Canaanites were one of seven nations driven out [by] the Israelites … of which the Canaanites were the coastal component …  the term ‘Canaanites’ corresponds exactly to ‘Phoenicians’.”   For a good Jew, our Gentile woman, being “of Syrophoenician origin,” was officially an “untouchable.”

 

There were many other chapters in this story of divinely sanctioned prejudice between the Hebrews and their neighbors up the coast, but the point here is that Jesus as a devout Jew would have been immersed from early childhood, marinated in these attitudes.  If we were to reach for an analogy it would perhaps be something like Red Neck southern whites’ attitude to blacks under Jim Crow laws prior to the Civil Rights era; or of many Europeans’ attitude toward Jews in the 1930s.  

 

What happened to throw a switch in Jesus’ consciousness to make him toss aside such deeply ingrained attitudes as these?  The woman’s clever retort, “ … even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs,” was perhaps the final touch to a shift that was already at work.

Last week’s gospel you remember showed Jesus pouring scorn on fellow

Jews, especially on the religious authorities who were supposed to be the very model of religious observance and holiness of life.  But Jesus delivered his condemnation of religious hypocrisy as one Jew to another.  That showdown was all “in the family,” siblings disputing among themselves, all children of one father.

 

            In today’s gospel, though, in a sudden flash of insight Jesus seems to “connect the dots” in a new way.  If ritual washing of pots and pans, without thought for the purification of the heart the washing is meant to symbolize, is hypocritical; how does God rate a compassion which is extended only to one’s own kind, one’s own ethnic group, one’s own skin color, one’s own social background?  This alien woman with her presence of mind, persistence, and clever repartee, tips the balance for Jesus, and opens a whole new window in his consciousness.  The divine justice and the divine compassion Jesus knew he was sent to proclaim could not be a mere family legacy, binding only on members of the clan.  

Perhaps words from the prophet Isaiah flashed across Jesus’ mind as this alien woman laid claim to his compassion:

 “… the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord … these I will bring to my holy mountain, … for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.  Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered.”

[Isaiah 56: 6-8]

           

The trouble with ingrained bias in favor of one’s own is that we cannot see it, for it is in the very air we breathe, the water in which we swim.   Ideas that have long been part of our psyche are exceedingly difficult to dislodge.

 

            A recently published book by Matt Miller is provocatively titled,

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.  As one reviewer put it, the author “drives a bulldozer into the complacent conventional wisdoms of our society,” identifying such shibboleths as, the desirability of free trade, of employers being responsible for health care, of low taxes, and of schools being controlled by the local community and supported by local property taxes.  He demonstrates in contemporary terms the extreme difficulty we have in reconsidering “received wisdom”—a difficulty we are even now experiencing keenly as the so-called health care debate heats up to fever pitch. 

 

A change of heart is as hard to come by as a change of habit, habits of mind especially.  But, thanks be to God, they can occur, as today’s gospel bears witness.  And in bearing witness to that remarkable and liberating human capacity to change, this precious Gospel story demonstrates Jesus’ precious humanity also.