pentecost 14 Year B

Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9, 22-23
Psalm 125
James 2: 1-10 (11-13), 14-17
Mark 7: 24-37

Jesus – boorish, exclusivist, racist and defiled? Jesus – taught a lesson about grace by a Gentile woman? Of course not! This is Jesus, the Son of God. This is God in the flesh. It’s absurd and faithless even to suggest that Jesus might be anything less than perfect! Jesus is perfect. Jesus knows everything. He doesn’t need a lesson from anyone about anything – especially from a Gentile woman about God and the gospel! On that basis, scholars have done all sorts of exegetical gymnastics to avoid the plain meaning of what Mark tells us in today’s gospel passage. The most common way to go is to suggest that this is a particularly “edgy” – but highly successful – teaching strategy by Jesus to lead the woman to understand something she doesn’t know beforehand. One exegete goes so far as suggesting that calling the woman a “dog” was not an insult at all. He (surprised at the gender?) suggests that both Jesus and the woman were Cynics, for whom the term was actually a compliment. What we have, therefore, is a scenario in which a delighted Jesus discovers what must be the only Cynic in the region of Tyre for miles around and enters into friendly, spirited repartee. To his surprise and pleasure, he is bested by this adept cynic and concedes defeat good-naturedly. Yeah! I’m convinced … NOT!

We might laugh, but it goes to show the deep-seated unease at Mark’s presentation of Jesus in this encounter. Show this passage to anyone who isn’t conditioned by concerns about traditional Christian Christology, and they will tell you that it hardly shows Jesus in a complimentary light. This is about Jesus, not the woman, learning a lesson about grace and inclusiveness.

Look at how Mark sets it up. Jesus has just explained that the evil things that come from within are what defile (v23). Then follows an exchange – a conversation. The very first words to be reported after v23 – the very next “thing from within” to emerge – come from Jesus (the Gentile woman’s request for healing is in indirect speech). And what we hear is: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs!” Now, however much we may want to major on the fact that Jesus is not being necessarily offensive or harsh in suggesting that “salvation comes first to the Jews”, we cannot escape the harshness of “dogs”. This was a term of real contempt and abuse – the equivalent of “nigger” or “kaffir” or “kike”. What makes it worse is that Jesus isn’t using this heatedly: he’s completely dismissive of her. It’s standard, crude, unthinking prejudice.

Remember, he’s trying to escape notice. Here comes a woman with a request – and Jesus moves to brush her away and move on. Yet she won’t let that happen. Her response is both unexpected and audacious: she takes Jesus’ words and turns them back on him. “Yes, I may be a dog, but are you so hard-hearted that you won’t even throw me a crumb?”

We almost sense Jesus’ surprise. He stops in his tracks, “seeing” her for the first time – as a mother, a woman, a human being, a child of God. Mark presents this as a “conversion experience” for Jesus. Jesus realises something he hadn’t realised before: the “Bread” (the use of “crumb” isn’t accidental) is for all people, not just the Jews! And eight verses later, as a result, Jesus feeds a huge crowd of Gentiles – with bread! And look at the contrast between Jesus’ responses here and then in 8:2: “I have compassion for the crowd …” Do you see? He’s learned compassion for Gentiles – from the woman!

Jesus has learned the truth of his own insights. He has recognised (in last week’s passage) just how damaging exclusion can be, and how it depends on an absence of compassion. He’s rejected the purity laws that marginalise people for that reason, stating clearly that holiness and purity have to do with God-likeness. Yet Jesus himself has to learn that he himself is not immune to the drive to reject people who are different. He learns to expand his compassion – to widen his definition of “neighbour”.

For those of us who pay lip service to Jesus’ humanity, but really believe that his divinity by-passed all the things that we human beings share, this passage is problematic. Yet if we put our money where our theological mouths are, it is a profoundly encouraging and hopeful passage. It presents us with a Jesus who is human, just as we are. It presents Jesus as “growing in grace”, just as we need to. It encourages us to do so, and affirms that genuine growth in grace is possible and realistic.

Putting our money where our mouths are (James 2: 1-17/Proverbs 22)
James confronts the ways in which we say – and mean! – good things theologically, but fail to live them out. Often our failures are unconscious. We simply don’t notice the significance of how we view and treat people, because that’s the way we’ve been brought up. We don’t intend to be unkind or exclusive – we simply are. That’s because “sin” is more than the intention to do evil. It is also the ways in which “things just are” because we’ve set them up that way – sinfully.

In today’s reading, he cites the example of unconscious partiality – the unthinking favouring of rich people, and the instinctive revulsion against poor, dirty, smelly and unpleasant people. Recognising that and overcoming it requires an effort. It requires a conversion – the realisation that we are not living by the insights of our faith and not putting our money where our mouths are.

James quotes the “second great commandment” to love neighbour as self (v8). He could easily have made his point by citing the example of Jesus in today’s gospel passage! “It’s all very well professing to love your neighbour, but if you choose as your neighbour only those people who are easy and whom you like, or who are like you, or whom you want to be friends with, then you are failing to keep the commandment!” Nor is it enough to say, “Well, I may have failed in this (insignificant) area to keep God’s Law, but I’m not an adulterer, or a murderer!” James goes straight for the jugular: if you want to play the game of calculating whether you’ve kept the letter of the Law, you’ve had it! If the Law is about that calculated form of rule-keeping, remember: fail in one (tiny) area, and you’ve broken the Law!

Either the Law is a means of self-justification (in which case, says James, we’ve had it), or else it is what God intends: a law of liberty which frees people to act in a God-like way! How will we know the difference? If we “really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” as we claim to do (v1), we will be like Jesus. We will behave and act like Jesus – ie our definition of “neighbour” will be bounded only by the limits of our compassion. Words are cheap and theology is easy: what matters – and what gives the truth or lie to words and theology – is the extent to which they result in Christ-like actions. This is the theme he will take up in next week’s passage: faith without works is worthless. Put your money where your mouth is!

Note that for James, as for Jesus, the “test case” is always how we treat those less fortunate than ourselves – the poor. This is the acid test. It’s the same “test” applied in Proverbs 22. The “good name” is not about riches. It’s about how the poor are treated, because the “good name” is about God-likeness. It is about generosity (grace) in v9 – the generosity that shares bread (hmmm! Now where has that theme appeared this week?) with the poor. It’s all too easy to rob the poor and crush the afflicted (v22). That doesn’t necessarily happen out of a deliberate sadism or wickedness: it happens easily because it happens unconsciously. The poor are “invisible”, just as the Gentile woman was off Jesus’ radar screen … until he noticed her in a way he never had before. And remember, says the writer: you may not even “see” them, but Yahweh does – and their cause is Yahweh’s cause! So if you want to be God-like, be as vigilant for the poor and dispossessed as Yahweh is!

The deaf hear and the dumb speak (Mark 7: 31ff)
Mark goes on immediately to record the healing of the deaf mute in the Decapolis region. Note two things: firstly, there’s the contrast between Jesus’ desire for privacy (v33) while healing, and the crowd’s broadcasting of the miracle (v37). Here is part of Mark’s “Messianic Secret” motif. Although the crowd are not calling him the messiah, they are still getting the wrong end of the stick over the miracles, and majoring on the spectacular rather than the true meaning. This is paralleled by the commands to silence over Jesus’ messiahship: “messiah” is true, but not if it’s being misinterpreted! In the same way, the crowds have got the “true-but-misinterpreted” dynamic over miracles here: they say, “He even makes the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak!” (v37). These are signs of the Last Days, although they’re not framed here as a deliberate citation. This is the irony: these are indeed signs of the Last Days, because “the time has been fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand” (1:14). But it has been done so by Jesus – in ways that people never dreamed it would be and which, in the end, they refuse to accept.

Secondly, this is part of the discipleship narrative. Mark will increasingly use incidents like the healings to contrast the truth about Jesus with the disciples’ increasing inability and refusal to believe. So the disciples will be “blind” while blind people are made to see. Here, Jesus wishes to keep his privacy, because people are “deaf” to the truth he is proclaiming and likely to “shout out” the wrong sorts of things, so that Jesus will be increasingly seen as a populist wonder-worker, making his mission more difficult. Significantly, the disciples will increasingly buy into this vision of the messiah as a populist, miracle-working, invincible Jewish nationalist, rather than the suffering messiah that Jesus is called to be. They will be “deaf” to Jesus’ passion predictions, and the more he wishes to silence wrong notions of messiahship, the more they will try to drown him out.

What we have in this week’s texts, then, is the encouragement to recognise the things that blind us to the truth about Jesus. Christian faith and truth – discipleship – is not “obvious”. Salvation and faith do not automatically inoculate us against deep-seated prejudice, or open our eyes to the people who are victims of the “in/out” boundaries within which we enclose our so-called Christian communities. I say “so-called” not to be derogatory or cynical, but to emphasises the point that all the writers today make in different ways: we need to be vigilant and self-critical, because what we say we believe doesn’t always cash out that way in our lives. We may claim to be followers of Jesus, yet be startlingly unlike Jesus! That will be far more obvious to others than it is to us – and to none more so than “the poor” – those we exclude and simply don’t even notice.

Amen.