The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost Year B, Proper 18
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. AMEN.
The Gospel this morning has two healings, and they connect to three others, Matthew’s account of the healing of (presumably the same) Syrophoenician woman’s daughter and Mark’s earlier freeing the demoniac of the unclean spirit in him and the later healing of the blind man. Each of these five healings have some points in common and, together, Mark’s healings make one point which contrasts with Matthew’s point. These Mark healings say something about Jesus’ understanding of both his mission and how it expanded. Those tie in with the other themes of this morning’s readings. Together, then, they broaden Jesus’ growing perception of God’s work of justice for all.
This morning’s healing of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter compares to Matthew’s account of the same event. The woman had the same discussion with Jesus and made her point saying, “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. Then Jesus answered her, ‘O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.” In the Markan account Jesus says to her “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” In the Mark account, Jesus does not make a point about her great faith, but rather about her and her challenge and demand of him, that he act for her. She was not a Jew, but an outsider, a foreigner, and so Jesus had felt no obligation to her. In the Matthew account, after describing her as a Canaanite he even says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” but he does not repeat this sentence in Mark. Instead, Mark says she was a ” Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin.” The difference in the descriptions of the woman was not that she was a foreigner, but that she was a non--Jew, a Gentile, and Jesus had had no sense of mission to other than Jews, those lost sheep of the house of Israel. The action is about the learning and change Jesus made, to extend his mission to those beyond his own people. He understood that he was healing a Gentile’s daughter, but he achieved that healing at a distance, without breaking any taboos about ever touching a Gentile woman.
Three other Mark healings connecting to this one are these. In Mark 5 Jesus drives out the evil spirit from the Gerasene demoniac and into the swine, quintessentially non-kosher and repellant beasts. Mark 7 holds this morning’s other healing, that of the deaf man. Jesus touched into his ears, spat and touched his tongue and prayed that the man’s ears be opened, and he heard and could speak. Similarly, in Mark 8, Jesus heals a blind man again by spitting, this time on the man’s eyes and then laying hands on him. In Mark’s Gospel the healing of the Syrophonenican daughter and the healing of Jairus’s daughter, the story interrupted by his healing of the woman with the long-time hemorrhage were non-Jews and were each healed but without any violation of Jewish law, without touching. The other healings, the deaf man and the blind man, both presumably Jews since they were local and not described as some sort of Gentile, were healed with his own fluid and touch. Even though it seems unappealing, the action is personal, even intimate, and includes actual laying on of hands. Jesus came to understand that his mission was to all — inside and outside his own assumed or learned understanding of his sphere with and for God.
The Psalmist explains that those who trust the Lord stand fast forever. While the emphasis is on showing goodness to those who are good, more important even is trusting the Lord to stand fast. Both the Proverbs and James readings emphasize the Jewish and Middle Eastern commitment to helping the poor, because the Lord always pleads their cause, and has even chosen the poor to be rich in faith, but the letter of James asks, “can faith save you? But what good is it if you say you have faith, but do not have works? Can faith save you? If someone lacks food and you say, “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat your fill and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
Jesus came to this understanding of both doing, and doing to all, through a series of healings in his travels. He urged people not to spread the word about his healing actions. It is another characteristic of Mark’s Gospel that after many of the healings Jesus implores the newly healed person not to report what happened. This plea for secrecy is called “the Markan Secret.” Why did Mark have Jesus do this? People opine there were several reasons. Jesus was going beyond what Jewish law authorized for him. His healing non-Jews, his use of somewhat disgusting spit, his moving of a demon from a man to swine, his engaging with women, and other free-spirited actions were a risk to him with Jewish authorities and then with the military and political leadership who heard about these outsized, successful, and seemingly symbolic, actions. Perhaps, too, he knew that human nature often led people promised to secrecy to understand the enormity of the secrets and to leak the secrets all around, both because its hard to keep big secrets, and if they’re big, surely they should be spread around instantaneously. He also knew that he could only do a limited number of actions, because each took power from him, which he could actually feel, and because there was more need than he could fill. Secrecy then would be appealing, if already clearly impossible to achieve.
Perhaps there was another reason Jesus longed for secrecy. He didn’t want to be regarded as a super magician, and so trailed and hounded to do more and more, bigger and bigger tricks. I heard a truly disturbing report about young RC priests being ordained near here. One was talking to a dedicated Catholic friend of mine. They were talking of his to-come life as new priest. He spoke of how his education was not particularly relevant or important—and the RC church like the Episcopal church is fixated on making priestly education as part of formation, cheaper—at all costs, cheaper, not better, but cheaper and inevitably worse. This young man spoke of the unimportance of that reality since at his ordination, he, himself, would be “transubstantiated”— that is, he would be the body and blood of Christ is his being, his actions, his priesthood— and in his authority. Clearly that has never been our theology, nor has it been understood to be RC theology, but it has become the shortcut for authoritative preparation and knowledge for quickly trained RC local priests. This was not Jesus’ understanding of himself ever, because he kept saying he did his great deeds to glorify the Creator, and to demonstrate who had sent him, and was acting through Jesus. For Jesus to see himself as someone no longer a regular human is to misunderstand the Christology, which understands Jesus as fully human in order to exhort each of us to strive to be like Jesus. If Jesus was not human, than there can be no expectations that we can emulate him in any way, and so we can just live without committing ourselves to his goals of service. We believe, instead, that the action around the bread and wine is a community action, not something that happens because I’ve been transubstantiated. Nonsense. Jesus knew to avoid that threat to his mission.
Jesus learned as he traveled. He learned that his work was beyond that of a student in the temple. Real people had real needs. He learned that while he believed himself to be called only to his own, feisty people, particularly this morning’s woman, stretched his understanding about the urgency of his work to serve all.
It seems to me that pairing these clear statements about working for the poor with Jesus healing of the non-Jew is to make a claim for healing, or serving and acting for all people. Both in service and method, Jesus reached beyond what he thought he should do, because the point of his work was that faith, that trust in the Lord, had to be lived out in action. While the emphasis on helping the poor texts in the late summer could be a lead-in to all fall fund-raising stewardship appeals, it also could suggest that as Jesus went beyond faith lines, so his work was to all categories of people in need. As an individual, Jesus was called to act in behalf of all those in need who crossed his path. The easy selection of those in need from our lists of people, to whom we are sure we are called to, isn’t the list to whom we are to go. It’s to all. Crazy people, foul-smelling people, sick people, stubborn people, poor people, rich people, smart people, and anyone who crosses into our visual and working fields is a candidate for our engaging with, our ministry, and our personal, intimate involvement.
Who are those? For each of us those people area apt to vary. They are unpredictable and what they want is often a surprise as well, but they want more than our own faith. They want our actions. Most of us don’t do dramatic things, but we are called to listen to a colleague or neighbor tell us what they need. It may not all be dire—sometimes people really want our support in their happiness, as well as in their dire needs of many kinds. Most of most of our actions are pretty tame, but there are actions we do, which seem providential, or even just strange—that make real our faith. Those actions are unexpected, surprisingly varied, usually we don’t talk about them much, and they were smaller to us than to the other to whom we went. These actions aren’t as simple as the condescending actions to a particular kind of the poor. These actions require immediacy of presence and generosity of spirit. “It’s not a good time for me,” cannot ever be our best Gospel response. Being ready to respond willingly, generously, and fully to a situation takes practicing faith and trusting in God’s ever-watchful present and mercy for us and to us. That’s what Jesus did for these individual people, and we are in that number by our own frailties, weaknesses, and needs. Jesus learned that he was to serve each one of us, even though he’d thought we were outside his responsibility— but filled with bad spirits, blind, deaf, or desperate needs for a loved one, Jesus cared for each and all, even each of us, and still does. And that’s Good News.
© Katharine C. Black, September 2009
