This isn't MY Jesus!

September 9, 2012

Pentecost 15, Proper 18 (Year B)

Mark 7:24-37

I’m in the middle of a great book, a historical novel by Geraldine Brooks called Caleb’s Crossing.  It’s the story of a girl named Bethia whose minister father comes from England to lead a settlement in Cape Cod.  She secretly befriends a Native American boy, given the English name Caleb, who becomes her soul mate.  I’m finding myself continually routing for these two against the forces of prejudice and fear that strive to hold them apart.  Like Bethia’s brother who doesn’t want her “exposed” to Caleb’s “paganism.”  And I’m applauding her on her spiritual journey as she begins to resist the rigid, black and white Christianity that she’s always assumed was the only way.  At one point after Bethia tells Caleb the story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit in the garden, causing sin to “besmirch all of us”, he responds: “Your story is foolishness.  Why should a father make a garden for his children and then forbid them its fruit?  Our god of the southwest made the beans and corn, but he rejoiced for us to have them.  And any ways, even if this man Adam and his woman displeased your God, why should he be angry with me for it, who knew not of it until today?”  Bethia couldn’t answer his questions; she’d never thought beyond the surface of the story before.  And having always felt the same way as Caleb about this particular story, I was glad for Bethia to have the chance to think again about it; glad for his pushing her to go deeper. 

There are plenty of stories in our Bible that give me pause.  When I’m reading them with my kids, I often find myself wanting to add caveats – just in the past week we’ve talked about how evolution can fit into the story of creation and I’ve made the case for the women, mostly unnamed, who must have also been close disciples of Jesus even though they weren’t included in the written list of 12.

But as I started working on my sermon this morning, I realized that there are some stories that I can’t just work around or incorporate into my pre-packaged view of God.  There are some stories that challenge my assumptions enough that I, like Bethia, have to do some deepening.   I can’t just be an onlooker in this business of re-thinking old views of God. 

This morning, we see Jesus trying to get away from it all.  He’s trying to escape the crowds.  Maybe he’s nervous because he’s recently gotten the news about the beheading of his cousin, John the Baptist. Or maybe he’s just exhausted from being constantly surrounded, constantly needed.  And so he goes outside his normal locale and heads to the region of Tyre, hoping no one will know he’s there.

Now Tyre is Gentile territory, the wrong side of the tracks for a Jewish boy like Jesus.  The people of Tyre are seen as pagans, enemies of the Jews.  And one of them is this woman, this desperate mother, who somehow discovers that a reputed miracle worker is in town and interrupts his anonymity.  She prostrates herself before Jesus and begs him to save her beloved little girl. 

Who among us wouldn’t do the same?  If there were something threatening my child’s life, I would go anywhere, do anything, fall on myself in front of anyone that I thought might be able to help.

Maybe that’s why Jesus’ answer is so hard to hear: "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."  The refusal to help her is bad enough.  Already that goes against what we’ve come to expect from the beautiful stories about Jesus.  Jesus who will touch lepers, heal centurions and unclean women alike, eat with sinners and tax collectors.  This isn’t my Jesus!

But it’s his words, his insult, that shock even more.  This woman has fallen at his feet begging for mercy for her child and he compares her to a dog.  Now, I know there are many dog-people out there and you love your dogs and consider them part of your family and you probably don’t see this as a horrible insult.  But things were different 2000 years ago.  Dogs were not pets in Jewish culture.  They were considered unclean nuisances, pests.  It was common to call someone a dog and it was meant as a dehumanizing ethnic slur.  Jesus just threw a racial slur at this weeping mother.  Again, this isn’t my Jesus!

            It’s unsettling to say the least.  Uncomfortable.  Unthinkable.

            Especially when you add to that the fact that Jesus’ insult includes us.  We too would be included in the category of Gentile dogs unworthy of healing. 

            I’m sorry to say that the first place I turned when I saw the reading for this morning wasn’t prayer, but the commentaries, hoping they would explain away this cloud upon my Jesus. 

            And there are a few you could turn to, if that’s what you want to do with this passage.  Some commentators point out that the Greek word Jesus uses isn’t “dogs” but “little dogs.”  So it’s a little softer, less harsh.  But given the 1^st century Jewish feeling about dogs, it’s a demeaning insult no matter how you slice it.

            Others try to paint Jesus’ comment as a riddle in which he is really acting as devil’s advocate to show the absurdity of the prejudices of the Jewish religious authorities toward Gentiles.  He doesn’t believe what he’s saying at all and plans to heal her all along.

I would love to go along with these arguments.  I would love to just discount this comment of Jesus’ as a mistranslation or add in a wink-wink-nod-nod from Jesus that would make the trouble go away.  That way I could preserve the mold of Jesus that I’ve so carefully constructed – the Jesus who was and is always and constantly perfect in compassion, wisdom, courage, and love.  But maybe, like Bethia, this was an opportunity for me to risk diving beneath the surface, to go deeper and trust that my Jesus will hold up to the scrutiny.

And so my next move was what should have been my first – to pray about the reading.  To meditate on the words and try to put myself in the scene.  Trying to get close enough to Jesus and the woman to see them in a new way, to hear their exchange differently, to empathize and understand.

What struck me most was how fully and utterly human Jesus is.  Just like we so often are, Jesus was exhausted, trying to hide away.  Just like we so often do, he was probably wishing that his burden were lighter.  And just as we so often find ourselves much to our dismay, he was still a part of his culture and a product of his upbringing.  He was an overwhelmed man who grew up in a culture where one of the traditional daily Jewish prayers for was to thank God for not making him a Gentile or a slave or a woman.

And so he missed the forest for the trees.  He failed to draw a connection between what he was preaching (about how people shouldn’t be so quick to draw lines between the clean and unclean), and the line he just drew to keep this desperate mother outside of his mission.  He was convinced that his primary mission was to his people, the lost sheep of Israel, and he was faithfully refusing to be distracted.

            But then comes this woman, who with her bold and prophetic rebuttal to his insult, demands a larger vision of God’s work in the world.  And suddenly heaven and earth move as she shifts his fully human heart and transforms his vision of his mission.  Suddenly Jesus realizes there is room in God’s kingdom for all people – that God’s love surpasses the barriers we humans construct.

            It’s a shocking moment for those of us who have cemented in our mind the tenet that being God meant Jesus should be absolutely unchanging and unchangeable.  But being changing and changeable is part of what it means to be fully human.  We are constantly growing and developing – physically, emotionally, spiritually.  And so must Jesus (though we don’t get many glimpses of that process in scripture).  And so must our own conceptions of and relationships with Jesus change.  My Jesus can’t stay the same if I am really letting him in.

The truth is, the more we read the Bible, the more we might find our assumptions about God and Jesus challenged.  The more we open ourselves to God, the more we may find ourselves and our vocations changed.  We can’t go deeper while still floating safely on the surface. 

            I haven’t finished Caleb’s Crossing, so I don’t know how it ends.  But I hope that Bethia will continue to be open to exploring her faith.  I hope she won’t turn inward and stick with the safe but constricting religion of her childhood, or throw it all away without realizing how much deeper it can be.  I hope that she’ll help her father to turn his sermons from fire-and-brimstone to love and mercy.  I hope that Bethia and Caleb will surmount the barriers that surround them and help their people to widen their own spheres of love for God and neighbor.  It’s the same ending to the story that I hope for for me, and you, and all of us as we struggle to live into our own God-given humanity.  Amen.