Lectionary blog for Sept. 9, 2012
15th Sunday after Pentecost
Texts: Isaiah 35:4-7a; James 2:1-10, 14-17;
Mark 7:24-37
About 20 years ago at a conference at St. Olaf College I heard a story about the famous theologian Karl Barth. During World War I he served a village congregation in rural Switzerland. His grandmother lived with him in the parsonage. One afternoon he returned home to find that his grandmother had organized a Bible study group that was meeting in his living room.
Young Pastor Barth stepped into the room, greeted everyone and then excused himself and slipped upstairs to his study. Throughout the afternoon he heard much loud and animated conversation from the Bible study.
At dinner that evening he asked his grandmother what book they were studying. “Ezekiel,” she replied. “Ezekiel!” Barth sputtered, “Why, Ezekiel is a very difficult book. It is full of problematic and hard to understand passages.” “That’s all right,” Grandmother said, “the things we don’t understand we explain to each other.”
OK, anybody ready to explain to me how in the Gospel lesson my Lord and Savior, my sweet Jesus, my king of kings and my lord of lords, the Son of God incarnate on earth could stoop so low as to call a polite woman in trouble and asking for help — a dog? Anybody got a ready explanation for that?
There are a lot of theories that float around: He didn’t really say it; he didn’t really mean it; we don’t really understand it because of cultural differences between the first century and now, etc. etc. The collective Bible study of the New Testament scholars has had a lively and occasionally loud discussion trying to explain it to each other.
Barth’s story sent my thoughts down a different track: What if the Syrophoenician woman was the one doing the explaining in this passage? What if Jesus was the one who did not fully understand and needed some help interpreting God’s will and way in this case? Maybe Jesus needed to have his vision cleared and his worldview adjusted so that he could see just exactly how large God’s love is.
All three of our Scripture lessons remind us that the coming of the kingdom of God has intense, this world, practical results. When Isaiah talks about healing, he is not speaking metaphorically. The blind see; the deaf hear; the lame not only walk, they run and leap and cavort; the mute not only speak, they sing for joy.
James takes his readers to task for failing to live out the faith that is within them. In particular, he rebukes them for showing favor to the rich and pushing aside the poor. While Martin Luther did in one place call James “an epistle of straw,” because he thought it favored works over faith, he also said, “I think highly of the epistle of James … he wished to guard against those who depended on faith without going on to works.” (Luther’s Works, Vol. 35 - “The Preface to James and Jude”)
In our Gospel lesson we see Jesus living out the coming of the kingdom by healing a young girl with a demon and a deaf man with a speech impediment.
But, but … there’s this difficult part about exactly who it is that the kingdom has come for. Is it only for the “children” of Israel, or is it also for the “dogs,” the Gentiles? Taking the text as it is, it appears that Jesus is saying that his mission is only to the Jewish people. If that is what he means, then he has failed to remember that the promise is that the kingdom will come from God through the Jewish people in order to bless all people everywhere.
In this story, Jesus stands corrected. Just like Barth’s grandma’s Bible study, the woman has helped Jesus to understand a difficult part of the Scripture and a difficult part of his call. The further Jesus goes in his ministry the deeper his understanding of his mission becomes. And this deeper understanding is a result of his encounters with people who aren’t afraid to confront him with hard and difficult truths.
A young adult youth leader I know was chaperoning his youth group at the ELCA’s Youth Gathering in New Orleans this summer. While out and about in the city one afternoon, they ran across a couple of homeless men on a park bench. The youth leader lives in a major city neighborhood with a lot of street people, so he assessed the time, the space and the group’s safety. When one of the men approached him and started talking, he reached in his backpack and pulled out an apple while signaling the kids to keep moving. The man was insulted: “I asked you if you believe in God and you try to give me an apple!”
The youth leader was struck dumb and somewhat appalled at himself. “Here I had spent all week talking to these kids about carrying Christ into the world, to the most needy among us, and the first chance I got to live that out in front of them, I blew it.”
But the moment was redeemed. The young man apologized and started talking with the man. Their time together ended with the man asking the group for prayer and so they prayed for several minutes together. It was, the group said, a very holy moment.
The good news of God’s grace and love changes people. It heals them, changes their relationships, changes the way they see right and wrong, rich and poor, us and them. It even changed Jesus and the way he saw the world and the way he saw himself in it.
May God’s grace come to each of us and change us. May it loose our tongues so that we may speak explanations of difficult truths to one another. May it open our ears so that we may hear the truth when it is spoken to us in love. May it free our arms to embrace those in any need. May it strengthen our legs so that we can go where God is calling us. Most of all, may it heal our hearts so that we can invite all God’s children to the table of God’s love.
Amen.
Talkback:
- When have you learned from your mistakes?
- Can you name a time when you excluded others?
Delmer Chilton is an assistant to the bishop of the Southeastern Synod of the ELCA, with responsibility for eastern and central Tennessee, northern Alabama and northern Georgia. Ordained in 1977, he has served parishes in North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.
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I have never considered before that Jesus did anything by accident. I have never thought of Jesus learning anything from any one. Jesus knew answers before questions were asked. He told people where they have been, where they were going, and healed their sickness without being told of the symptoms. He spoke and the elements obeyed. Why would Jesus need to find out how large God’s love is when Jesus demonstrated that He is in fact…God?
I believe in this case Jesus knew the woman’s thoughts before she asked the question. The Jews of that day considered the gentiles of a lower species, or even dogs. So Jesus played the role of a typical Jew to demonstrate something that we might not understand in the context of that time period. We might take offence of His method, but the outcome is what we should concentrate on.
Driving a wedge between God the Father and God the Son seems an inadequate and un-Biblical way to define Jesus. Jesus was not on a fact finding mission to take notes from earthlings so He could better understand how God the Father wanted Him to act. Is this yet another new theology coming from the leadership of the church?
I think this post is wandering into some very dangerous territory: "What if Jesus was the one who did not fully understand and needed some help interpreting God’s will and way in this case? Maybe Jesus needed to have his vision cleared and his worldview adjusted so that he could see just exactly how large God’s love is."
Jesus needed to learn how large God's love is? This sounds very much like the typical "God is Love" theology that is floating around today.
Jesus turned water into wine at the beginning of his ministry. He cured the blind and raised the dead. He walked on water... and he needed to "learn"? This low Christology is destroying the church. The sense of the sacred is lost; people can no longer find God in church... if Jesus is just some average teacher, a bumbling messiah, learning life's lessons like the rest of us.
If this does not soon change, it is the church that will be going to the dogs.
A question for you to consider. What does it mean that Jesus was 100% man and 100% God?
A man must "learn" things. Tell me, did Jesus know how to walk on the first Christmas? Was he already able to read? Did he have abstract reasoning abilities as an infant?
What do you make of Luke 22:42 where Jesus asks God if he would consider taking the cup away from him. If Jesus knows all how could he ask such a question?
Excellent questions, John V! Of course Jesus is True God and True Man -- we say this in our Creed. Of course Jesus was not born walking -- on water!
The answers to your questions can be found in 2000 years of Church Tradition -- just study it! Theologians, Saints and thinkers have been pondering these questions since the First Century.
You must understand that what is happening today is a radical departure from this Tradition. This post is a radical -- and absurd -- departure.
John V,
Jesus was fully God and Fully man. Sure our Lord had to be nursed and potty trained like a normal human. But by the age of 12 he was in the temple teaching the teachers. Jesus was able to do what no man has done before and that is he lived a sinless life. But Jesus could still feel physical pain. The thought of being nailed to a cross cause His human body to sweat great drops of blood. His human side was wincing from the thought of this future pain (because He knew the future). Anyone who knows the future does not need to learn anything. They already know it! He foretold how He would lay down his life and pick it up again. He questioned God, but never the less, He knew there was no other way, and He went like a lamb to slaughter; without complaint. Your will be done, not mine.
We must draw a distinction between Jesus’ youth and His adulthood. Once Christ came into adulthood, He knew who He was and what He was there for. Nowhere in the text is Jesus found hesitating in making a decision or lacking of human knowledge. On the contrary, Jesus was all about demonstrating that He was (and is) in fact God. “Before Abraham was; I am” should explain it to you clearly. To say that Jesus was learning as He went is absurd.
Davey does a good job explaining the mystery of Jesus' divine and human natures -- ultimately it is a mystery, and we as Christ's followers can only meditate on it -- not fully understand it.
The problem, I believe, comes in when we try to use or "spin" theological concepts for our own purposes. I am wondering why Delmer Chilton, an assistant to a bishop, would be saying things like: "...then he (Jesus) has failed to remember.... Jesus stands corrected.... the woman has helped Jesus to understand a difficult part of the Scripture and a difficult part of his call. The further Jesus goes in his ministry the deeper his understanding of his mission becomes. And this deeper understanding is a result of his encounters with people who aren’t afraid to confront him with hard and difficult truths.... It ('the good news') even changed Jesus and the way he saw the world and the way he saw himself in it."
I am wondering what Chilton means by "hard and difficult truths." I think this is probably the issue. Instead of trying to undercut the dignity of Jesus Christ, why not just spell out the "hard and difficult truths"?
I think it's interesting and necessary to pose questions like 'did Jesus mess up here?' and we need an open-enough mind to admit when we really believe that He did and sort out why we believe that.
That said, like others, I don't interpret the passage as Jesus screwing up and trying to make it up to the woman by healing her daughter. For one, it doesn't make sense with the rest of his actions. The demoniac he cures in Mark 5 is very likely a Gentile. This also comes right after his diatribe about it being what comes out of one that defiles, which isn't really consistent with no Gentiles. He's in Tyre to hide from the crowds in the first place. It doesn't take the Son of God to suspect that if the (Gentile) people living there find out, they'll come for healings in droves. In that case, he either has to be a jerk and not heal them, or heal them. If he even somewhat knows his own personality, he knows which route he'll take. In all, it doesn't make sense that he initially didn't want to heal the woman.
Theologically, it gets us in trouble, because Jesus sinning eliminates the paradox of the cross: Jesus is now dying for his own sins instead of ours (and if he can die for his own and ours, he didn't really need to die in the first place, did he?)
What we need to wrestle with is that we don't like Jesus calling someone a dog. One route is to analyze the cultural context and what it likely meant to that woman and Jesus' listeners for him to call her a dog (or to even speak to an unclean, Gentile woman in the first place). Failing that, we still need to address our gut response to this passage. We see Jesus' statement as a word of death to this woman. Especially in our culture today, this is like a white man of power calling a poor black person a dog. We get the death implied. Interestingly, though, we don't get the death Jesus was speaking about at the beginning of the chapter. Instead, we hear Jesus rightly proclaiming justice against the evil Pharisees. Both of these proclamations, though, are Law, and as such, aimed to kill. In another difficult passage, Jesus says that he comes not to bring peace, but a sword. In Jesus, we do face God's judgment, and it's ugly. It is the racism, the sexism, the legalism that traps us and kills us. We can't escape it.
The Gospel, though, is that God dies to this very same judgment, and that is what breaks death. Jesus is vindicated through His resurrection. He breaks through the racism and all of the other -isms. The Gentile woman gets this-- in the face of racism, she still trusts Jesus for healing. That trust-- evinced in what she says-- is what heals her daughter. That trust today is what will free us from the racism, the sexism, the legalism and all of the other -isms. That trust is played out in building relationships with those who persecute us and whom we persecute. This healing in Christ is what we can proclaim to the world.
(And think about how this story goes. For all that it seems like the Gentile woman "won" the exchange and told Jesus, think about how modern politicians would act. Mitt Romney has plenty of these moments. Does he ever respond like Jesus did? Would he heal the daughter? Obama is better at avoiding these sorts of situations, but he doesn't really fare any better.)