September 7, 2003 -ThirteenthSunday after Pentecost
James 2:1-17
NRSVKJV
Mark 7:24-37
“Openedfor Good?”
“Ephphatha….be opened.” All week long I’ve thought about Jesus’ words to the deaf man and I can’t quite get them out of my head. I can’t help but thinking that Jesus’ words when he touches that man’s ears and opens them to sound for the first time are healing more than just physical deafness. It also strikes me that maybe, just maybe, something has been opened inside Jesus that leads him to reach out in the way he does. I’m going to ask you to indulge me a bit on this “Rally Sunday” and let me think “out loud” with you about the readings we’ve heard today from Mark and from James – both of which are designed to challenge us to be opened….opened for good.
The Syrophoenician woman, a gentile, came to him and made a simple request. “You’ve been healing others. Will you please heal my daughter?” For most of us raised in the “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, come to me a little child” school of Christology the Jesus who answers her is someone we don’t know. He says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” First of all, it’s a rather curt response. Second, he’s implicitly referring to her as a ‘dog,’ not something that we consider at all polite, but that we humans often do to cut someone down to size – we make them into something else, an animal or some other object. There’s even a term for that behavior – ‘reification,’ to reduce to the level of a thing. Third, he’s saying that the mercy of God is only “so big” – almost like the Jansenists, an 18th century French Catholic group, envisioned when they made a crucifix with the arms very narrowly spread, because only “this many” are going to be saved. In short, this isn’t the Jesus most of us think about or want to try to be like. So, why does Mark do this? Why is this hard saying in here?
As I’ve thought about it and read about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that Mark is simply being consistent with the way he’s presented Jesus all along. The Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – all have what we call a “Christology from below” or a “discovered Christology.” In other words, as the story unfolds we come to know more and more about who Jesus is and how the kingdom of God is brought in his person and work. The disciples don’t get it and don’t get it and then, after the crucifixion, and even after the resurrection, ta da!, they do! All that Mark is doing here is showing us that it wasn’t just the disciples who were discovering who Jesus was – Jesus was also discovering who he was and beginning to understand his own mission in an ever expanding way.
What we get in this story is a woman – already a second class citizen by gender and a gentile on top of it – an outcast about as far away from the bosom of Israel as you can get giving Jesus an argument he can’t refute. I know that you won’t be surprised to learn that I did a master’s degree in Rhetoric with an emphasis in argument theory. In argument the great mythical quest is for the “knock down” argument – the one that can elicit no response. Or, as one of my professors used to say, the one that makes your head blow up. Boom! This lady offers such an argument to Jesus. He makes his point about feeding the children first and she fires back, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” So this triple outsider – a woman, a Syrian, and a pagan – points out to Jesus that the mercy of the Father who sent him maybe is a little broader than he thought it to be. Brilliant.
What we see here, as some commentators point out, is part of the gradual spiritual maturation of Jesus who is discovering who he is and what the Father is calling him to be. One can understand that Jesus, who elsewhere is said to grow “in wisdom, stature, and favor with God and man,” can develop as a human being with absolutely no damage done to the understanding that he is God in the flesh. Actually it makes much more sense, at least to me. So, here’s a hard saying that makes a powerful point – God’s mercy, God’s love is more inclusive than the convenient boxes we often want to put around it. And Jesus gets it, just like the outsiders get it – for that matter, in Mark’s Gospel the outsiders are often far more ready to see God in him than the Jews are – and sends her home to her healed daughter. “For saying that you may go….”
As Jesus goes his way he encounters a man deaf and with a speech impediment. The man can neither hear the words of life nor can he communicate his need. Jesus opens his ears and looses his tongue just as Jesus himself had been opened to the wideness of God’s mercy by his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman. Both of these healing stories are about being opened and in them we are called to a renewed openness ourselves. God in Christ worked healing and restored wholeness, which is a full sense of humanity, for both the woman and her daughter and for the deaf man. God is willing, and indeed able, to do the same for us – if we have the faith to respond to the call of “Ephphatha – be opened!”
So what was Mark trying to do? He was, I believe, showing us how faith develops in all of us – even in Jesus. He was also showing us how that faith is to then bring itself into action on behalf of others. God’s limitless mercy is not something that we keep to ourselves; it is something that takes root in one so that it might be given to another, and another, and another. Mark may also have been taking a shot in defense of the early Christian community, because we know there were those who were upset that they took women seriously and that they opened themselves to a wide range of persons. We need to remember, dear ones, that Christianity was, originally, far from an establishment religion – it was the religion of the urban poor, of the disenfranchised and the outcast. Remembering our early history helps us to not only see the validity of the call to openness, but also James’ admonition to “really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
This week I was listening to some lectures by Luke Timothy Johnson on the essential characteristics of the religion of early Christians. The material was wonderful and brilliantly presented. Johnson went into the definition of religion and noted that one by Joachim Wach, who had taught at the University of Chicago, dealt with the encounter with the divine that lead to change in action. Johnson noted that the difference between the aesthetic and the religious is that something happens in terms of action after one has a religious experience. I’m paraphrasing, but it was the change in action that got to me. Religion, and I would definitely say Christian religion, isn’t about individual inspiration or “feeling good.” We encounter the Transcendent, the Divine, in order to be changed for good, opened for good, if you will. Our faith should draw us beyond ourselves, out of ourselves, and into the lives and the service of others. It may take us time, even Jesus needed the Syrophoenician woman to give him an argument, but if we are to mature, to be what we say we are, then we live outside of ourselves for the common good – the good of all.
Our worship, then, ought not to be an exercise in aesthetics, but a true leitourgia, a work of the people, that testifies to our commitment to God and to the world that God has made. While I don’t agree with everything Bishop John Spong says, I do find much good in his A New Christianity for a New World. What Spong has to say about worship is, I believe, on the mark, because he reminds us that it’s to call us beyond ourselves.
“In Liturgy,” he writes, “ we need to be led to recognize that while survival was the driving value that enabled self-conscious human beings to win the evolutionary struggle, it will not be the value that moves us into a new humanity. A new humanity depends on our ability to move beyond the self-centered mentality of survival and into the kind of being that has developed a capacity to love others beyond our own needs – indeed, beyond our own limits. So one of the goals of the ecclesia will be to organize its worship life in such a way as to encourage this selfless love. That is the compelling reason why Jesus will continue, I believe, to stand at the center of our liturgy as the empowering example of one who could live fully, love wastefully, and be all that he was capable of being. In his life we can point to a moment in history when humanity was opened to divinity, when human life became the vehicle for the experience of divine life, when human love was expanded until people saw it as the vessel bearing divine love, and when the Ground of All Being was revealed in a particular being. If the word Christ stands for that moment or that person through whom the word of God is spoken and the will of God is lived out, then we might actually say of that life in our liturgy, ‘Jesus, you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.’ For it is in these ways that this life has opened to us the doors of transcendence and has enabled us to see the meaning of our lives when they are related to the reality of God.” (p. 212)
Jesus was opened for good and because of his life and his example those who call themselves his followers are to be opened for good. If our tired, weary, scarred world is to ever be different. If people are ever to know that they are infinitely lovable and that human life, regardless of race or class or caste, has ultimate dignity, those truths must be lived out among those who call themselves followers of Christ. In our daily dealings in our homes, our work places, our schools, our life in community, and especially in how we encounter one another here that openness for good must be evident. We covenant that we will “treat one another with love and understanding” and in this covenant community the ultimate concern must be for the common good. Jesus stands in our midst today and, for each of us according to our needs, he unstops our ears and looses our tongues.
“Ephphatha – be opened.” Be opened….for good. Amen.