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September 8, 2024
Mark 7:24-37
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Block Pary Sunday and Back to Church Sunday
Mark 7:24-37
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ But she answered him, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ Then he said to her, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’
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The transition from summer to fall is, I’m not going to lie, a rough one. I’m not sure about you, but oftentimes at the end of summer vacation I feel like I need a vacation from the “vacation.” You know what I mean? With only two months of really good weather and the kids out of school, it feels like a lot of life has to get crammed in to a small amount of time. By the end of the summer vacation, you may be wondering when the rest will come. And suddenly it’s the first week of September and if you thought summer was busy, sit down because now it’s fall. Early wake up times, remembering to not miss school pick-up, making lunches. Not to mention checking the weather at the beginning of the day so that you have some vague idea of how many layers to dress yourself and your child in. The first week of the fall routine offers no rest for the weary.
And so it was against this glorious, real-life, backdrop, that I opened the Bible to the suggested scripture for this Sunday, Mark 7:24-37. The story starts out and it’s hard deny: this sounds like Jesus on vacation.
“…Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” Wow, Jesus, that sounds like a pretty nice place. Can I book the place after you leave?
But the passage continues.
“And yet, he could not escape notice.”
This is where the vacation starts to get…interrupted. A stranger comes into the house, doesn’t knock, just comes in. And not just any stranger, a Syrophoenician woman. Culturally problematic in that day for three reasons: #1 she was a woman, #2 she was Syrian, and #3 she was a Gentile, not a Jew. Three reasons why this individual would not have been expected to approach Jesus’ retreat house, let alone enter without knocking.
She walks right up to Jesus and the scripture says she begs him to “cast the demon out of her daughter.” Not a normal vacation experience by any stretch of the imagination, but that said, in our other experiences of Jesus, this kind of interruption would be welcomed by Jesus. But in this case, something else happens. Jesus replies, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Wait, what? Jesus said what. Is Jesus saying he came to heal and spiritually feed the children of Israel, not the “dogs” of Syria? Is Jesus being exclusive? This is where the wheels start to come off the vacation and the story and everything we thought we knew about every. This is Jesus we are talking about, right? The son of God? The ambassador of love sent to earth to save us all? Why did he say that?
Biblical scholars will debate this passage until the end of time. Some will say Jesus was exhausted. And this makes sense. If we truly believe he was fully human, we must understand that he, too, needed rest. And if he couldn’t get the rest he needed, his best self didn’t show up. I have about a thousand grumpy mornings in my own fully human life that give credibility to this theory. A fully human Jesus in need of recharging could have easily resorted to the stereotypes of his own culture in his exhausted state. And another theory is that Jesus in the Gospel of Mark initially really did first understand his calling specifically in terms of saving the people right around him in Israel as the primary goal.
And yet another theory is that Jesus responded with animosity to this stranger intentionally and knowingly so that the stereotypes could be named out loud and confronted head on. Some really did believe that Jesus had come only for the Jews, and in this way, Jesus is setting himself to be convinced otherwise on purpose. It’s like Jesus is lobbing this age-old stereotype up like a slow ball so that this woman could be the one to set the record straight.
And that she does.
‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’
This woman has not come to be dismissed so easily. She did not come to accept the status quo. She is not distracted from her mission. She takes the stereotype of her people and turns it back at Jesus. I may be at the bottom, but even at the bottom we need crumbs to live on.
Something happens to Jesus. Something in him changes. Her speech, bold and courageous, has affected him.
‘For saying that,” Jesus says, “you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’
The Bible does include tone of voice. We won’t ever know if Jesus was just pretending to be elitist and exclusive or if he was actually so fully human that the cultural stereotypes of his day were ingrained within even him. And because we get so fixated on the contradiction of perfect Jesus possibly being less than loving, we lose sight of the miracle itself. The miracle that stands out to me is that a woman who had no standing summoned the strength of a thousand mothers and marched into a space where she was not allowed and speaks to a person she was not supposed to and makes a plea she is not allowed to make.
“Save my child,” she begs.
This woman is a glowing, radiant model of a courageous faith. A faith that believes in the power of crumbs. A faith that believes in the glimmer of hope coming through small cracks. A faith that says God’s blessing will be enough, even if she has to beg for it. Her faith in the face of insurmountable odds is nothing short of a miracle. And it overwhelms Jesus. It pulls him into a new, wider understanding. An outsider could see what an insider could not. A mom sacrifices her pride for her child. And it opens him.
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This is a challenging story. And you may be wondering why we begin a new program year at church with a challenging story. Here’s the honest to God truth: our faith is not a cakewalk. Our faith takes practice and action and boldness. And I actually think it’s a really good reminder to hear at the beginning of a school year. The strength of a parent’s concerned about their child is one of the strongest forces in the world. And this story reminds us that when we make sacrifices for our children, when we stand up to the status quo, God’s compassion only grows wider. We need that now more than ever. Not just from biological parents but churches and communities of adults that care about the children they all share.
Fall in routines in 2024 for our children aren’t what they used to be. In this day and age, it seems the new status quo is that our children, in their first week of school, will undoubtably go drills about what to do if an active shooter were to be in the school. Part of our American way now requires that long before they teach math and reading, our teachers will first teach their students how to hide. The drills, it seems, are now a fact of life. But we can never let the violence itself become a fact of life. It must always shock us to our core. When it happens it must always compel us, like the fierce and protective guardian of an endangered child in this passage, to find the courage to stand up and take action. To be bold and enter conversations where we were not invited.
To be fully human, as Jesus shows us, means that we all have the capacity to learn and change. We all have the capacity to be opened up by an outsider who speaks for those on the outside. Are we listening? The way things are now doesn’t have to be the way things will always be.
Today we have our Block Party and we will literally set up a long table with a literal feast. This is not just because we like to eat, which we do. It’s because the openness Jesus found in Tyre that day, despite his exhaustion, has become ingrained into the DNA of the kind of Christians we want to be. Even when we’re tired by the change of season, we still rally together to throw a party for the neighborhood. We want to make sure that our tables are long and our feasts are wide because we believe in a world where those who are on the margins shouldn’t have to just eat the crumbs of what is left over. We believe in a world where those on the outside of these walls have wisdom to teach us. We believe in a world where the status quo can be changed with opened minds. We believe in a world where children’s safety and wellbeing can be a catalyst for change. We believe in this world because we must.
So let us sing and build longer tables and set wide feasts. Because we must hold on to the hope that opening each other up begins when we set a table wide enough to include all.
+Pastor Anna
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