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Boy Scout Tr #240

Scripture: Mark 7:24-30

This story in Mark describes a very difficult moment in Jesus’ life. It’s a difficult story. I’m not sure if it wouldn’t be skipped altogether if the lectionary committee did not direct us preachers to deal with it. It’s a story that appears in the Gospel of Matthew as well. The differences in Matthew and Mark’s versions of the story are few. Matthew fills the story in what some interesting details, where Mark gets right to the point. What makes the story so difficult is how harsh Jesus sounded, harsh and downright rude. First, Jesus refused to answer a woman pleading for his help, she had to beg. Then he denied that he had anything to offer people of “her kind.” Finally, he compared her to a dog before the sheer force of her faith changed something in him and he decided to answer her prayer after all. That is a lot for us to comprehend for those us who believe that Jesus was perfect and was God incarnate! And many, many preachers have bent over backwards to make Jesus look good in this story--but, I’m sorry, I’m not going to do that today.

The problem Jesus and the disciples had was that this woman was a Gentile, of Syro-phoenician descent, one of the great unwashed and unclean with whom practicing Jews of Jesus’ day had little contact. She came from Tyre, where strange gods were worshiped and holy laws of cleanliness were unknown. She was a pagan. She was NOT Jewish. That meant she was an outsider and one of the untouchables.

Earlier, Jesus had warned his disciples to steer clear of those Gentiles. He reminded them that they had been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. The problem they were having, however, was that the lost sheep did not seem to want to be found. In spite of Jesus’ undivided attention to just them, they were not rushing to respond to the shepherd’s call.

Jesus had just come from Nazareth, his hometown, where his friends and family had doubts about his authority. His teachings had offended them. Then he received word that John the Baptist had lost his head to a dancing girl, literally. Jesus seemed to need some time alone after hearing about John’s death, but the crowd kept following him. Then with a child’s gift of five loaves and two fish, he fed the crowd crowding around him. Following the feeding of the 5,000, there was the storm at sea and Peter’s hope to walk on water. Everywhere Jesus turned he found need--need and people who wanted what he could do for them but who remained blind to who he was. I think Jesus was rather stressed out, nearing the end of his rope, all but used up.

Then came this woman begging him to heal her daughter--one more of the needy multitude who wanted something from him. Only there was something different about this person. She said something very shocking. She called Jesus by a different name, “O Lord, Son of David.” (This is in the Matthew version.) “Lord, Son of David” was a name and title reserved for the Messiah! None of the lost people of Israel, none of his own people had called him by that title. When the Gentile woman addressed him as the Son of David, she named something in him that even his own disciples had failed to recognize. Maybe it felt like a mean trick of fate to Jesus to hear what he most wanted to hear out of the mouth of someone he least wanted to hear it from. Is that possible?

So, he did not answer her. He ignored her. He drew the boundary. It was like he leaned down and traced a line in the dust at his feet and said, “Enough is enough. I will not cross the line between you and me.” He would go no further. The doctor was out. The bank was closed. The sign on the door said, “Closed for business.” So what if she called him by that name? He would not waste his energy on this Gentle woman while his own people were wanting. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he said to her, and that was supposed to be the end of that.

But the woman would not stay on her side of the line. Kneeling at his feet, she said, “Lord, help me.” Jesus had dismissed her, but she would not be dismissed. She had her foot in the door. Jesus could not close it. She showed no sign of leaving. Not one minute before he had dealt with her. “Lord, help me,” she said. I can only imagine what Jesus was feeling. Can’t this woman hear? He told her NO. He told her that she was not one of his sheep. But she did not seem to get the message so he said it again, in a different way, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Now, that, my friends, was a crude and cruel rebuff if there ever was one. There is no way around those words. They are in the Bible-- in both Matthew and Mark, in red print, for all of you who have the words of Jesus printed in red in your Bibles at home.

Now, we also believe, at least since the Council of Nicea in the fourth century that Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine. So, because we know Jesus’ human aspect very well, we can probably guess what was going on with him. He was discouraged and weary and a long way from home. Every time he turned around someone wanted something from him, but at the same time no one wanted what he most wanted to give--namely, himself, in terms of WHO he was for them, not what he could DO for them.

It is not hard to imagine how that felt, even though we do not happen to be a Messiah--to be surrounded by appetites, by people who want your money and your time and your gifts but do not seem much interested in who you really are. There are those times in our lives when we actually wonder about whether there is enough of us to go around. Everyday, there are pleas for help--on T.V., the radio, through the mail, pleas for help from every cause under the sun--all good causes.

We just have to draw the line somewhere or we wouldn’t have anything left. We have to decide what we can do and what we cannot do, whom we can help and whom we cannot help. If we don’t we will be swallowed whole and we may never be missed, because everything we have is not enough to feed the hunger of the world. That is a point most of us reach and often we decide to draw the line around our own families, a few friends, our church, our communities, and our deepest concern.

We set up boundaries which is important to do. Strangers show up saying, “Help me,” and we invoke the boundary, that line that separates insider from outsider, clean from unclean. “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” we say, or something to that effect. It sounds harsh, but what are we going to do? We have to draw the line somewhere.

But the Canaanite woman simply would not budge. She did not even flinch from the harsh words that came from Jesus’ mouth. She said, “Yes, Lord,” when he all but called her a dog, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” When she said that, something in Jesus snapped. He blinked. He woke up. His anger dissolved. Something in him was rearranged and changed forever, a change you could hear in his voice. “O woman, great is your faith,” he said to her. “Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed.

The boundary he had set up between him and the woman disappeared; the limits he had placed on himself vanished, and we can almost hear the huge wheel of history turning as Jesus came to a new understanding of who he was and what he had been called to do. He was no longer a Messiah called only to the lost sheep of Israel, but God’s chosen redeemer for the whole world, Jews and Gentiles alike, beginning with this Syro-phoenician woman.

Through this woman’s bold and persistent faith, Jesus learned that God’s purpose for him was bigger than he had imagined and that there was enough of him to go around. In that revelatory moment there was no going back to the limits he observed even a moment ago. The old boundaries would not contain his new vision; he had to expand them to include this foreign woman that day and who knew who else the next day. It looked like answering God’s call meant that Jesus could no longer control his ministry or narrow his mission There was no more safety or certainty for him, no more guarding against loss or hanging on to his cherished notions about the way things ought to be. Faith worked like a lever on him, opening his arms wider and wider until there was room for the whole world in them until he allowed them to be NAILED open on the cross.

Having boundaries is important. We all need to have boundaries, our children need boundaries. And the clearer we are about them, the better. However, there are times in our lives when we are called to stretch those boundaries. There are times the line needs to be crossed. We, as a church, experience this stretching all the time. The secure and safe thing to do is to draw the line and say, that’s not my problem. But we simply can’t. Every church has had this experience, more than once. In Dallas, one of the most profound times it happened was when a couple shared with the congregation that their grandson has been arrested for possession of meth and was in treatment as a user and addict. We could no longer say, it was a problem out there because in the church was a family, who was suffering because of this insidious epidemic that is all communities. And when one of us suffers, we all suffer. That’s what being the church is all about.

We still want to draw the line, say we are busy, refer them to the experts. But it doesn’t work that way. The truth is that God’s face can turn up anywhere, and especially on the far side of the lines we draw to protect ourselves: in the face of the Syro-phoenician woman, or in the faces of a family struggling to save a grandson’s life, or in any other faces that turn toward us seeking help, seeking care, seeking a place to belong when we are reluctant to open our doors and hearts. The call of God is insistent, and whenever we limit who we will be to other people or who we will let them be for us, God gets to work, rubbing out the lines we have drawn around ourselves and calling us into the limitless realm of God’s love. Yes, we will formulate new limits and draw new lines, but none of them last very long, because that is the way it is when people have been called out by God Once God has called us out there, there is no going back--whatever we choose to do. God never calls us back behind our lines.

So what does that mean, day to day? For us, as a church? It means noticing the difference between the times we are hanging back, clinging to our limits, and the times we are moving out, pushing into new and often frightening territory. It is a difference you can FEEL: the difference between withdrawing from people, failing to meet their eyes, keeping a tight rein on your feelings, protecting yourself. It is the difference between that and putting yourself in the paths of strangers, being the first to extend your hand, aching with empathy for a world in travail, trying new things, changing your mind.

It is a painful difference, to be sure--as painful as it was for Jesus to hear a Gentile woman call him Lord when his own family would not; as painful as it was for him to step beyond generations of tradition and respond to her faith; as painful as it is for any one of us to step over a boundary we have drawn to protect ourselves and take the risk of exploring unknown territory

Take a bold step. Look a Syro-phoenician in the eye. Trespass an old boundary, enter a new relationship, push a limit, take a risk, don’t play it so safe! We have nothing to lose but our life the way it has been, and there is lots more life where that came from. And if you get scared, which you will, and if you get angry, which you probably will too, remember today’s story. With Jesus as a model--and as our Lord--we are called to step over the security lines we have drawn for ourselves, not because we have to, and not because we ought to, or even because we want to, but because we know that it is God’s own face who waits for us on the other side.

Amen.