Mark 7.24-37- A learning faith
One of my favourite passages in the bible is the story of the good Samaritan. We havent read it today, but I think it has a connection to what we have read today and in it I find a comforting familiarity of a God who’s boundless love knows no limit, and therefore I know that I too am loved by them too. In that story Jesus tells us of the Jew and the foreigner, the misfortune of one leading to the generosity of the other, setting aside centuries of racial hatred in the simple act of meeting a basic human need.
Thinking of God as the good foreigner tells us a lot about their love for us. But I’ve come to notice over the years that my favourite bits of bible are a little bit like a good mother who, after a typically child-like scrape, will in one and the same moment, lovingly bind us up and give us an earful to better ourselves at the same time. I wonder if your favourites do that too?
God’s a bit irritating like that. I notice the appealing pull of her love that wants to influence, heal me, and be part of my life, and then I see the extent to which she wants to go: “Go and do likewise,” are words that echo around many of our favourite passages, and it’s a tough call because I’m pretty sure that most of us, if truth be told, are really just beginners in this life of generous, attentive, Samaritan-like love to which she calls us.
God knows we need to learn about her ways, and it’s possible that was happening for Jesus as he encountered the Syro-Phoenician woman in Tyre.
Jesus’ words to this woman aren’t one’s we would normally expect to hear from him: ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.’
What’s going on? Has he forgotten the love that his mission is crowned with? Why’s he being so harsh here? Where’s the good Samaritan figure in this story of need? Why is he suddenly denying a foreigner and keeping all the goodness for his own Jewish kind here? Was he deliberately drawing the expected divisions to see how far this woman would push the boundary of expectation, to see if she really truly wanted to have the association in her life that goodness had come to her from a foreign power? Was she prepared for the fallout from all that from her peers? Or was he humanly speaking, learning what the breadth depth height and width of God truly meant?
We will never know, the details aren’t there for us to know. I personally believe that Jesus was learning. Learning how to be a human seeking after the will of God. Even if that was merely to provide an exemplar of how far our love needs to go in our Christian lives. And to that end, perhaps this passage can encourage us in our learning of faith too.
Here was our saviour in a foreign land, Tyre, along the coast of modern-day Lebanon, for whatever reason away from the centres of his ministry around Galilee and Jerusalem, and, at the very peak of his popularity. And here was someone who had sought him out, eager to receive mercy for her child. She was probably aware of the big differences between her nationality and Jesus. She is probably also very aware that she counted for nothing on account of her gender too. But it seems Jesus’ reputation for the underdog had spread abroad, and we can imagine her pricking her ears up as she hears Jesus is in town, and with a nervous sense of respect, mingled with hope, she hurries off to approach someone who is totally different from herself.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Jesus was aware of where his life would eventually lead, that Jerusalem was its centre. Perhaps healings abroad risked upsetting what he understood as God’s chosen trajectory. Making a big public hoohah in Lebanon might have felt like a distraction to the power games he knew had to happen back home. Certainly Jesus seemed so totally focussed for what was going to happen ‘back there,’ that perhaps he didn’t immediately see the hand of God in where he was now. But the woman, in her response, was ably clear to demonstrate with an amazing analogy that there is enough spillage of God’s goodness for others besides, even if it were as tiny as a crumb dropped on the floor, it would be enough. At that moment, something clicked for Jesus.
In our own faith, it often takes us time to hear God pulling us in a certain direction.
When we do, we make our plans for following them, and like setting out to sail on the sea, we can be so dedicated to the original plan, that we do not immediately sense the complex changing tides beneath us and it takes us a little while to reconfigure the boat so as to ride the waves well.
It is in recognising our common humanity with an-other, that holiness and God become present. And the interruptions to our plans and visions that God brings our way often centre upon those things.
I read an article some time ago, describing such an interruption, written by a woman upon her experience of childhood with a severely disabled twin sister.
She remarked just how much her sister’s needs kept getting in the way of what she felt her early teenage life was meant to be. She felt alienated, unable to grow into her true self, and along with her sister she was made fun of by her peers, as the needs of severe cerebral palsy seemed to halt everything.
The woman hated her sister for all this, until one day when she began to realise that growing into her true self was not separate from her twin but would happen with and because of her twin. She began realise that her very-different sister was a human being just like herself, and as her twin, was a part of her. And that opened a whole new way of growing up that she had not previously perceived.
Perhaps the Syro-Phoenician woman Jesus met helped him perceive something more of how his mission of mercy was to overcome barriers of culture and geography. Perhaps that moment extended the scope of his vision, and perhaps it even resulted in his story of the Good Samaritan.
I believe these kinds of moments are hidden portions of the plans God gives to us, seeming distractions that actually help us unfold some more, into the right shape that God hopes for us, as we pursue their larger visions. A shape that proclaims mercy over judgement, and that recognises others as deserving more than crumbs under the table, simply because they are human, like us. Our twin, part of us.
We belong to a learning faith. A faith where God sometimes teaches us in the midst of the very things we would do for him. Let us not be put off by that but seek to learn. And perhaps our own favourites from the bible will surprise us with where they wish to lead us for God.
And may mercy not judgement, be our continual gift to all whom we know and meet.