For Sunday, September 6, 2015 – Mark 7:24-37
We all find ourselves there sometimes, in the dried up flat lands of Bottomed Out. Constant needs hurl themselves headlong into us, shriek our names, insist on our response until we feel utterly depleted by their demands. Does it help to know that Jesus, too, sometimes needed to get away, that he, too, could grow increasingly tired and short-tempered? For myself I see it easily, how impatient and unkind I can become when I am stretched beyond my capacity, but I don’t like to see it in Jesus, the one who shows me God. I want God to be nothing but long-suffering love, eternal patience and unending mercy. Yet here Jesus is, wanting to rest when he is interrupted again by a woman begging for help. Friends, what happens next isn’t pretty.
He chastises her harshly. He berates her, even pulling the race card, telling her unkindly that she is an outsider and her child is nothing more than a stray dog compared to other children. Nothing she hasn’t heard thousands of times before, but I can hardly bear it. You, too, Jesus? Is this what God looks like? I refuse to believe it. Surely you were exhausted and did not mean what you said. Or maybe you hoped to evoke a response from your disciples, get them to defend anyone being treated that way. Had you and she agreed beforehand to play-act this teaching moment? Or could it be that being fully human means you were learning and growing along the way, just like the rest of us? What are you wanting us to notice?
Then I see her, this woman, suffering endless putdowns and punishments yet in Jesus seeing a light of hope that draws her close. She bows at his feet, risks getting kicked in the face, then with steady confidence she begs, not for herself but for her daughter. She knows what “the rules” say, that other children deserve privileged treatment and hers does not, that other children are precious and her child is not. But she also knows who she is, and who he is, perhaps better than he yet knows himself. Reaching beyond his defenses, beyond his culture, she insists that he look at her. She is an outsider, yes, a so-called nobody, maybe even a “dog”—but if so, one of God’s dogs. And that changes everything. Calmly, politely—how does she do it?—she says, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She draws for Jesus a bigger picture of who God is. If Jesus needed her wisdom, imagine how much more we need the least likely messengers among us. We need to see the unseen, to hear the unheard, lest we miss the bigger picture of what God looks like.
