“Astounded Beyond Measure”
Mark 7:24-37
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
3/15/15
Jesus has left the familiar surroundings of home and made
his way to the city of Tyre. What may sound like a rather ho-hum detail represents
a scandalous break from protocol. Tyre is Gentile territory, and any Jews who
live there are as reviled as the Gentiles themselves. For Jesus to go looking
for them is more than bold; it is prodigal. But Jesus is no ordinary, line-toeing
Jew. He stretches almost every boundary. In today’s text he even says something
that none of us polite southern folk would dare to say – at least not to
anyone’s face.
A Gentile
woman comes to him begging that he heal her daughter, and Jesus says, “Let the
children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw
it to the dogs.”
For many of us, Jesus’
response to the woman is nothing short of racist. Hard-shell, Bible-believing
Pharisees may applaud Jesus for this, but I can’t quote any less Christ-like
words attributed to Jesus.
Apparently
embarrassed by this passage, many Christian scholars have run to Jesus’ rescue,
saying things like, ‘Jesus isn’t being mean. It’s just his way of testing the
woman’s faith.’ William Barclay goes so far as to say that “the woman saw at
once that Jesus was speaking with a smile.”1 How does Barclay know
that? He then says that the woman demonstrates a “sunny faith that would not
take no for an answer.”2
Seriously? Does this
desperate mother of a tormented child really brighten the page with “sunny
faith?”
What kind of Savior needs
saving? Why rush to cover up the possibility that Jesus is not manipulating the
situation?
This may be uncomfortable
for many of us, but what if Jesus speaks this way because he really believes
that Gentiles lie, if not beyond the hope of salvation, at least beyond the
limits of full participation in the family? You are free to reject this idea, but
I’m going to challenge us to entertain for the moment the possibility that in
this story we witness a moment when the boundaries of the kingdom are clarified
even to the boundary-defying Jesus himself.
Now,
preacher, are you questioning the divinity of Christ?
No. I am trying to avoid missing
– out of my own, all-too-human desire to protect Jesus – an invitation to see
Jesus struggling with his full humanity. Remember, in the wilderness he faces
three temptations to reduce the organic process of faith to dead-ended certainty
by working Machiavellian spectacles that would erase all doubt and wonder. So a
human Jesus, strengthened by divine vision, resists these temptations because
he wants faithful disciples who participate in spiritual transformation rather
than fearful zealots who manage religious information.
Jesus enters the struggle
between the human and the divine for our sake. As fully God-imaged creatures,
we engage that same struggle every day.
When God
Incarnate at first refuses to throw “the children's food…to the dogs,” the
woman replies, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.”
Two things about her answer demand attention.
All I ask for is a crumb, she says, because
that’s all my daughter needs. Humbly,
and most likely deeply humiliated, this nameless, Gentile mother who is passionately
in love with her daughter, risks the scorn of a celebrated healer and his entire tribe because she trusts the
Giver of the gift. Treated as something less than human, the woman claims the
fullness of her own humanity, which includes her divine belovedness. She knows
that she deserves the same compassion as any Hebrew, and her boldness becomes a
tenacious prayer.
Jesus tells the woman to go
home. Her daughter is well. This story jars us with both the full humanity and
the full divinity of Jesus.
“Sir,
even the dogs under the table eat the
children’s crumbs.” Jesus has a thing for those who live under the table. In Tyre, he is under the table with the forgotten people
of his own faith as well as those whom his people treat like common house pets.
But down there, under the table, even those whom scripture has labeled
sub-human live with all the faith, hope, love, and divine humanity of any Jew
in Jerusalem or Christian in Jonesborough, TN.
It gets
better. From Tyre Jesus goes to the Decapolis, more Gentile territory. There,
some people bring to him a man who is deaf and mute. Jesus takes the man away
from the crowd and performs a rather bizarre healing ritual. When Jesus says, “Be
opened!” the splendid symphony of everyday sound fills the man’s ears. Intelligible
speech flows from his mouth. And the witnesses, says Mark, are “astounded
beyond measure.”
When was
the last time you experienced the joy of the presence and the grace of God so deeply
and gratefully that you were beside yourself with wonder? What I often wonder
is whether we, who live for the most part at
the table, we who tend to have everything we need and most of what we want, do
we really remember what it’s like to feel “astounded beyond measure?” If this
doesn’t apply to you personally, it certainly applies to us culturally. Abundance
blesses us with enough, and therefore with gratitude. Excess curses us with
entitlement, and thus with the loss of the ability to feel truly astonished by
grace, and then mobilized to share with those who languish under the table.
The
Gospel calls us to claim the miracle of abundance, not to wallow in the sin of
excess. Think about it: When healed of her demon, the girl doesn’t get rich and
sail across the Mediterranean to holiday on the French Riviera. She is able,
once again, to help gather firewood, cook, sew and in time get married and have
children – maybe. The deaf man doesn’t suddenly go on a speaking tour making
money hand-over-fist. He is simply able to work, to bargain in the marketplace,
and if he has children to tell them who they are by telling them his story. The
likelihood of either of these first-century Gentiles ever living anywhere but under the table is remote.
The most
astounding things happen under the table, though. Under the table is wherever we are brought to our knees in open-handed
need, where we cannot provide for ourselves something basic to our humanity,
something that separates us from dogs and cats, gerbils, and goldfish. Revelations
of God, awakenings of spirit, calls to ministry happen under the table.
When out-of-balance,
we tend to belly up at the table and
ignore Jesus’ invitation to dive beneath it into the Holy Land of immeasurable
astonishment. How do you get there?
Well, where is the great need to which you are drawn? What hurt in the world
hurts you? You do not have to have big ideas, deep pockets, or eloquent speech.
Crumbs will do. Offer your crumbs to the food pantry, to Family Promise, to the
neighbor who lives alone, to the friend in the hospital, to an abused creation.
Now,
will I promise that you will be astounded beyond measure if you show up one Thursday morning at the food pantry?
Of course not. Jesus calls us to an entirely new way of life, not to the quick
thrill of some amusement park ride. The astounding thing is that venturing
under the table to share the crumbs of holy abundance with those who need the
most offers the richest and most liberating life.
May we
all make ready to cross whatever boundaries and to die whatever deaths we must.
And on the other side, may we experience, in this life, the astounding new life
to which Jesus calls and leads all of us.
1Willam
Barclay, The Gospel of Mark: The Daily Bible Study, The St. Andrew
Press, Edinburgh, 1964. p. 182.
2Ibid.
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