Introduction
- I never forget a face, but in your case, I’m willing to make an exception.
- My psychiatrist told me I was mad. I said I wanted a second opinion. He said “You're ugly too.”
- If ignorance is bliss, you must be the happiest person on earth.
- Two wrongs don't make a right - take your parents as an example.
- I can always tell when you’re lying. Your lips move.
One-liner put downs; usually we enjoy them but, to be honest, maybe we feel a bit guilty about it. And if we do feel guilty perhaps it’s because we think, as Christians, that we shouldn’t be getting pleasure from someone else’s humiliation.
So when we read Mark 7.27, as we did a few moments ago, I suspect most of us feel quite uncomfortable. Did I read that right? Did something get lost in translation? Did Jesus really just call that woman “a dog”? Surely not!
Background
We’ll come back to that, but first, let’s set today’s reading in context.
For the first time in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus leaves the region around the Sea of Galilee; a land that is almost entirely made up of small Jewish communities. Now, starting in v24, he moves out into new ground, a place he's never been before, where only Gentiles live.
He travels with his disciples to a place called Tyre, which is about 30 miles to the north, in modern-day Lebanon.
Tyre was a wealthy trading port and its prosperity fuelled a culture of excess. People from there worshipped gaudy idols, they lived promiscuous lives, they ruled with an iron fist, they were corrupt and unjust traders, and everyone saw them as arrogant and proud.
Let me quote a few words about Tyre from Ezekiel 28. “In much buying and selling you became violent... Your beauty went to your head... Your heart is arrogant, going around saying, 'I’m a god. I sit on the throne of a god in the heart of the seas' …. because of your great wealth your heart has grown proud...”
The Jews hated these people; they felt they were utterly beyond the pale - and the feeling was mutual. It was like the enmity you find today between Israelis and Palestinians.
So what is Jesus doing in a place like this? Basically, he has little choice. Everywhere he goes in Jewish territory, he’s in trouble. He’s doubted by his own family and rejected by his home town. He’s opposed by his own religious authorities.
And he’s accompanied by twelve disciples who are so slow-witted he would have been better off with a dozen scarecrows from eBay, so they're not much help either.
Jesus is starting to seriously make enemies. He is taking the entire elaborate system of man-made religion, with all its vested interests, that dominated his day, and he is blowing it apart. He’s becoming a marked man for the powers that be. And the net is starting to close in. You can see why he had to get away for a bit.
1. The Syro-Phoenician Woman
That's why it says in v24 “Jesus entered a house in the vicinity of Tyre and did not want anyone to know it.” He wants to lie low away from the tinderbox atmosphere of his home land.
You know what it’s like when you’ve had a difficult day at work, and a stressful journey home, and just when you get back to a bit of peace and quiet, the washing machine leaks all over the kitchen floor, the phone rings, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses knock at the door? Have you had days like that? This is what happens here. Sort of.
Jesus and his disciples, remember, have been at it non-stop. Every time they plan a break, someone turns up with a pressing need. “Fix this, mend that, help my child, feed this crowd, heal my dad, cure my wife…” On top of that, they’ve just walked all day on a dusty country road.
But even here Jesus cannot keep his presence secret. As soon as she hears Jesus is in town, a needy woman with a troubled daughter tracks him down, knocks at the door, walks right in, falls at his feet, tells him her story, unloads all her problems on him, and pleads, and begs, and implores Jesus to get up, put his shoes and coat back on, and head off with her, and sort it all out.
Matthew’s Gospel says the little girl was “suffering terribly.” Is there any human pain more excruciating than watching your own children endure terrible suffering? I can remember my kids with tears running down their sweet faces because they were being bullied at school. I know how heartbreaking that is. I would do anything to change their world and make it right.
This little girl is deeply troubled, oppressed and afflicted. There’s demonic heaviness and darkness and the shadow of evil - and whatever her desperate mother tries, she can't fix it, nothing works. How long has this poor woman carried her daughter’s pain in her heart?
So, (v25) she falls at Jesus’ feet and (v26) begs him to help. And Jesus says “no.” In fact, in Matthew’s version, we read at first that he says nothing to her at all. He responds by ignoring her. He just blanks her. This is not the Jesus we know! What’s going on?
Have you ever prayed, and prayed, and prayed, and agonised before the Lord about something that has been very important to you and been met with a deafening silence from heaven? Have you ever felt that in answer to your best prayers God just does nothing? Have you ever given up bothering to pray because God seems to ignore you?
In fact, Jesus doesn’t actually say “no.” But it would almost be easier for us if he did. Instead, we have one of the most baffling sayings of Jesus in all four Gospels. It’s not a misprint; Matthew records exactly the same thing. The one thing you can say is that this is surely proof that the Gospels are authentic and factual, because no one would have made up what follows.
Jesus says in v27, “First, let the children eat all they want, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” I’ve looked that up in all the versions. Even in The Message, it's the same.
“The children get fed first. If there’s any left over, the dogs get it.” If anything, in The Message it sounds slightly worse!
We like dogs. We call them “man’s best friend.” They're loyal and friendly. We put their pictures on Facebook and talk about them as if they were human sometimes. In fact, let’s put some pictures up of some really nice dogs… Say “ah” if you think they're cute....
We love dogs. But in the Middle-East, in Jesus’ day, calling someone a dog was a term of contempt and it still is; it’s an insult because most dogs there are flea-ridden mongrels.
When the Jews looked down on the Gentiles and called them dogs, this is what they meant.
That’s why at the start of this chapter they obsessed about washing their hands because they had been near Gentiles who were considered unclean. You had to get rid of the contamination. Except, you’ll remember from last week, that Jesus and his followers didn’t do that.
The word Jesus uses is not kuon, which is your common street dog, scavenging around bins and rubbish tips, but kunarion, which means a smaller, cute family pet.
We actually use dog language today in totally inoffensive ways. We all know people of a certain age who will never get computerised and we say, “well, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” It's a metaphor. We don't take it as directly insulting or offensive. Jesus' remark is similarly indirect; it's not like he says “You're a dog, madam, get lost.”
But, let’s be honest, this is still a difficult word and with an apparent coldness so uncharacteristic of Jesus.
What's this all about? He is telling the hard truth about the community this woman belonged to. They were estranged from God. They were lost in their idolatries and superstitions. They hated God’s people and were proud of it. They were cut off from God’s promises and didn’t care. Their arrogance and self-sufficiency and vanity were what these people were known for.
This is the key to why Jesus talks to her in the way he does. He wants to know if she is willing to distance herself from the pride of her people and come to God, poor in spirit.
And the answer is yes. She accepts as true what Jesus says about her pagan background.
The greatness of her faith is shown by the fact that she not only recognises who Jesus is (she calls him Lord), but she refuses to take “no” for an answer, and won't go home empty-handed. Like Jacob in Genesis 32, her attitude is “I will not let you go until you bless me.”
Jesus loves the meekness of her reply; “Lord, if it’s from your table, I’ll take the scraps. That’ll be all I need.”
There’s a very old and beautiful prayer we say sometimes before Holy Communion and it comes from this story. Some of you know it.
“We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord,
trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy.”
This Syro-Phoenician woman has heard about what happens when Jesus is in town.
· Blind people see again
· Paralytics walk again
· Dead bodies breathe again
· Evil spirits get sent packing
· Lepers’ flaky skin becomes young again.
She is only asking for a single cure; one crumb! It doesn’t need to be a whole loaf, or even whole a slice, let alone a full meal. “Just let me have one crumb! That’ll be all I need.” What faith!
Jesus says, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”
And the Bible says that “she went home and found her daughter relaxed on the bed, the torment gone for good” (MSG).
All this is challenging for me because I’m a Gentile too. So are most of you. Am I prepared to swallow my pride and come with humility and brokenness, and accept Jesus’ verdict upon me, a sinner, with an unclean heart by nature, unfit even to gather up crumbs from under a table, and ask for grace?
The amazing thing is that, though all of us are unworthy of crumbs, we all get invited to a banquet!
Parenthesis
So this is Jesus going into new ground, beyond his homeland and bringing blessing to an entirely new audience.
This is interesting to me because I have been asking God for a few years now what entering new ground would look like for us at All Saints'.
God is leading us to redevelop and extend our building. That will be an important focus for us over the next few years.
We're going to have more space to fill, and the Lord has already been adding to our number in anticipation of that extra space being created.
But I think there’s more. I felt prompted by the Holy Spirit a few months ago to speak with the Bishop about an offer I had made a few years earlier, and which essentially came to nothing, to send out a team from All Saints, led by a curate, to plant a daughter version of All Saints' into another community.
Extend the building or plant out a team? I have a growing conviction that it is not either/or but both/and. If the Jesus we've been reading about this morning is the same Jesus we know and love, I have faith that we can grow the building and fill it, and also send out a team of maybe 30-40 people in a few years' time to plant a new church.
I expected the Bishop to say no, that wouldn’t be possible, but to my surprise, he told me that this is right in line with what he thinks God is saying about his strategy for mission and growth. Things are at a very, very early stage, and I can't say more now, but I would encourage you to start praying about this. If God is in it, and I think he is, nothing will be able to stop it.
2. The Deaf and Mute Man
Jesus leaves that place and heads back to the Decapolis. It's back in Galilee, but it is Gentile territory. The last time he was here was in chapter 5, do you remember? He met a weird, naked, shrieking, self-harming man living in a cemetery calling himself Legion and he delivered him of his demons and said “Stay here and tell everyone what God has done for you.”
That’s why when Jesus comes back here in v33 it says there’s a crowd. The evangelist formerly known as Legion has been busy. In fact, at the start of chapter 8, there are 4,000 people there who listen to Jesus preaching for three days! So that’s the secret to church growth; three-day sermons!
People bring to Jesus a deaf-mute. Imagine what it must be like to be this man. Put yourself in his shoes. You are cut off from the world. You have never heard the voices of your loved ones. You don’t know what birdsong sounds like, or music, or laughter, or the rustling of trees… or fingernails scratching down a blackboard (there are some advantages to being deaf…)
Why the fingers in the ears? Notice that Jesus hardly ever heals the same way as he did before. Each time, he does an entirely new thing. He listens to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and however strange it seems, he goes with that.
Why the spit? And incidentally aren’t you glad the prayer team isn’t trained in the ministry of expectoration? Thank God we don’t sing songs like “Come, Holy Spit,” “Washed in the Dribble of the Lamb” and “These are the Days of Saliva.”
What’s Jesus doing? He is going out of his way to explain what he’s doing to a man who cannot hear, in order to raise his faith and expectation. This is a mime.
The fingers in the ears – to communicate that he is going to do something about his hearing.
The spit on the tongue, (the Jewish Talmud mentions spittle on the tongue as a means of healing), to communicate that he wants to do something about his speech.
Jesus lifts his gaze – to communicate looking to heaven and asking the Father.
The deep sigh is also a very visible signal – to communicate that Jesus is moved with compassion.
And finally, this word “Ephphatha” meaning “be opened!” Probably the most lip-readable word in the Aramaic dictionary.
Jesus ministers at a level that people can understand. What more do I need to say? The man opens his mouth, his tongue is loosened and he starts to speak coherently and clearly.
“He has done everything well,” they say.
Ending
Hasn’t he? Isn’t God good and isn't Jesus awesome!
Let's stand to pray...
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 8 October 2017
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