Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Gospel Year B

Author’s Note:  Mark 7 deals with the relation of Jesus to the Gentiles.  After an argument with the Pharisees about ritual purity in which Jesus departs northwards for Tyre and Sidon, a majority Gentile region.  Jesus’ speech to the Pharisees differentiates between the traditions of the elders focused on outward ritual and the commandment of God, which regulates the deeds spurred by the human heart (7:6-15).  The teaching here foreshadows the messiah’s journey into Gentile territory populated by people considered “unclean.”  As if to illustrate Jesus’ point he meets a Gentile woman who demonstrates great faith in begging Jesus to heal her daughter and abasing herself in speech and act by bowing down at his feet.  Her entreaty removes an unclean spirit from her daughter.  After this Jesus heals a deaf man which results in the populace of Sidon “zealously proclaiming” Jesus.  

The search for identity is a symptom of dislocation. Prior to the industrial revolution who you were remained largely determined by your parents, your neighbors, your trade, or even your church. As masses gathered into cities lured by higher wages and opportunities toward the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries people lost many of these marks. Trade unions, political machines, and various nationalisms and ideologies became mass movements because they filled this gap. As social scientists have pointed out humans need to link themselves to something which gives them a greater sense of identity and purpose. The dislocations of the digital age have revolutionized human society in different ways: first by barraging us with too much information for us to process comfortably, and secondly by lowering barriers to putting information out there. Luther had to utilize printing presses, Marx and Engels had to found newspapers and painstakingly build networks of fellow travelers, but anyone can now start a movement from a social media page once the internet garners them enough followers.

Our tribes are less given to us now and more identities that we construct like a patchwork quilt from various ideas and causes that float around. They offer simple explanations for complicated problems, manufacture quick enemies to blame, and connect us across geography through media spaces like chatrooms which give the illusion of intimacy. We tweet markers of this group and we share its images. These groups begin as places of belonging and continue as sources of projection. Where identity formerly molded us from the outside, identities now confirm our interior thoughts and opinions. We choose our tribes.

Step 3: Final Diagnosis (Eternal Problem): Weak Constructions

We struggle with this text in horror as Jesus appears to be engaging in the worst kind of tribalism.  It would not have been as much of a shock to his disciples or any other contemporary observers.  Jewish attitudes toward Gentiles were diverse but it was generally accepted that Gentiles were unclean and only able to attain salvation by a divine decree at the end of time, never changing their status as Gentiles (The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 249). The relation between the groups would remain mediated by the law.  Jesus’ statement about not giving the children’s food to the dogs is just a nasty way of saying “wait your turn.”  For Israelites of the time, the law and covenant conveyed a kind of status and privilege.

Our shock at what Jesus says is something worth pausing to consider.  We’ve long been taught about the absolute and universal love of Jesus which covers “all the little children of the world.”  Jesus displaying the nastier particularism of his own time might come as a shock to us.  But even more, it might come as a shock to what our sense of the gospel is.  Our sense that the gospel is at its source an affirmation and welcome of all people dictates for us how we feel that Jesus should act.  As important as these practices are they are not themselves the content of the gospel.  “All are welcome” is a statement that reveals more about the practices and attitudes of a congregation than the gifts of a savior.  Welcoming is based on clear commands from scripture, we should do it, but we shouldn’t confuse it with the gospel.  The gospel is forgiveness, life, and salvation: the power of Christ.  The woman received these things from Christ despite Christ himself not extending her welcome (“Go away,” he says effectively).  Something happens here outside the bounds of the law.  Something new.

The great theologian James Cone wrote in his magnum opus, God of the Oppressed:

“I realize that my theological limitations and my close identity with the social

conditions of black people could blind me to the truth of the gospel.  And maybe our white theologians are right when they insist that I have overlooked the universal significance of Jesus’ message.  But I contend that there is no universalism that is not particular.  Indeed, their insistence on the universal note of the gospel arises out of their own particular political and social interests.  As long as they can be sure that the gospel is for everybody, ignoring that God liberated a particular people from Egypt, came in a particular man called Jesus, and for the particular purpose of liberating the oppressed, they can continue to talk in theological abstractions, failing to recognize that such talk is not the gospel unless it is related to the concrete freedom of the little ones” (God of the Oppressed, p.126, italics original).

Such “concrete freedom” is the true substance of the gospel.  The Syrophoenician woman’s daughter is healed not because she convinced Jesus to be nice to the Gentiles, or because she demonstrates any kind of righteousness outside of the relentless persistence of a parent with a sick child.  She doesn’t criticize or doubt Jesus when he says that he has to love the children of Israel first but begs that Jesus show love to her.  She doesn’t insist that she’s a child too but persists in that she will remain at his table even as a dog looking for scraps.  Group identities do not fade here as if to congeal into something new.  Grace transcends the ethnic boundaries between the Syrophoenician woman and Jesus, even dragging Jesus along, because grace responds to need and not status.  And this is at the heart of every sermon.  Christ can only be “for us” because he is first and always “given for you.”