King’s
Acre Church, 7 September 2003
What on Earth?
Our Gospel reading this
morning is made up of two very strange stories. In that first story, what on earth is going on? It’s really weird; what did Jesus
think He was doing? The whole story begs
a very great many questions. To start with,
why did Jesus go to Tyre in the first place? These days it’s in the Lebanon, and back then it was a Gentile place,
not a Jewish one. What was he doing
there?
Then, how did the woman
know of him? Had he been sharing the
Good News up there? Had someone
mentioned Jesus of Nazareth to her when she was looking for a healer for her
daughter? Did she know who he was, or
was she just looking for a wonder-worker?
Then what on earth did
Jesus mean? The Bible is a bit like the
Internet in one respect, in that you can’t tell what people’s tone of voice was
meant to be. So we don’t know what sort
of voice Jesus said “It’s not right to take the children’s meat and throw it to
the dogs”. There’s so many ways he
could have said it. He could have been
aloof, remote: “It’s not right to take the children’s meat and throw it to the
dogs”. He could have been thoughtful: “It’s
not right to take the children’s meat and throw it to the dogs”. He could have been almost teasing: “It’s not
right to take the children’s meat and throw it to the dogs, nome sane?” We don’t know, and at this distance, we
probably never will know.
And what of the woman’s
response? Was she desperate, clutching
at straws? Was she in an “Oh well, I’ve
got nothing to lose!” mood? Was she
responding to his affectionate teasing?
Again, we can’t know.
The classical explanation,
of course, is that Jesus was testing the woman to find out whether or not she
had enough faith for him to heal her daughter.
Well, that may or may not be the case, I don’t know, but it’s what
people often say because it’s what they think Jesus is like.
But I once read an
explanation that was a little different.
I am not totally sure exactly where I read it, and it was years ago, but
it had a profound effect on me. In this
explanation, the writer – I have a feeling it was M Scott Peck, but I wouldn’t
swear to it – suggests that Jesus had gone to Tyre for a break, to get away
from it all for a few days. And when
the woman came to him to heal her daughter, his first reaction was
irritation. But because he stayed so
close to God, he knew he mustn’t give in to that reaction, but went out to see
her anyway. And then when he found she
wasn’t Jewish, again, his first reaction was to send her away: “It’s not right
to take the children’s meat and throw it to the dogs”. But again, he listened to God, and heard the
voice of God in her response: “but even the puppies can eat the crumbs the
children let fall”. And so he knew that
what God wanted was for him to heal this woman’s daughter. Which he did. He didn’t need to go to her and make himself unclean by going
into a Gentile’s house – you remember, we were talking about uncleanness last
week, and that was one of the things that Jews simply Did Not Do. He was able to tell her to go home, her
daughter would be healed.
Now, when I first read
that explanation, I was rather disturbed.
I felt it was all wrong. “No, no, that can’t be it! Jesus wasn’t like that?” But that was a knee-jerk reaction, and the
story refused to go away. Like a sore
place in one’s mouth, or something, I kept on thinking about it and thinking
about it. Why was this so totally alien
to my mental image of Jesus?
Then I realised that, of
course, it was because I was confusing “being perfect” with “never being wrong”. There’s a difference between being mistaken
and sinning! Jesus, after all, was a
human being, and that meant he had to have grown and changed. He was not born fully-grown from his mother’s
forehead, like whoever it was in the Greek myth; he came, we are told, as a
human baby. And as a human baby, he
would have had to have learnt – and you don’t learn without making
mistakes. Jesus would have fallen over
when learning to walk, just like every other baby; he would have confused
common words when he learnt to read, and forgot which symbol represented which
letter in the Hebrew language. St Luke
tells us that Jesus grew and became strong, and the favour of God was on
him. But even the mere fact of growing
and becoming strong means you have to learn – you don’t become strong without
training your body, and nobody can run 100 metres in ten seconds, for instance,
without years of intensive training.
So it is certainly
possible that Jesus was, in this instance, mistaken just at first about whether
he could or should do anything for this woman’s daughter. And in the end, I found this thought very
liberating. It made Jesus far more
human. I realised that, while I had always
paid lip-service to the belief that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine,
in fact, I’d never really believed in his humanity! For me, he had always been a plaster saint, absolutely perfect,
never making a mistake, never even being tempted. I realised I’d envisaged him overcoming those temptations the
gospel-writers talk about with a wave of his hand, not really tempted at
all. But, of course, it wasn’t like
that! St Paul tells us that he was
tempted “in every way that we are”, and if that doesn’t include really, really,
really wanting to do it, then it wasn’t temptation!
But if Jesus could be
mistaken, if he sometimes had to change his mind, if being perfect didn’t
necessarily mean never being wrong, then that changed everything! Suddenly, Jesus became more human, more real
than ever before. The Incarnation wasn’t
just something to pay lip-service to, it was real. Jesus really had been a human being, with human frailties, just
like you and me. He had had to learn,
and to grow, and to change. Suddenly,
it was okay not to get everything right first time; it was okay not to be very
good at some things; it was okay to make mistakes.
And, what’s more, it meant
that the Jesus who had died on the cross for me wasn’t some remote, distant
figure whom I could aim at but never emulate, but almost an ordinary person,
someone I might have liked had I known him in the flesh, someone I could
identify with.
Do you remember, about 15
years ago there was a film called The Last Temptation of Christ? I never actually saw it, but I do remember
someone saying that the film-makers had forgotten than Jesus was divine as well
as human. I think sometimes we forget
that Jesus was human as well as divine.
I know that I had, and I needed that interpretation of today’s story to
remind me.
===oo0oo===
I think I’ve probably made a great many bricks from very little straw, but it’s something that’s rather precious to me. Let’s turn now to the other story in today’s reading.
Jesus goes back home on a
rather circuitous route; perhaps not exactly on holiday, as we know it, but
certainly having a break from normal routine.
He meets a man who is deaf
and can barely speak, and heals him. As
you know, deaf people are often not able to speak clearly, if at all, and many
prefer to use sign language. Although
it’s possible that this bloke had some kind of speech impediment as well, the
text isn’t very clear. Anyway, Jesus
takes him to one side, so that he won’t be the centre of attention – too
ghastly to have to explain the problem in front of a crowd when you can’t speak
very clearly in the first place – and makes it very clear to him exactly what
he is doing. He touches the man’s ears,
spits and touches his tongue, and then says “Be opened!” in a loud and clear
voice. And the man can instantly hear
and speak – and, apparently, make sense of what he is hearing.
Something to notice here
is how Jesus treats people as individuals.
He treats this man quite differently from the way he treated the
Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter. And
other healings are different again. This
is perhaps obvious, but all too often we like to make Christianity “one size
fits all”. Okay, to a certain extent it
is: “One body, one Spirit, one faith, one Lord, one people, one nation, praise
ye the Lord!” as the old Chorus has it.
But within that, Jesus meets with us as individuals, and deals with us
as individuals. The story of the
Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter, that means so much to me, might leave you
totally cold. And perhaps part of the
Bible that, at this stage of my Christian journey, leaves me a bit cold, means
everything to you! We are all different
– there are many Christianities, even though there is only one Christ. We are all on different stages of our
journey; some of us have walked with Jesus for longer than we care to remember,
while others have only recently said “yes” to him. And so it goes. What
matters is that we continue to walk with him.
So at the beginning of
this Methodist year, let’s pray that we will be able to carry on together as a
community, while recognising that within that, we are individuals, with individual
needs. And allow Jesus to meet us where
we are, not where we think we ought to be.
Or, worse, where we think you ought to be! Amen.