“He has done everything well; he even
makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.” From the Gospel for today, the
Gospel according to Mark, the 7th chapter, verse 37.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
Today’s Gospel comprises two different
stories: the story of the Syrophoenician woman (which includes the story of her
daughter), and the story of the deaf man. And there are many things going on
within each story, which reveal more about the nature of Jesus and our
relationship to him.
Today’s reading begins, “From there he set
out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want
anyone to know he was there.” This remark is rather odd. First, Jesus takes
himself into Gentile territory. Then he doesn’t “want anyone to know he was
there.” I’m not sure who the “anyone” is, but it can’t mean the people in the
house, or his immediate followers. It suggests that Jesus has a network of supporters,
probably clandestine, in Gentile territory, whose existence he wants to keep
secret until he is ready to make his ministry publicly known. The mere fact
that he is in “the region of Tyre” is a clear sign that Jesus is not limiting
his ministry to Israel, and intends to take his teaching to the wider world.
Although there is no hint of it in the text, I’m wondering whether Jesus is in
physical danger in this story. His caution is perhaps a foreshadowing of danger
to come. In any case, Jesus doesn’t want to be pushed into premature action in
public, so his caution is understandable.
But pushed he is. The Gospel says, “Yet he
could not escape notice.” The Syrophoenician woman with the demon-possessed
daughter, hears about him and finds him. And in their interaction we see the
basic contradiction in Jesus’s Gentile ministry. When she requests Jesus to
heal her daughter, he replies with a remark, not about healing, but about food!
“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” We’re
meant to understand the comparison the way the woman does: she, a Gentile, is
one of the dogs under the table, unworthy apparently of being fed any other way,
although I have to ask, in what household does a dog eat at the table and not
under it or elsewhere on the floor? Why does Jesus compare Gentiles to dogs? If
that’s what he thinks of Gentiles, what is he doing there?
Jesus is triangulating, I think, to
placate his followers who believe in their superiority to Gentiles (and to dogs
too), and to reinforce this attitude, at least in public, in the presence of a
Gentile woman. At the same time, he responds to the woman’s request, that he
heal her daughter, as soon as it becomes clear that the woman is not
intimidated by Jesus or by her supposed social inferiority, and has faith in
Jesus’s ability to do what she asks of him. Jesus takes advantage of the
situation to make it clear that faith is what matters, not a social or
religious or any other kind of distinction. Jesus abolishes the Jew/Gentile
distinction at the very moment when he appears to be reinforcing it. He is in
Gentile territory because he is including Gentiles in his kingdom. And it is
the Syrophoenician woman who recognizes Jesus for who he is, and makes it
possible for him to use the opportunity to reveal his nature and his teaching.
On his way back from Tyre, Jesus is
presented with a man who is deaf and mute. “He took him aside, in private, away
from the crowd,” the Gospel says. Again this emphasis on privacy, secrecy even,
and this even in Jesus’s home ground, away from a more stressful situation in
Gentile country. This privacy, secrecy, is part of Jesus’s message. Jesus keeps
his healing action, in this case, private, because he doesn’t want it to be
perceived as magic. A crowd watching him might suppose that his actions with
his hands were powerful in themselves, that they were actions they could
imitate and so get the same results. But what Jesus is responding to is faith,
and that is what makes the miracle possible. It is interesting that it is the
faith of the crowd, oddly enough, that makes this possible; nothing is said
about the faith of the deaf man. In the previous story, Jesus’s removing the
demon from the woman’s daughter, nothing is said about the daughter’s faith
either. In other words, there is no suggestion that the daughter or the deaf
man had to earn their healing by professing anything in particular, by
affecting any particular religious attitude, or even by expressing gratitude.
Jesus never asks them to.
What Jesus does ask the deaf man and the
crowd to do, is not to tell anyone about what he is doing. And do they respect
this? No. “The more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it,”
the Gospel says. I like to think that Jesus intended this; any teacher or
parent has likely seen this effect many times, by mock-sternly telling their
charges not to do something, they make sure that it gets done, when a positive
suggestion might not have worked. Jesus is taking advantage of this contrary
streak in human nature, to make sure that his message is heard far and wide.
We need not be afraid to take the message
to the Gentiles, that is, to people outside our religious or social circle, and
beyond. The two stories we heard today, remind us that there is a real hunger
in the world for signs of God’s power and healing love. The “faith” of the
crowds in the Gospel may not be much more than a hunger for cures, which is
entirely legitimate. But that hunger is the beginning of real faith. There is a
lot of spiritual deafness in our world, and there is a lot of spiritual
muteness too. There are people who yearn for something beyond themselves, which
they don’t know how to express. We can help them find the words that they need;
we can help them hear the teaching of Jesus. Even in our rampantly secular
society, there is a need for people to hear of the saving work of God. And we
are empowered to tell people about. May it be said of us, as the crowd said of
Jesus, that we have “done everything well; we even make the deaf to hear and
the mute to speak.”
In the name of God, etc..
No comments:
Post a Comment