Think Twice, Open.

Mark 7:24-37

Someone told me once that I should always think twice before speaking or acting. The reason, they said, is that our first thoughts are rarely even ours. So often, the first words on the tip of our tongue or the first thoughts that cross our mind do not belong to our deeply held values, or even to our gut instincts. We might see someone with a cardboard sign on the side of the road, and our immediate reaction is to look away, avert our eyes from the shame or from the risk of being asked for something we don’t want to give. We might see someone we don’t recognize in our neighborhood, and decide in a flash whether they might be up to no good based on whether they look like the kind of person we think would buy a house on our street. Our first thoughts are meant to protect us by noticing patterns, giving us scripts to follow based on prior experience or things we’ve been shown or taught by others. While most of the time these flashes of assumption and judgment are relatively harmless, they call to mind the urging of our pastor James last week. Be slow to anger, slow to speech. When we slow down, we have the opportunity to push past what our prejudices, biases, expectations and assumptions would have us say and do. When we think twice, we make space for that second thought, that prayerful pause, the moment when the Holy Spirit might step in and lead us down the righteous path.

When Jesus set off by himself and went to Tyre, he seemed intent on solitude, hiding away in a house where he hoped no one would learn of his presence. After many healings, exorcisms, arguments, and sermons, it stands to reason that Jesus, fully human in addition to being fully divine, might need a break. But such a person as the Son of God could not escape notice, and a woman came to him immediately with an urgent need. Her daughter is sick with an unclean spirit, and she has heard that Jesus is capable of curing this affliction. Worn out from the journey and a stranger in this region, Jesus does not give the answer we hope he would. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” The generosity we are accustomed to is nowhere to be found. Instead of beautiful images and carefully curated parables, our Lord speaks an insult to a desperate woman. He quite literally calls this Gentile woman a dog, a person excluded from the care given to the people of Israel. This moment in scripture is uncomfortable, and often passed over because it challenges everything we think we know about Jesus. We think of Jesus as infinitely kind, and nice, and often polite and mild-mannered and even genteel. We imagine Jesus as he often appears in stained glass windows and storybooks, seated before an audience calmly teaching or gently gazing up toward heaven. We fall into the same trap as the people who wished to crown Jesus as benevolent ruler and mighty warrior, making Jesus an idol of our own preferences instead of an icon of eternal life. We create images of the divinity of Jesus to make ourselves feel safe and important, and we soften his humanness into something entirely inoffensive. In the process, we lose so much of the miracle of the incarnation. It is the divine humanity of Jesus that is revealed to us in this disquieting passage.

Part of being fully human, part of God’s choice to live and die as one of us, is growing up in a society and a culture and being shaped by them. Jesus was raised in the religion of his mother and likely trained in the craft of his adoptive father. He was taught to read and interpret scripture and spent time in the synagogue discussing the stories and history of his people with his peers. He grew up in a patriarchal, hierarchal, and ethnically divided culture under the colonial rule of a foreign empire. He is the Son of God, and he is the Son of Man, the intersection of perfect love and mortal flesh. On this particular day, his first thought did not belong to the heart of God, but the assumptions and divisions of human society.

In the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus saw a person different from him by gender, ethnicity, and religion, and spoke from the first thought, allowing bias and prejudice to set the tone. That first thought belonged to the world, not the kingdom. It is only when the brave woman takes a leap of faith, challenging that worldview of scarcity and exclusion that Jesus slows down and thinks again. The human instinct toward prejudice and separation is overcome in that slow moment, as the true will of God breaks through the status quo. The traveling preacher who has shared table fellowship with religious elites and social outcasts, who has healed lepers on the edge of town and the disabled in the heart of the city, hears his own preaching opened up to him in the voice of a loving and determined mother. Sir, even the dogs eat the crumbs. Sir, even the outsiders and the outcasts have a place in the household of God. Lord, even I need you. Lord, even I will be at the table.

I do not believe that Jesus spoke those harsh words to test this woman’s faith. I do not believe it was a trick or a rhetorical device. I believe Jesus who was tempted in the desert yet did not sin is again being tempted here, not by the devil incarnate but by a culture that has told him who is and isn’t worthy of his time. Jesus is facing a temptation in this strange wilderness, facing his own humanity, as his image stares back at him in the eyes of a woman with different features, with a different language, with a different religion. But Jesus does not fall, as we all have done and will continue to do. He hears the word of the Lord in the prophetic voice of a mother, and answers with a healing word of his own. The woman’s daughter is healed, freed from her unclean spirit, and they are reunited in their home, a family made whole again. And Jesus continues on in his journey, perhaps newly aware of who exactly needs to hear his Good News the most. He walks through more cities and towns of mixed company, of diverse religions and languages and ethnicities. He preaches and teaches and heals. When a man is brought to him who cannot hear or speak clearly, he takes him aside, looks up to heaven, and sighs. Before proclaiming the words that would bring about healing, Jesus looks up to heaven and sighs. Be opened, he says. Be opened. And the man’s ears are unstopped and his tongue is released to form speech. I wonder if that sigh is a bit of divine humor, Jesus acknowledging the irony of commanding openness after his own recent experience of being challenged, of being opened. Be opened to the prayers and pleas of those you would rather avoid. Be opened to the people who challenge you. Slow down, and be opened. How much of our world could we heal, if we did the same?