Mark 7:24-37
The reality of the incarnation is one of the greatest scandals of history. Not the fact that God came to earth, plenty of deities have done that in mythology from all over the world. Not the fact that a human woman gave birth to a somehow more-than-human child, since of course the myths of Heracles and Achilles fit that description too. Religious traditions all over the world share stories of heroes born with unearthly powers and a stronger than average connection to the divine. Although there were arguments and disagreements and even all-out brawls triggered by the claim that Jesus was divine, this part of the story is actually a little easier to swallow than the other side of the coin. The true scandal of the incarnation, the thing that caused arguments and entire theological treatises and the establishment of the historic creeds that we still recite today is that in Jesus, God became human. Not that God came among us disguised as human, or fully formed as a mortal adult. The scandal is that God truly stooped to the extreme of becoming us, with all that being human entails.
It made people uncomfortable, that part of the story. It still makes people uncomfortable, when we really stop to think about it for any length of time. If Jesus was entirely God and entirely human, then that means God played in the mud as a child and had to be convinced to take baths by an exasperated mother. That means God had to experience all the awkward and uncomfortable realities of puberty, and God probably got sassy with his parents when he was overtired. And like today’s Gospel reading from Mark, he learned prejudices and sometimes they got the better of them.
A woman comes to Jesus for help, not even on her own behalf but as an advocate for her suffering daughter, and he refuses her at first, insulting her in the process. We don’t like this story. I don’t know many people who wouldn’t rather skip this story altogether, maybe even edit it out of the Bible entirely. The whole exchange leaves a bad taste in our mouths, and it’s easier to skip ahead to the miraculous healing of a deaf man with a speech impediment. We would much rather be able to say unequivocally that he has done everything well than wrestle with why Jesus would refuse to heal a sick child, even if only for a moment.
Being human includes being formed, being a product of time and place and the people who raise you and the society in which you live. If God became fully human, then God experienced what it is to be formed. Part of that formation, whether we like it or not, is the development of biases. We know this. Science tells us that the human brain is an incredible pattern-recognizing machine. We learn very quickly what is safe and what is unsafe, who is a trusted person and who is a stranger. Our brains are so good at this process that very rarely do we have to spell it out for each other. Unfortunately, that also means we can learn and internalize things without ever knowing we have. We can teach our children things completely unintentionally. We walk around with biases we don’t even realize are influencing our behavior, down to how we spend our money and who our friends are and how we speak to and about our neighbors.
A good innocuous example is the way college football impacted me from a young age. In Kentucky, the rivalry between the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky is unparalleled. My parents are UofL fans, and from a very young age I knew that the team colors of red and black were good, and the UK colors of blue and white were bad. What my parents did not intend, but happened nonetheless, was that I became biased against not only UK fans, but anyone from the city of Lexington where the dreaded blue team came from. I believed they were somehow less than us, and as a young child I even ended friendships with children who came to school in blue and white. You can imagine how devastated and confused I was to learn that my favorite older cousins were UK fans.
As a child who had not attended college and who honestly didn’t really know a thing about basketball or football, the only reason I was a UofL fan is that my parents were. And my parents were because they both happened to attend classes there for a few years. My cousins, who admittedly knew a little more about sports, were only UK fans because their mother, my dad’s sister, happened to go to college there. We had developed biases in favor of our own teams and against one another’s, for no other reason than its what we grew up hearing from our parents. Even now, all these years later and with the recognition of this unfounded bias, I still have a kneejerk response when someone learns I’m from Kentucky and asks if I’m a UK fan. The bias is still there, and I must make choices to override it.
We all experience this, it is part of being a human in a community. We develop a fear of dogs because a particularly reactive dog bit us in childhood. We come to distrust and become guarded when we hear a certain accent or language being spoken because of a story in the news or one bad interaction with an individual. We assume the worst of a particular religion or culture because the villains in our movies always speak or dress or pray like them. Very rarely are we even aware of it, and most of us would never knowingly treat some people as better than others. But we are human, and we are susceptible to bias and even prejudice even when we don’t want to be. And because God scandalized the world by becoming human, God became susceptible to unacknowledged biases too.
Jesus grew up in a community that was biased against certain people, especially Phoenician people like the Gentile woman who came to him for help. To Jesus’s people, she was the Other, the outsider. His kneejerk reaction, born out of unconscious bias, was to dismiss her. But by not backing down, the Syrophoenician woman made him think twice about his own response.
The trouble with unconscious bias is, once you become conscious of them you must decide whether to listen to them. Once you become vigilant, you notice just how much preconceived notions were informing your choices and behaviors. The assumptions might never fully go away, even if you work at overcoming them. It becomes a lifelong, constant journey of self-discovery and mindfulness. It can be exhausting and requires an ever-deepening humility. It requires admitting that we will never be finished growing beyond our biases. It requires admitting that we are human, and then choosing to be better at it.
There are many for whom this feels like an impossible ask. Many people would prefer to believe that they have overcome all the biases they have acquired over their years of life and are thus incapable of behaving in a biased way. Many people would prefer to believe they have no biases at all, regardless of what the data shows or the experiences others share. But as Christians, we have a God who became human. We have a God who had biases and had the grace to change when those biases were revealed to him. If Jesus, God himself, can have unconscious biases that need to be addressed, how could we claim that we don’t?
The good news is, Jesus models for us what to do with them. We need only look at how he responds to the Syrophoenician woman. When she pushes back against his prejudiced words, he listens. He sees her and believes her when she tells him what she needs. He frees her daughter, and he commends the woman’s faithfulness. He does not get defensive. He does not claim to be in the right. He listens, he believes, he reevaluates, and he repairs what he can. Imagine what our society would look like, if we responded to one another this way. Imagine what our civil discourse, what our public dialogues and our dinner table conversations could be. Being human does mean we are susceptible to bias, yes, but it also means we are capable of learning, of change, of coming closer to the example given to us in Christ. We can love one another better. We must love one another better.
Mother A Writes 