Opening
Mark 7:24-37

September 10, 2006


Have you every heard of a hushpuppy? No - it’s not a shoe and it isn’t a breed of dog - hushpuppies are a culinary specialty of the American South.

The name evolved from the practice folks used to have of throwing little morsels of cornbread to the dogs who would faithfully gather around the area of a fish fry or BBQ. The dogs would smell the aroma of good food cooking and like any animal motivated by hunger they would begin to beg for a portion of what their noses promised them would be a most tasty treat.

Quite naturally the cooks who were preparing the fish or BBQ were reluctant to give the dogs the good food so instead they threw bits of cornbread into the deep fryer and tossed it to the dogs to get them to stop barking.

Hushpuppies are the crumbs thrown to the dogs to shut them up - thus the term - Hush! Puppy!

Well - nothing will shut this woman up! If only the word “puppy” had been the one used, we might be chuckling, but Jesus was blunt and called her a dog. It isn’t nice now, and it wasn’t intended to be nice then. That is what is hard to imagine: Jesus did not intend to be nice. How can he still be Jesus?

Perhaps it was a geographical problem. For some reason, Jesus and company had traveled over to Tyre on the Mediterranean coast, an area where there were virtually no Jews. Loaded with Gentiles and pagans galore, an unsavoury, unclean, really not safe place for a rabbi and his students to be - it’s a puzzle why he was there. As soon as he got there, he took refuge in a house, but it seemed seconds before someone was knocking at his door. It was her.

None of this was proper. She was a Gentile woman, a woman who was forward and presumptuous. And she had a daughter with an unclean spirit, a demon possessing her. Demons in a pagan land. The disciples around the room had to be rolling their eyes, “Well, don’t they all in this neck of the woods!” Jesus didn’t help matters.

It’s not right to give the children’s food to the dogs, Jesus sneered at her. Not much of a code to be figured out here - the children are the Children of Israel and dogs are those unclean scavengers of Gentiles. I remind you again, we are all Gentiles. Bark!

Even puppies eat the crumbs that fall under the table, she pointed out. She didn’t argue his characterization, just expanded its focus. Dogs do get to eat the hushpuppies. Something clicked inside Jesus, and without a gasp or an Aha! he simply said, “For saying that, you may go - the demon has left your daughter.” So it came to pass.

A lot of people have felt very uncomfortable about this exchange and frankly would like to leave it out of the Gospel. The Syro-Phoenician woman has beaten Jesus at the old rabbinical game of rhetoric, and she isn’t even a Jew. There are even bigger problems that make a lot of Christians nervous, for people assume Jesus to be divine, indeed, people need Jesus to be divine. Does God need to learn? What can God learn after creating everything one learns about? So is Jesus really capable of learning something new? Or does being divine make Jesus immune to any real learning? If so, then what happened here with the Syro-Phoenician woman?

Jesus is fully divine, but if Jesus isn’t fully human then he does not do any of us good. If Jesus did all his miracles and healings and even his excellent teaching on account of his divine superpowers and super-intellect then his example is one you can never imitate, for I have not seen even the best of us approaching divinity lately. If Jesus is fully human it is encouraging that there were still things he could learn and grow and expand his view of the world. Maybe I can do the hard and humble work of recognizing that there’s more in the world and in people that I do not know.

That demon-possessed daughter whom the story is supposed to be about? Jesus says it, “for saying that” your daughter is healed. Is this what faith boils down to, being stubborn enough to outwit the gods? If that’s what you have to do to save your child, then get smart. Faith is not a recitation of a creed or knowing the right prayers, but a relationship with the divine that is beyond our definitions. Jacob wrestled with God, after all.

What Jesus had learned is seen by his turning back towards and then beyond home to the Decapolis or the Ten Cities, also a Gentile, non-Jewish region. This time Jesus is not sneaking into a strange land and laying low. He does not try to seclude himself, for they brought to him a deaf man who also had a speech impediment. Who would the “they” be except Gentile leaders in the community. They begged Jesus to lay his hand upon him - they had heard about Jesus and despite being heathen polytheists they possessed a divine compassion for the plight of this deaf mute that forced them to throw aside their dignity. Jesus’ ministry was no longer just to the Jewish people; it was becoming universal, receiving the concerns of all human beings.

Jesus took the man away from the crowd and began a bizarre procedure no one is expected to imitate. He put his fingers in the man’s ears, spat and touched the man’s tongue (saliva was regarded as having great healing power), looked up to heaven, groaned, and then spoke to him in Aramaic “Ephphatha”, “be opened.” Our man heard loudly and spoke distinctly. I would not try to attempt this at home!

How do we know all of this? If it were truly private, would we have such minute details about Jesus’ eccentric healing methods? How would we know what he said, especially being preserved for us in the original language? Only a few highly memorable times Jesus is cited by his precise Aramaic words - translation is quite good enough everywhere else.

Jesus tells this man and “them” not to tell anyone about this - “but the more he ordered them, the more they zealously proclaimed it.” That is one more thing Jesus needed to learn - that you don’t tell people not to tell others about something good. Some think he slyly did this on purpose, but I tend to believe that Jesus was genuinely worried that people were assuming this healing was all he was about. In vain, he tried to keep it on the down low. “He has done everything well, even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to talk.”

Jesus had learned something new. It seems so obvious as heirs of a world-wide Christian movement operating for millennia. It is that a human being who is suffering is God’s child, no matter what their position towards the God of Israel is. God just didn’t create one race of faithful people. God created humanity and the universe of life we all inhabit. Jesus’ mind and spirit was opened, expanded.

The desire of many Christian churches and denominations to have contact only with fellow Christians, to operate Christian schools and colleges, publish Christian Yellow Pages, to listen only to Christian music is to forget that Jesus’ most dramatic and compassionate encounters were with people who did not share his kind of faith, if any faith at all - I guess they don’t read their Bibles!

I know that every single one of you has significant contacts with people who are not Christian in the slightest or are committed deeply to another great faith. Probably you know numerically more of these people than you know people like us sitting next to you in these pews. And I know that you truly appreciate many of these Gentile folk and trust them and their advice and counsel, and you even love them. Don’t stop now, keep on loving. You have read the Bible. Jesus fully divine, fully human, still learned something from someone other than his family. You and I still have a lot to learn and who knows from whom we will learn our next lesson?

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan