“Spat”

Mark 7:24-37

September 6, 2009

I cannot remember when I wasn’t told to imitate, to be like Jesus. That is the goal of Christianity, but listening to how people read the stories about Jesus, it almost seemed impossible to be like Jesus, walking on water wherever he could.

But if you go back to the first Gospel, Mark presents a Jesus with an edge, perhaps an original Jesus. If what you want is a nice spiritual Jesus who preaches politely, offering salvation ecumenically to all people no matter who they may be, then don’t read Mark. Make some excuse, for in these two quick episodes we not only hear, but feel viscerally Jesus hard at work physically doing the Gospel. It is neither polite nor pretty, but spitting is really the Gospel. If spitting is involved, maybe we really should listen carefully.

First is an unexplained trip by this Messiah to the region of Tyre and Sidon on the Mediterranean coast, solidly pagan territory. Jesus is abandoning the security of Jewish culture and geography for a place where one talked of the deity in the plural - not God, but the gods. To use a phrase of Maclean’s, Jesus is going into “the most dangerous neighbourhood” in that part of the world.

What Jesus was intending to do there is beyond our figuring out and once he arrived he went into a particular house so that no one would know that he was there. Who did he think he was fooling? When a stranger comes into a small town, everybody knows he’s there and where he is. So, he could not be hid.

Jesus had tried to get lost, but he was found by a Greek woman, a Syro-Phoenician - a way of saying she wasn’t Jewish, she was a pagan. She had heard of him somehow and wasn’t concerned about his denomination, for she had come to seek his help because her young daughter was possessed by a demon. For Jesus this was not an unusual request and demons are not discriminatory - neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free - they possess all.

The conversation that follows is one of the most embarrassing in the Bible. Most people don’t know what to do with Jesus here, for he bluntly responds, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” It’s a figurative term, but still he calls her a dog, and not by the way a cute dog. The sense of this is that Jesus is a person sent to minister to the Jews, not to the Greeks, to the pagan non-Jews. Inter-faith-wise, we are offended doubly that Jesus would be so narrow and so crude. Is this a major misprint that some translator didn’t quite understand?

She was driven by her need for her daughter’s healing, and is a exemplar of patience and pretty significant religious insight. “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She didn’t try to challenge Jesus’ Jewish-centrism; she acquiesced to the superiority of his faith, and found a humble dog’s place in it. The crumbs will be more than adequate for my daughter. Her crumbs opened up a new world for Jesus, and he saw in her a faith perhaps wider and stronger than his, and he admitted that she was right.

Nevertheless, there is another angle on Jesus’ attitude. He knew that his faith was very specific, based in the God of Israel. The God of Israel was unique in authority and being and accomplishment, as well as relationship. To be a servant of the God of Israel was not Dwight Eisenhower’s famous line that he didn’t care what church or religious faith you belonged to as long as you belonged to one. To be a servant of God required a very particular set of behaviours and viewpoints on the values of life and other people. He was not here to minister to the generic God of everyone, and he suspected that this Syro-Phoenician woman was just interested in a spirituality that would work for her and her demon-possessed daughter. What she showed him was that the essence of the God of Israel could be perceived by a non-Israelite. The Gospel became specific like that.

Jesus went back to his home region and along the way people brought to him a deaf and dumb man. The kindness and the care they showed to bring this man was then matched by Jesus who took the frightened and embarrassed man off to the side privately.

This is not a smooth, polished Jesus who with a well-practiced motion of the hand and firm pleasant words magically waves away diseases and demons. Reversing the principalities and powers of this world is hard work, physical work. So that this poor man would have a sense of what Jesus was going to do to him, Jesus took hold of him, put his fingers in the man’s ears and said to the man, “Ephphatha,” “Be opened!” in Aramaic. The two of them may have been off to the side, but somebody remembered the very Aramaic words Jesus used. Oh, and in between the ears and the words, he spat upon his fingers and touched the man’s tongue, looked up into heaven and groaned loudly. The Revised Standard Version says “he sighed,” but this was hard work - he groaned and grunted. Everything opened - his ears heard, his tongue spoke clearly. His demons were gone and destroyed.

By now this was no a longer private meeting and all could see and hear the evidence of the once bedeviled man. Jesus told them not to mention this to anyone - he knew no one would get it right, no one would understand, and people would interpret Jesus wrongly. The cat no longer had anyone’s tongue, however, and before long the word was spread far and wide. He does all things well, they praised, a little too slick and oily considering what would happen.

This physical and rough-edged Jesus who stumbles and groans as he casts out demons and frees a man’s faculties is not the sweet Jesus we turn to solve our problems and save our souls. This is a fully human Jesus, not pretty to listen to or look at. Fittingly, the Gospel is a labour, and Jesus labours at this human and divine task, showing us how to live out the Gospel, living out a very specific, demanding way of life where one often says the wrong thing, but admits one’s wrongness, and then does the right thing; where healing means not drawing attention to yourself, but giving every ounce of strength you have to healing the ailing person.

As hard as it is, this Gospel we can do; it is extraordinarily difficult, but we can fulfill it with our labour. The magical Gospel in which Jesus heals all with no real effort through his divine power is something we cannot do. Mark’s Gospel is meant to show us first how to labour like Jesus.

Preached by Robert Kitchen

Knox-Metropolitan United Church

Regina, Saskatchewan