Thinking and Thinking Again
or
Outside the Box

by Rev John Moses
St. Mark's United Church, Whitby, ON
Sept 10, 2006

And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house, and would not have any one know it; yet he could not be hid. But immediately a woman, whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell down at his feet.

Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he said to her, "Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

And he said to her, "For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter." And she went home, and found the child lying in bed, and the demon gone.   Mark 7:24-30

Lynn Johnston's comic strip For Better or Worse follows the Patterson family through the everyday joys and challenges of growing up and growing older. In the episode (Aug 4, 2006) included in today's bulletin young April, who is about fifteen, is saying "good bye" to her boyfriend before going off to spend a few weeks with relatives in Manitoba. The boyfriend is a bit shy about a kiss in front of April's mom but April says, "She has to learn the facts of life, so I prefer that she learn them directly from me." Then they kiss with a somewhat surprised mom looking on.

What April wants her mother to know is that she is not a little girl anymore and she uses a line that has most likely been used on her to reverse the mother-daughter role. There is something that mom needs to learn and, whether she likes it or not, she is going to have to deal with it. What parent is ever the same after seeing a daughter kiss her boyfriend or a son kiss his girlfriend? It is a moment for thinking and thinking again, for seeing your child in new light and beginning to understand her or him in a new way. It is also the dawning of an awareness that your relationship with this young person is changing, perhaps a lot faster than you might want it to change. Children are good at providing us with these kinds of moments. How we respond will shape both them and us.

The movie Mr. Holland's Opus, starring Richard Dreyfuss, (1995) tells the story of a musician who aspires to be a great American composer like Leonard Bernstein or Aaron Copland. However, to make ends meet, he takes a job teaching music at a high school and that absorbs his time and energy to such an extent that his dream is never realized. The "point" of the film is that the students with whom he has been involved over the years are in fact Mr. Holland's great work, his "opus" but what I found most compelling was Holland's relationship with his only child, his son Cole. Cole is born deaf and, in spite of his best intentions, Holland cannot hide his disappointment. His son, he thinks, will never be able to appreciate music, never be able to share the great passion of his life. He doesn't take the trouble to become fluent in American Sign Language, leaving his wife to do most of the communicating. As the teen years approach, father and son are strangers to one another, separated by a wall of silence.

On the day John Lennon is killed, Holland comes home very upset. He treats Cole even brusquely than usual. When Cole signs and asks what the problem is, the dismissive reply is that John Lennon is dead but he couldn't possibly understand what that means. This is the breaking point for Cole. All his frustration comes pouring out and he refuses to let his father turn away from him. He expresses his anger at the assumption the he would not know who John Lennon was and he reveals quite an extensive knowledge of music, which he enjoys by placing his hands on the record player and feeling the vibrations. Cole is demanding to be taken seriously. He is no longer willing to put up with being the poor little deaf boy whom his father may be able to pity but never treat as an equal. For both Holland and Cole this is an excruciatingly painful moment but it is one that helps them step outside their respective boxes and, for the first time, really see and hear one another. It happens because Cole is angry enough or desperate enough or lonely enough to risk an even deeper separation from his father. In these kinds of situations there really are no guarantees as to how things will turn out. Some things are worth the risk.

Some things are worth the risk. Such a conviction is surely what motivates the mother in today's reading from the Gospel of Mark. Here she is a Syrophoenician woman, a Gentile, coming to beg a favour of a Jewish healer. If she knows anything about Jews at all, she must know that she is likely to be rebuffed. Because it is so difficult for them to retain their cultural and religious identity even in their own country, now dominated by Gentile foreigners, Jews like Jesus tend to jealously guard their distance from the pagan goyim. But this is probably not the only risk she is taking. Where is her husband, the child's father? Why hasn't he come as head of the family to seek out the healer? Perhaps he deems it beneath his dignity to be beholden to a Jew and he is not likely to be best pleased where he hears what she has done. Or maybe there is no husband and she is a widow or woman who has had a child out of wedlock. In either case, her situation is still more "iffy" for she is then a woman without the protection of a man, however disapproving he may be.

At first the encounter been Jesus and this Gentile woman seems to be going as anyone might have predicted. She makes her request, asks Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter and he refuses in an insulting manner: "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."

To this day in the Middle East the epithet "dog" is reserved for those beneath consideration as human beings, as in "infidel dog." Jesus is saying, in effect, that what he has to offer is only for the house of Israel and it cannot be wasted on outsiders of no consequence. What follows is entirely unexpected. Rather than cringing and slinking away like a dog, the woman retorts, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." (Mk.7:28) She is staking her claim to a share in heaven's realm, absolutely refusing to be deflected. It is a gutsy performance, one which may well put Jesus in a yet more contrary frame of mind---if all he is able to see is a Gentile woman being uppity, stepping out of her place and into his holy space. But Jesus sees something more. The Gospel of Matthew says that he sees great faith. (15:28) Mark says that he tells the woman, "For saying that you may go---the demon has left your daughter." (7:29) It is obvious that this meeting is an occasion of change in the lives of the woman and her daughter. They find freedom from whatever affliction it is that demonic possession implies but it is also a catalyst for change in Jesus. He begins to see a breadth to his work that he has not hitherto imagined. The Gentiles, he realizes, are capable of deep, honest and courageous faith. They are not dogs to be despised but people to be loved and healed and empowered.

This story about Jesus being forced to think again, to step outside his box, forces us to step outside our boxes as well. If, for example, we understand Jesus as being human only insofar as he had a body like ours, we may be startled by the suggestion that he shared at least one of the deeply held prejudices of the average first-century Jew, that is to say, a contempt for or even a hatred of Gentiles. Could Jesus have been a racist? The story strongly suggests that he may have been. The hope for the racist in each of us is that he was able to change. For me, a Jesus who has to find his way and at times to change his mind is a much more accessible model of humanity than a perfect Jesus who always gets it right the first time. In finding his way, he can help us find our way.

There are numerous instances in the church's history of last-ditch resistance to change and of change coming only when there was no choice but to accept it. Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin are but a few of the names that come to mind. How strange it is then and how potentially liberating to find in one of our foundational texts the assurance that Jesus himself could and did rethink his position when facts and circumstances required it and this was not a defeat or a diminution but rather an opportunity for growth and widening the kingdom's embrace.

Another disconcerting aspect of the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman is that it reminds us that the excluded are seldom invited in. They usually have to force their way in. We liberal, mostly middle class church types tend to see ourselves as being benevolent and helpful, always anxious to lend a hand to the "less fortunate." Should "the less fortunate" begin to ask for or, worse yet, demand, a role in deciding who gets what, should they try to put themselves on anything like an equal footing with us, we whine about their lack of gratitude and how they are upsetting everything.

Back in the 1980s homosexual people who were part of the United Church of Canada began to ask to be considered full members to whom all the offices of the church, including ordered ministry, were open. Very few would admit to having anything against gays and lesbians and it was generally agreed that they were perfectly welcome to sit in our pews, maybe even sing in the choir, as long as they didn't draw attention to themselves and make trouble. When they decided they would no longer settle for this kind of "don't ask, don't tell" toleration, our benevolence was severely tested. I was one of those who opposed the ordination and commissioning of homosexual people in the beginning because I thought the church was not ready for it. In retrospect I have to say that, left undisturbed, we would never have been ready. It was only when the issue was forced and we had no option but to face it that we were to move toward inclusion and justice. We ought never to forget what it cost many people to force us to think about what we did not want to think about and act when we would rather have done nothing.

If we could really own the story of how Jesus met a woman who changed his way of thinking and, therefore, the world, we might discover that we have a precious resource to help us and others through these uncertain and difficult times. It is all too clear that many of our ways of thinking and acting with respect to the environment, war and peace, the disparity between wealth and poverty, and so on, are leading us, literally, to dead ends. And yet, we are loathe to consider alternatives. We can scarcely imagine an alternative. If we could see that being Jesus' people requires us to be like him in inventive re-imagination that might make a lot of difference. We might make a lot of difference.

Some things are worth the risk.