Mark 7:31-37

From about 2005 to  2010 I was invited to become part of the local chapter of Faith and Light.

Faith and Light is an ecumenical organisation that was started by Jean Vanier, a French-Canadian lay person,  as a way of deliberately creating a community of faith especially for people with intellectual disabilities as well as their family and friends. He had recognized how the intellectually disabled (and the disabled in general) were often excluded from the mainstream life of the church or on the periphery. Faith and Light was formed as a faith organisation where the intellectually disabled would be placed at the center.

The group I was involved in was run by members of the Methodist Church I was minister of and included people of other denominations. In fact Faith and Light was probably one of the most inclusive groups or communities that I have been a part of. Not only did it have people of various shades of ability and disability, and various ages, it also included people from a variety of denominations, Methodist, Catholics, Greek-Orthodox and Baptist, as well as a Chinese family who were from a Daoist tradition.

At the beginning of every meeting the Faith and Light prayer would be read:

Jesus you have called us to follow you in a community of Faith and Light,
Teach us to accept our wounds, our weakness so that your power may be revealed.
Teach us to find you in all our brothers and sisters especially in those who are the weakest.

What I learned from that prayer and from being a part of that community is that all of us have wounds and weaknesses, and in that sense all of us have disabilities. For some of us our wounds, weaknesses and disabilities are that obvious or visible

I discovered that this was not a meeting of the intellectually disabled on the one side and their friends and families on the other, but in fact each of us present, with our own wounds and weaknesses were disabled. In that community I came to recognise that I too was disabled in my own way.

I still believe that it is true, that all of us in our own ways have disabilities: things we are able to do and things we are unable to do.

In our passage today, I wonder if the man who is deaf and has a speech impediment stands as a symbol and a reminder of a particular disability that many of us suffer from.

Outwardly, the story is of a man who is deaf and who cannot speak. He relies on his friends bring him to Jesus for Jesus to lay his hands on him. But inwardly the story could also be about us. It could be about the inability of many in this world to truly and deeply listen.

In Mark 4:12, Jesus quotes from Isaiah where the prophet says the people of Israel are ever hearing, but never understanding. Never truly listening.

Our ears may outwardly be perfectly fine in our ability to hear sounds, but many suffer from a listening disability, and inability to truly and deeply listen to others.

This became apparent when in 2015 I went on a 13 week narrative counselling course. In the first few weeks of the course we spent time practicing our listening skills with one another. Learning to listen and reflect back to another person what they had shared with us, without putting our own interpretation on it and trying as much as possible to use the words that they had used, rather than our own.

The majority of people in the course (and there were at least 30 of us), really struggled.

It was a sign that in most of our ordinary conversations in everyday life, very little true listening actually happens. Often we are listening with half an ear and our minds are thinking about something else. Often we’re putting our own interpretation on what we are hearing. Often, instead of listening to what is being said, we are thinking about what our next clever or funny reply is going to be, and as soon as we begin to do that, we are no longer truly listening. We become deaf to each other.

In the passage, not only is the man unable to hear. He is also unable to speak. Some translations suggest that he has a speech impediment. There is something preventing him from being able to speak properly. In the original Greek, the image that is created is of a tongue that is tied up in knots. He is tongue tied, unable to get the words out.

The order is significant. Before we can speak properly we first need to learn to listen.

If our ability to listen is disabled, if we don't know how to listen deeply to another human being, then our ability to speak with relevance, care and sensitivity is lost.

If we as Christians are to learn to have loving truthful and kind speech, then we need to engage in listening as an act of love. In the passage, Jesus puts his fingers into the man's ears and says "Be opened!". We need to allow our ears, and in fact our hearts  to be truly opened to the other in order to respond with speech that is loving and kind.

Becoming a good listener is therefore not just a requirement to be a good counselor. It is a requirement to be a good Christian, and in fact simply to be a good human being.

In the passage, before Jesus lays his hands on the man, Jesus draws him aside from the crowd. Jesus creates space around the man and gives him his undivided attention. To be a good listener means creating space for another person. It means for the time we are listening, to temporarily put to one side our own thoughts, our own wants and our own desires in order to create space to hear and receive the other persons thoughts, the other persons feelings, to understand the other persons wants and the other persons desires.

True listening is therefore an act of profound selflessness, because only when there is less of self can we make space for another. In this sense, the act of deep listening is at the heart of the spiritual life. When learn to listen deeply, we become like Jesus who constantly created space for others. The phrase that Paul uses in his letter to the Philippians (2:7) is that Jesus emptied himself for others. And in the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn: "He emptied himself of all but love".

When we truly and deeply listen to others, we therefore become a little bit more like God. It has been said that before God created anything, there was only God. When God created the universe, God had to make space for that which was not God. Every time parents bring children into the world, they too are being like God. They too are having to make space for a new unique individual, who may have come from them, but is not them. Deep listening is at the heart of family life.

And so, may this Gospel story be true for us also. May Jesus draw us aside. May he put his fingers in our ears and say “Be opened” and may he put his spit on our tongues and say “Be loosed”, that we may create space for others by listening deeply, and that we may in turn learn to speak with sensitivity, care and love. AMEN.

SOME QUOTES ON LISTENING:
 
≈  “Be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.” James 1:19
 
≈   “Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.” Stephen Covey
 
≈ "The word listen contains the same letters as the word silent.” Alfred Brendel
 
≈  “Listen. People start to heal the moment they feel heard.” Cheryl Richardson
 
≈   “If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be they have a small piece of fluff in their ear.” Winnie-the-Pooh  (A.A. Milne)

Mark 7:24-30

What do we make of a passage like this one today?

Reading it through it contains some disturbing language. In the passage, Jesus is seen indirectly referring to the women’s little girl as a dog.

Jesus appears to be buying into or simply accepting 1st century Jewish racism.

1st century Jews saw themselves as superior to every other race. They believed they were God’s chosen people. All other nations and races were by implication, God’s 'unchosen' people. People rejected by God. Unclean. Unholy. Less important. Less valuable.

As an expression of all these negative attitudes to their neighbours, Jews would refer to them as dogs. Even today, to call someone a dog is not a compliment. It carries with it the sense that the person concerned is no better than an animal in our eyes. Perhaps also a sense that they are dirty, unacceptable, less than human.

And so what is happening in this passage that Jesus is buying into that language.

One explanation that some preachers have suggested is that this is a moment of conversion for Jesus. This is a pivotal moment in the gospel, where Jesus is confronted by his own prejudice and caused to rethink those prejudices when seeing the faith of the Syrian Phonetician women.

This is quite a challenging view, because it makes us rethink our views of Jesus. Most Christians are accustomed to thinking of Jesus as being absolutely perfect with no fault at all. The idea that Jesus might have had un-examined racial prejudices which had to be challenged and over-turned seems a strange one. Maybe even blasphemous?

And yet those who interpret this passage in this way, will remind us that if Jesus was truly human, as all orthodox schools of Christianity would affirm, then is it not possible that at times, like all humans Jesus had to reconsider ideas he had grown up with and inherited. After all, in Mark’s Gospel, at no point does Jesus claim to be perfect or omniscient. In fact, when one person comes to him and calls him “good teacher”, Jesus immediately responds asking the question “Why do you call me good? There is only One who is good, and that is God.”

And so we are left with the question: “Was Jesus, in this incident, confronted with the un-examined prejudices of his own culture and his own upbringing, and then forced by the faith of this women to review those prejudices, or is it perhaps that there is something else happening in this passage?

I wouldn’t want to dismiss the above interpretation out of hand. But it seems to me that maybe something else was happening?

Firstly, in passage just prior to this one, Jesus has just declared that all foods are clean. Last week we glossed over those words. But to a first century Jew, Jesus’ words would have been like dropping a bomb-shell. It would have been utterly shocking. It would have rocked the foundations of what they considered it meant to be properly Jewish. It would have rocked their understanding of their own scriptures. It was of course in scripture, in the book of Leviticus, that some foods were to be regarded as clean and others to be unclean. Jesus was not only challenging their culture and their tradition, he was even challenging what they would have regarded as the word of God.

Absolutely shocking to hear Jesus declare that all foods are clean. How then would they define themselves as Jewish if they no longer observed their food laws?

Clearly Jesus in the previous passage, Jesus had already begun to challenge the culture of his upbringing. Jesus had already begun to see beyond his conditioned understandings of what it meant to be Jewish. He had already begun to see that God is bigger than the Jewish tradition of his upbringing. There is a realm of the spirit that transcends any specific culture or tradition.

Secondly, the very fact that Jesus was willing to consciously and knowingly travel into Gentile territory meant that Jesus had already transcended the racial prejudices of his day.

For most Jews, the very thought of traveling into gentile territory would have been non-negotiable. Gentile territories and and gentile towns were no-go areas, best to be avoided even if it meant adding a day or two to one’s travel time.

To travel into gentile area and into a gentile town would have given most Jews the "heebie jeebies".

Jewish prejudices were so deep that even going into a gentile town would have made them feel unclean and deeply uncomfortable and probably even a little unsafe.

But Jesus goes knowingly into the gentile area of Tyre. He seems un-phased by it. Clearly, he no longer holds the prejudices of his Jewish culture, or he wouldn’t be there in the first place.

Some have suggested that what is therefore actually happening in this passage is in fact a bit of playful banter between Jesus and this strong willed, determined women, who is determined at all cost to see her daughter healed.

From this perspective, Jesus uses the language of Jewish racial prejudices in order to highlight it, to bring it out into the open, and then to undermine it and over-turn it. Maybe this is a teaching moment for his disciples.

The Syrian Phonetician woman already knew of the Jewish prejudices against her people. She was probably expecting a hostile response anyway. But there is a clue in the passage that Jesus is already undermining the racist language of the Jews even as he makes use of it. The term Jesus uses for dog, is in the diminutive. In effect turning the word into a term of endearment. It could give the effect of a parent referring to their son or daughter and ‘my little puppy’. And so with that phrase, Jesus sets up a bit of banter... too-ing and frowing with this women, who Jesus clearly sees is up for the challenge.

In the end, I don’t believe it is Jesus who is being converted... In the end, I think it is the disciples who are watching who would have been converted or at least deeply challenged by these interactions between Jesus and the Syrian Phonetician women.

And maybe, by pushing her hard, Jesus was being a little bit like Simon Cowell on the X-factor who pushes some of the contestants to bring the best out of them. Maybe, Jesus was pushing her a bit in order for her to discover the strength of her own faith and determination that already lived within her.

Mark 7:1-23 and Micah 6:6-8: 

Rev. Janet Hunt, a Lutheran minister in America tells the story of an incident early in her ministry at her first church, a smallish rural congregation. She says:

The people there were kind and they were kind to their pastor.

When she began her ministry there, she quickly learned it was their tradition to simply come forward for communion in a line, and to receive the bread and wine while standing.

She writes that it never occurred to her to even ask why they did this. And so it was that when the season of Lent rolled around, she thought to suggest another way...that for the season leading up to Holy Week and Easter perhaps they could celebrate holy communion by receiving it kneeling at the rail before the table. Lent, after all, as she had learned in seminary, is a season of repentance, and kneeling would be especially appropriate.

In her own words she writes the following:

“And so on the first Sunday in Lent we knelt for communion. I'll never forget that morning as the kind and good people of St. Paul Lutheran Church did as their pastor asked. Winifred, the matriarch of the congregation, sat on the right hand side near the back. She was a round faced woman whose wrinkles had been etched from years of smiling. Indeed, she was not young and her knees were not what they used to be. After most of the rest of the congregation had come forward, Winifred made her way to the front as well and knelt with all the rest. I remember wincing to watch as she struggled to get up again. And it hit me that this was why the people of St. Paul Lutheran Church did not kneel to receive the sacrament. It was out of kindness. If Winifred could not kneel, then no one would. The next week we quietly returned to standing as the bread and wine were shared.”

Rev. Janet Hunt ends the story by asking the question: “Why do we do what we do?”

Is there a reason and a meaning behind our traditions? Are they motivated in the final analysis by kindness?

Our Gospel passage that we read today is all about first century Jewish traditions

The context is that a group of big shot Pharisees have come up from Jerusalem to investigate the troublesome matter of Jesus and his growing band of followers. Word about Jesus had clearly begun to spread beyond the backwaters of Galilee down to the capital of Jerusalem. He had created enough of a stir and unsettled enough people in Galilee that leaders in Jerusalem felt the need to take a closer look at him.

The first thing they observe and are quick to point out is that Jesus and his followers are failing to observe their sacred Jewish traditions of ritual washing. They eat without washing their hands in the elaborate and detailed way passed on in their tradition.

Now, it is important to note that what we are dealing with in this passage is not matters of hygiene, but rather matters of what they considered holiness and unholiness.

The religion of the Pharisees had become obsessed with issues of ritual purity. Over time the ritual washing of hands and other items had grown more and more elaborate and come to regarded as signs of holiness. Those who washed in this way were ritually clean and holy, and those who didn’t were ritually unclean, and unholy and anything they touched would be tainted with impurity and uncleaness.

Interestingly, the Greek word for defiled hands is actually the word common. They were eating bread with common hands, hands that were not ritually pure. It suggests that the common things of life are somehow not holy.

By contrast, the way Jesus lived suggests that God’s blessing already rests on the common things of life. God meets us in the common, ordinary things of life. God’s holiness is already here, already present in the ordinary, in a common shared meal with friends.

And in a sense that is what Holy Communion is about. It is a celebration of God coming to us in the ordinary, common elements of bread and wine. The Christian faith is meant to be an earthy faith. Holy Communion is meant to be a celebration of the God of the common and ordinary things of life. The earthy elements of bread and wine (everyday items in 1st century Palestine) remind us of Jesus and how he lived his life: he nourished people with his love, and brought joy to people through his warmth.

There should be no reason to exclude ourselves from Holy Communion if we feel common and ordinary because Jesus himself ate meals with common ordinary folk, eating with common hands. There is already something precious and holy about you simply by virtue of the fact that you are God’s creation.

In contrast, with their special elaborate rituals, one could even say, with high and noble ideals, the Pharisees were trying to make everything holy, but in the process failing to see the holiness that was already present.

Jesus responds by calling the Pharisees hypocrites, which comes from a Greek word referring to actors on a stage. They were like actors on the stage playing a role in a made-up, man-made holiness. Their holiness was all outward show. Like wearing the external clothes and masks of actors.

By contrast, Jesus points to matters of the heart that are far more important than anything external.

Jesus calls us to seek a purity of heart, a purity of intention and a purity of action rather than a man-made outward, external purity.

I am reminded of Jesus’ words in Matthew: “Blessed are the pure in heart, For they will see God”.
And in Titus 1:15 "...to the pure, all things are pure."

The Dalai Lama once famously said: "My religion is kindness". In our reading from Micah 6:6-8 we see the prophet Micah has a similar conception of the heart of Jewish faith and religion: that it is ultimately about kindness and humility.

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

When we live our lives with a simplicity and a purity of heart, in other words, with hearts that are loving and kind, then we discover that all of life, even the common and the ordinary is already holy. AMEN.