Sunday, September 6, 2015 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Taking Hold of Jesus

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 125
Isaiah 35:4–7
Mark 7:24–30

In the story of another, may we meet You.
By the life of another, may You shape us.
With the companionship of another, may You guide us.

Living Stones: Pray Now Weekly Devotions

What was she thinking? Seriously, what thoughts traveled through her mind at that moment? Now, unlike Jairus, the religious leader who confronted Jesus a few chapters earlier, her name is not known to us. She is just called “the woman.” Mark tells us she was of Syrophoenician origin. Matthew claims she was a Canaanite. Their point, though, is that she was not Jewish. And that truth begs the question: what possessed this no-name, no-status woman to think that she could march right into the place where Jesus was staying and demand that his mercy and healing were for her family too? We ought to wonder as to the source of her gumption.

For her entire life that foreign woman was probably told that God’s mercy did not extend to her or her daughter; that they were outsiders to the covenant with the God of Israel; and that, as a woman and as a girl, they had no voice, no power, and no right to demand anything anyway. They needed to stay in their places, accept their situation, and just deal with the fact that the little girl was sick and getting sicker. That is what they knew. That is what they had probably been told. That was the reality of the place and time in which they lived.

So what gave her the gumption to decide that the God of Israel was too gracious to just let them languish; that God’s mercy must also be meant for them; and that God would want her daughter to have a future full of wholeness, healing, and shalom, just like God wanted that for the daughter of Jairus, the Jewish religious leader? Something planted that courage into the woman’s soul, don’t you think? Someone must have nurtured and nourished that courage, right?

Mark implies Jesus had gone into the region on that day hoping to not do one single bit of ministry. He needed to clock out for a while, to escape the people’s neediness and demands on his time and energy. He was tired. We now call the way he felt “compassion fatigue.” So he made the decision to travel to Tyre, a region northwest of Galilee that was largely Gentile. He must have thought if he could just make it there, he could finally carve out the time and space to simply be by himself and to refuel for the long journey ahead. He could let out a deep sigh, release his tense shoulders, and just breathe. And yet perhaps at the very same moment as he closed his eyes for a delicious nap, she burst in the door and demanded his attention.

In Mark’s version of this story, we do not hear her voice in the beginning. Matthew, though, claims she said something like, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Mark, however, just writes she bowed down at his feet and made her request. Now, certainly part of the reason she bowed down was to show her respect and humility. Furthermore, that was the appropriate posture that one would assume when one approached a man of Jesus’ reputation, especially if you were a woman, a Gentile woman, a foreign woman, a woman who dared to come without the protection of a male relative.

But I have also wondered if she quickly bowed her head for yet another reason. Maybe she did it so that Jesus would not see the anger and desperation in her eyes. I am convinced her eyes flashed with both anger and desperation, because I, like some of you, have seen the eyes of a parent whose child was in dire need and who would do whatever it took to try and make it better.

As a hospital chaplain, I have seen the eyes of a dad sitting at the bedside of his son while the doctors tried to figure out if anything more could be done, the father’s voice raising and his eyes flashing as he demanded more answers and fuller reasons for why his little one was not waking up. As a pastor, I have seen the eyes of a mother whose child was sick but who had no money for medicine, who looked at me with anger and grief as she swallowed down feelings of indignity and asked for help from the church. As a young mission volunteer in Dallas, I have seen the eyes of parents as they sternly but quietly ushered their kids through the soup kitchen line, looking straight into my fresh-out-of-college face, almost daring me to not have compassion for them. This week, I have looked into the eyes of the refugee parents trying to flee Syria with their children, as they spoke to news agencies with real anger and great frustration that they had nowhere to go and no country wanted to take them in and children were dying because of it.

Like I’m sure has happened with your own eyes, once my baptism opened up my eyes to notice other people, I have seen the eyes of parents and caregivers who would clearly do whatever it took to make it better for either their kids or for all children in need. And those eyes flash with anger, with grief, and often with a real sense of desperation. So it might very well be that the Syrophoenician woman bowed her head that day not only to show the appropriate and expected respect, but also to hide her anger that her daughter was in such desperate need in the first place and that as her mother, her protector, she had nowhere else to turn, no one else to whom she could go, except this stranger rabbi she’d heard about named Jesus.

But in addition, it could also be that she bowed her head because she knew what was coming. She had a good idea what Jesus’ response would be. She had heard it too many times before. Here is how seminary president Brian Blount paraphrases Jesus’ words back to her: “Look lady, I wasn’t sent to help you and your people. . . . I am not about to throw my salvific power to the dogs” (Brian Blount and Gary Charles, Preaching Mark in Two Voices, p. 131).

I tell you what: if her eyes had not been flashing with anger before his response, surely they started to storm at that point. Surely she must have been thinking, “Fine. We can play this game, because I hear all these great things about you. I hear how powerful you are, Jesus, how compassionate you are, how you make the impossible possible, how you turn night into day, how you bring life up out of the grave” (Preaching Mark in Two Voices, p. 131). “So no matter what you say to me, Jesus, I’m not going to let you turn away from me. I won’t let you take my hope.”

Something akin to that train of thought must have rushed through her mind, because this woman was not about to turn loose of Jesus. She was not about to let him get off that easily. As the Reformer Martin Luther once preached, this no-name, no-status woman laid hold of him.

She laid hold of him, and she completely reframed the argument. As a matter of fact, she did to Jesus what Jesus had been doing to the Pharisees and Sadducees. She took his response, stood toe-to-toe with it, and then turned it upside down and inside out. “Sure Jesus, I don’t care if the food is meant for the children, but that doesn’t mean that your loving, gracious Abba God wants everybody and everything else to go starving. That can’t be what you’re saying, Jesus, is it?” (Preaching Mark in Two Voices, p. 131). If only we had security camera footage of that moment, because surely by that point of their discussion, the woman had lifted her head, maybe even stood up, and was looking Jesus straight in the eyes, for without a doubt, she was challenging him to live out his call.

It is almost as if she knew Jesus’ mission better than he did at that moment. After all, as a friend of mine puts it, when Jesus initially responded that way, denying her request—without even considering it—simply based on who she was, it was like he had forgotten himself, or the limits of his humanity butted up against the scope of his divinity in a way that just didn’t compute. As feminist theologian Sharon Ringe writes, Jesus was caught with his compassion down. Yet even then the woman was not about to give up. She was bound and determined to cling to the good news she had heard about him and would not let Jesus get in the way of himself. It was as if she already knew what Jesus would later claim in Mark 13:10 and Mark 14:9, when he preaches that the gospel, God’s good news, is to be proclaimed to all the world, for all the people.

Her actions, her response to Jesus, seem to cause some seismic shift in Jesus himself. When he hears her challenge, he heals her daughter. We might wonder if Jesus heard the voice of the one he called Father through the voice of this determined, brave, desperate mother. Might it be that through her stubborn hope, the Holy One pushed out Jesus’ assumed boundaries, expanded his call, and gave him a glimpse of a bigger picture, a fuller picture, God’s picture of what he was to be about as Messiah, Lord?

Might it be that through the tenacity of her witness to what she saw as the bigger scope of Jesus’ mercy than even he realized that Jesus learned more about the One who sent him, as well as more about the reason why he was sent? We wonder if God used this determined, brave, desperate mother to help show our brother Jesus that he was sent not to be the Savior of only a few, but to be the Savior of all, including people just like her, a no-name, no-status woman, and just like her daughter, a little one held captive and afraid.

This conflict is beautiful, because when we look, we can see healing and transformation all over this story. I think this no-name, no-status woman was healed, transformed by her courage to stand toe-to-toe with Jesus, to fight for her daughter, and to raise her voice against the injustice she heard laid bare in his response. I bet she walked out of that room straighter and more confident, rooted more deeply in what it meant to be a daughter of God.

I also think Jesus was transformed by her courage, too. As a matter of fact, he was so transformed that not only did he heal her daughter, not only did he bless her with his response, but after that encounter, he did not even go back home or return to his own people. Rather, he went straight out into the Decapolis, a network of ten Greek cities, an area full of people whom he used to claim he had not been sent to minister, but people he now included in the scope of God’s promise, God’s reign, God’s shalom.

Why? Because in part, that no-name, no-status woman lifted her eyes, lifted her head, lifted her voice and demanded that God transform her daughter’s life through the healing power of Jesus. Demanded that he remember what happened at his baptism, when God tore apart (schizo) the boundaries between heaven and earth and thereby declared boundary-breaking was to be a central part of Jesus’ ministry in the world. And Jesus heard her cries, discerned in them the cry of the one he called Father, and said “Yes.”

There are a lot of scholars who wonder why on earth Mark and Matthew would leave in a story like this one—a story in which Jesus does not look very sympathetic; a story that seems to showcase his humanity; a story that might even suggest that because of her witness about him to him, he changed his mind and grew deeper into the fullness of his calling as the Savior of the world. Luke did not include it in his Gospel. Matthew and Mark could have certainly left it out, and we would have never known.

But I’ve been thinking that one reason they left it in as a part of holy witness is so that we might learn from that tenacious, angry, desperate mother as to how to demand God’s transformation and how to do everything in our power to become God’s instruments of that transformation ourselves. I imagine Mark included it so that we might learn that part of our calling as disciples is to lift our eyes, to lift our heads, to lift our voices, and to holler out for the transformation and healing of the world, not resting our collective voice until it is all finally done.

And then, like the mother did, to be willing to put our time, our effort, our resources where our voices are as active partners with God in God’s mission of transformation and healing, for that is who she was being in this story. This woman was being an active partner in God’s mission for the world—demanding that God’s mercy continue to wash out over more and more people and determined to do whatever she had to do to help make that happen.

So what might we need to start hollering about? What do we desire so deeply for this world that we would throw ourselves at Jesus’ feet and beg him for it? In your own life, what are you being called to raise your voice about? Are you doing it? Are we, collectively, following her example? How have we laid hold of Jesus, determined not to let him go until we see the transformation and healing we long to see and know? Are we hollering or just whispering these days?

This no-name, no-status woman has a lot she could teach us—about tenacity, about courage, about how to use our anger in a way that gets us heard. But most of all, I think she has a lot to teach us about what deep faith looks like. In this story, deep faith looks like trusting in God’s goodness, mercy, and justice so much that we are willing to go toe-to-toe with God, lifting our eyes, lifting our heads, lifting our voices, laying hold of Jesus, and hollering out for transformation, for healing, for mercy—and then being willing and determined to do whatever we can through God’s grace to help God make it happen. Deep faith looks like the Syrophoenician woman who was willing to partner with God in being good news not just for a few but for all. And who was never and would never be willing to settle for anything less.