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A Little Less Humanity, Please
A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
September 6, 2009
Mark 7:24-37
For nearly eight years I
was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Washington, DC. One of the things I
loved most about that job was the diversity of the place, the zesty
international flavor of that city. And so it did my heart good to look into the
dining hall here at First Baptist, Richmond, yesterday and see people from all
over the world gathered there for the Muslim Background Believers Conference.
There were women in saris and men in prayer caps; people with black and brown
and yellow skin; some who spoke English with an accent and some who spoke no
English at all. One of the organizers stopped me in the hallway to say thank
you for the hospitality First Baptist Church was providing and I was grateful to
hear him say that our volunteers had been wonderful, bending over backward to
meet every need. I was grateful, I say, because one of my fears when we
entertain people from other countries and cultures is that we will offend, that
we will do or say something wrong and our guests will feel less than welcome
among us. I keep wanting to say to our volunteers, “Be careful. Be sensitive.”
And so I was glad to hear that they had behaved themselves beautifully, offering
nothing but warm, Christian hospitality.
Which is more than I can
say for Jesus.
In our Gospel reading for
today Jesus leaves Galilee and goes up to the region of Tyre on the
Mediterranean coast. While he is there he is approached by a Syrophoenician
woman—a Gentile—who begs him to heal her demon-possessed daughter. Jesus has
been approached by thousands of people in the weeks preceding this visit. Many
of them have made similar if not identical requests. In every instance Jesus
has responded with compassion: healing their sick, casting out demons, cleansing
the lepers, and raising the dead. But not this time. This time, confronted by
this foreign woman, this Syrophoenician, this Gentile he says, “It isn’t
right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” And I can hardly
believe that he says it! If he were one of our volunteers at the Muslim
Background Believers Conference I would take him aside and say, “No, no, no!
That’s not the way we talk to people from other countries and cultures. We show
respect!” But this is Jesus talking, and you don’t correct Jesus, do you?
I’ve spent a lot of time
over the last week thinking about what Jesus says here and wondering if there is
any way to excuse his behavior. In the end I have concluded that he was simply
exhausted, that he had been approached by so many people asking for his help he
couldn’t deal with one more person. Consider the evidence: at the end of
chapter six Mark says that Jesus couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized,
and people were rushing around bringing their sick on mats to wherever they
heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages or cities, or farms, they
laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the
fringe of his cloak (Mark 6:54-56). Add to that his encounter with the scribes
and Pharisees at the beginning of chapter seven—a bunch of religious hypocrites
who were upset because his disciples didn’t wash their hands properly before
they ate—and you begin to get the full picture. I think Jesus was worn out and
fed up and needed to get away, and so at the beginning of today’s reading Mark
tells us that Jesus “set out from there (from Galilee) and went to the region of
Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there” (7:24).
Why? Because he needed a break! And yet, Mark says, “He could not escape
notice.”
One of the people who
noticed him was this Syrophoenician woman. Jesus’ reputation had spread so far
and wide that way up there in the region of Tyre they had heard about a Jewish
man who could heal people: Jesus of Nazareth, who traveled around with twelve
disciples. When she saw him this wild hope leaped up inside her that maybe he
could heal her daughter, and so she began to look for an opportunity to talk to
him in private. When the opportunity came she seized it. I like to imagine it
as a moment when Jesus was all alone, looking out over the Mediterranean Sea,
watching the sun set. I like to think of him taking his first deep breath in a
long, long time and letting it out in a sigh. I like to think that it was
precisely then that this woman fell down at his feet and begged him to heal her
little daughter. Jesus was tired. He was beyond tired. And he had responded
to thousands of requests like hers over the previous few weeks. He looked at
her long enough to see that she was a Gentile and then blurted out the words he
had probably heard a hundred times from the village elders when he was growing
up in Nazareth: “It isn’t right to take the children’s food and throw it to the
dogs.”
It’s a shocking thing to
say. We don’t expect it from Jesus. We expect something far more gracious and
compassionate. But he was tired. Surely we can forgive him for that, and
surely this woman could see that he didn’t want to be bothered. But she was
tired, too. She was tired of holding her daughter while the little girl’s body
was racked with convulsions. She was tired of watching her eyes roll back in
her head, of wiping the foam from around her mouth, of mopping the sweat from
her fevered brow. She was tired of hearing her little girl say, “Please, Mommy,
make it stop!” and she was not too proud to beg. Summoning up her courage she
said to Jesus, “But sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s
crumbs.” It was a good answer, so good that Jesus felt his resolve crumble, his
determination to get some rest. He looked out over the water one last time,
sighed, and then looked back at this woman. “For saying that you may go,” he
said—“the demon has left your daughter.”
But it’s not really Jesus’
best moment, is it? For him to deal with this woman in the way he does is
embarrassing to those of us who worship him. He doesn’t behave much like the
divine Son of God here: he behaves like an ordinary human being who is tired and
grumpy. And the next episode in this passage isn’t much better. Mark tells us
that Jesus returned from the region of Tyre but that he did it by going up
through the region of Sidon and eventually making his way around to the other
side of the Sea of Galilee in the region of the Decapolis, almost as if he were
trying to avoid bumping into anyone who might recognize him. But there, on the
other side of the sea, someone figures out who he is and brings to him a deaf
man with a speech impediment. Jesus doesn’t dismiss the man, but look at how he
labors to heal him! He takes him aside in private, away from the crowd. He
puts his fingers in his ears, spits and touches his tongue. He looks up to
heaven and sighs and then whispers the word Ephphatha, which means “Be
opened.” And it works. The man’s ears are opened, his tongue is untied, but it
doesn’t come easily. I picture Jesus soaked with sweat at the end of this
story, trembling from the effort. Why doesn’t he just wave his hand over the
man? Isn’t he the Son of God? Can’t he do that? In both of these stories we
see a side of Jesus that is just a little too human for our comfort. We want
him to be—I don’t know—a little more “god-like” than he is.
But why? What is it about the
humanity of Jesus that makes us uncomfortable? If you look back through history
you find that the question of Jesus’ humanity was one of the biggest issues
faced by the early Church.
1.
Some
people believed that Jesus was just a man until he was inhabited by the Spirit
of Christ at his baptism. They believed that spirit stayed with him until just
before his death on the cross. And so, they argued, it wasn’t really Christ who
died, but this man, Jesus.
2.
Another
controversy raged about whether Jesus was created by God, or co-existed with God
from the beginning. And if he was created by God, was he created of the same
divine substance, or was it some other, more earthy, substance he was made of?
3.
And then
there were those who said he had a human nature and a divine nature, but only
one will. And others who said he had two wills and two natures. And still
others who said he had only one nature and one will.
Do you
see what I mean? All this arguing about the divinity and humanity of Jesus went
on for the better part of a thousand years before the Church reached some kind
of consensus on the subject. Now we say that Jesus was both fully human and
fully divine: not fifty-fifty or sixty-forty but one hundred-one hundred. And
so, when he seems to be having a particularly “human” day in the Gospels it
concerns us. What’s going on here? Where is that full divinity we have come to
expect?
I’ve tried to think about why
it concerns us and I think it’s because we are human. We know what we are like
and we don’t want Jesus to be like that. We want him to be better than we
are—stronger, and more able. Part of the problem stems from the way we think of
ourselves. We walk around with this “ideal” self in our heads, a mental picture
of the person we want to be. That self never makes mistakes, never gets
spaghetti sauce on its necktie, never has a hair out of place. That self is
nearly perfect. But then there is this real self we keep confronting in the
mirror, which is not perfect, and it can be disheartening to discover just how
much distance there is between the ideal self in our heads and the real self in
our shoes. We keep leaping up high toward that ideal; we keep falling down flat
on our faces. And so it is with our conception of Jesus. We have in our minds
a kind of “ideal” Jesus, one who is probably much more divine than human. This
Jesus is always compassionate, always generous, always able, the kind of savior
who “does all things well.” So when we hear stories about this other Jesus—the
one who refers to Gentile women and their little daughters as “dogs,” and who
heals people like some wild-eyed witch doctor—it disturbs us. The real
threatens the ideal.
But psychologist Carl Rogers
said one of the keys to our own mental health was achieving congruence between
the real and the ideal self, coming to that place where we could be at peace
with who we are, knowing that, yes, sometimes we do spill spaghetti sauce on our
ties, but it’s OK. It’s just part of being human. Everybody makes mistakes.
Maybe one of the keys to our spiritual health is allowing Jesus to be both fully
divine and fully human, to not only let him preach and teach and heal and save,
but to let him be tired at the end of a long day, and ache after sleeping on the
cold, hard ground, and want to get away from all those grasping, clawing
people.
I’ve been talking with people
this week about the humanity of Jesus and what they’ve been telling me is that
it is a great comfort to them. It doesn’t disturb them that Jesus got tired
sometimes, that he had an occasional bad day: it reassures them. “If he was
fully human,” they say, “then he knows what it’s like to be me. He can
understand my problems, he can feel my pain.” The writer of Hebrews celebrates
this: “He became like his brothers and sisters in every respect,” he says, “so
that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God….
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our
weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet
without sin.” (2:17; 4:15).
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So, on those days when we
are too tired to drag ourselves out of bed, Jesus knows about that.
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And when we don’t know if
we can make it through another day at work, Jesus knows about that.
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And when we wish all those
people would just leave us alone, Jesus knows about that.
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And when we think nobody
understands what we’re going through, Jesus knows about that.
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And when we ache with
every move we make, Jesus knows about that.
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And when we come to the
end of the workday tired and hungry, Jesus knows about that.
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And when we are less than
patient with those we love, Jesus knows about that.
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And when we fall into bed
at last, exhausted, wondering how we will get up and do it all over again
the next day, Jesus knows about that.
He was fully human. He knows what it’s like to be us. And that’s a great
comfort. But he was also fully divine, and is! And that’s an even greater
comfort. Consider that even on a bad day he sent this Syrophoenician woman home
to a daughter who had been delivered from her demon, who lay on her bed sleeping
peacefully for the first time in years. Even on a bad day he unstopped the ears
of a deaf man and untied his clumsy tongue, so that he could run through his
hometown shouting the good news. If Jesus is only human he can’t do anymore
than I can do. He can feel my pain, but he can’t fix it. But if he is also
divine, well then, all things are possible. He can know us down deep, down in
the depths of our souls. He can feel all the grief we have in there, all the
frustration, all the anger. He can sympathize with our aching limbs, our feeble
hearts, our struggling lungs. He can know the anxious thoughts we have, the
anguished workings of our troubled minds. And he can do something about that,
about all of that. And he has. At the end of this story the people are
“astounded beyond measure,” so that they can say about Jesus even on one of his
bad days:
“He has done all things well.”
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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