Do you folks
remember All in the Family, the
television series that aired back in the ‘70’s starring Carol O’Conner as the iconic
racist and bigoted yet redeemable Archie Bunker? It was a comedy that made America laugh while
it exposed the racism and sexism that undergirded American society and made the
case for the foundational American values of freedom, justice, and equality for
all. The character of Archie Bunker, as
offensive as he was, held the beliefs, values, and opinions of so many if not
the majority of Americans in the 70’s. Yet,
he demonstrated how people like him could soften and change over time when
faced with real people.
On every episode Archie
Bunker’s racist and bigoted limits were pushed and so it was with everyone
watching it. All in the Family showed that whites and blacks could live in the
same neighbourhood, be neighbours, and become friends. It destroyed ignorant, racist myths like if a
white person received a blood transfusion using a black person’s blood he would
turn black. It demonstrated that women could work outside the home and weren’t
“dingbats”; that it was even okay for a wife to work to support her husband. It showed that a university education was a
good thing and that the “liberal” ideal of a just, fair, and equal world were
not “commie” or “pinko” threats to democracy.
That list could go
on, but the point is that all groups of people have their limitations with
respect to other groups of people. We feel
safest when everyone else is just like us.
We find people and ideas that are different from us to be threatening. So, we create limits in the form of -ism’s,
myths, and phobia’s in order to reinforce our boundaries and keep “those”
different people out.
This problem of
limits was a particular concern in the early church as transitioned from being a
predominantly Jewish to a predominantly Gentile movement. These two stories in Mark address the
tensions that arose back then as more and more non-Jewish people began to come
to the small groups of Jesus followers to follow Jesus too. They capture the moment in Jesus’ ministry
when he took the Kingdom of God beyond the limits of Israel and opened it to
the nations.
Our first story is
Jesus encounter with a Gentile woman. Christianity
was very popular with Gentile women because it was, at least initially for a
while, empowering to women. Women could
be leaders in a Christian fellowship as opposed to being temple prostitutes,
virgins with no voice, or doped-up oracles as they were in the religions of the
Gentiles. Mark’s account of Jesus’
interaction with this assertive Syro-Phoenician woman has Jesus in a very
Archie Bunker-ish way pushing the limits of the church particularly between
Jewish men and Gentile women. Jewish men
frequently did not allow Gentile women to speak to them. When it happened Jewish men usually ignored
the woman or spoke very rudely to her.
As we find Jesus doing here.
As a side note, it
needs to be said that in biblical studies recently it has become quite popular
to say that due to the limitations of his being fully human Jesus was actually
as sexist, bigoted, and prejudiced against Gentiles as this story portrays him
to be. I have to say that those who
think that need to be careful about how much of our cultural baggage they may
be reading back into the story. As a
counter argument, if Jesus was as sexist, bigoted, and xenophobic as he appears
here in Mark, he never would have went into Gentile lands in the first
place. But, he did go outside the
boundaries of Israel to the Gentile peoples.
He did so for reason and we must take a moment to say why.
The Jews of Jesus
day had a list of things from the Bible that they believed they could expect to
happen when their expected Messiah came.
The Messiah would be of the family line of their beloved King
David. He would do things that only the
Lord God of Israel could do such as cause the lame to leap, the dumb to speak,
to blind to see, set prisoners free, and proclaim good news to the poor. Jesus fit that bill. Also, on the list were that Gentiles would be
welcomed into the Kingdom of God and that there would be a general resurrection
of the dead.
These two Kingdom
of God acts in our reading is the point when Jesus checks the list with respect
to the Gentiles being brought into the Kingdom.
Jesus interaction with the Syro-Phoenician deals with the prejudices,
the limits that needed to be pushed, that hindered the welcoming of the
Gentiles into Christian fellowship. It
is likely Jesus is pushing those limits in an All in the Family/Archie Bunker kind of way – minus the
humour.
This story follows
Jesus miraculously feeding over 15,000 people with five loaves of bread and two
fish. Afterward, the disciples collected
twelve basketsful of bread. Then it
appears Jesus led them off on a Kingdom of God Share-the-Bread tour all over
Isreal – twelve baskets for twelve tribes.
This conversation Jesus has with the Syro-Phoenician woman concerns who
can eat the bread.
Jesus has taken the
disciples and the bread into what is modern day Lebanon. The only apparent reason there could be was
that he intended to share the bread with Gentiles. Upon arrival in Tyre, a Syro-Phoenician woman
desperately sought him out and begged him to cast an unclean spirit from her
little daughter. Jesus’ response to her,
which is more aimed at the Disciples than the woman, is “Let the children be
fed first, for it is not proper to take the children’s bread and throw it to
the dogs.” She very wittily answers,
“Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” He heals her daughter.
Jesus’ racist,
bigoted, sexist, xenophobic behaviour towards this Syro-Phoenician woman was
out of character for him. It is likely
he is acting like Archie Bunker, so to speak, to show his disciples that such
behaviour and beliefs should be out of character for them. A good way for ministers and church leaders
to deal such behaviours in churches is that when someone makes a racist,
sexist, or bigoted remark is to ask “Would Jesus make a remark like that?” The answer is no and so neither should we!
Moving on, Jesus
then takes the disciples for coastal Lebanon all the way over to the region of
the Decapolis, the Ten Cities, which is Jordan today and historically the land
of the Ammonites who were in the days of Moses the last people the Israelites
fought before entering the promised land.
There he cures a deaf and mute man. It is interesting that Jesus doesn’t just
outright heal the man, but uses a lot of heavy sighing and hand actions as if
he was a marketplace medicine man. I
guess its that when we are doing Gospel things among people different from us ways
should do it in ways customary to them.
Of most
significance in this healing is that the “magic word” Jesus used was the common
language of the people of Palestine. It
wasn’t Greek or Hebrew. Jesus put his
fingers in the mans ears and then spat and touched the man’s touch and said “Ephphathah”
(Ef-Faa-thah) which means “Be opened.” This
was the moment Jesus opened the Gentiles up to the Gospel of the Kingdom of God
being at hand, opened them both to hear it and to proclaim it. From that point on, the Gentiles have
received and participated in the work of Jesus’ Kingdom of God ministry.
To close, in the
church today we have our limits that need to be pushed. It would be a lie to say that racism, sexism,
and fear of foreigners didn’t still exist among us. In the last 30 or so years we’ve been having
our limits pushed with respect to reconciliation with the First Nations, human
sexuality, and an influx of refugees. In all things concerning our
limits we have to ask what would be in character for Jesus and do as he would
under the litmus that he loved and died for all. Amen.
