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A long time ago I went to High School and there’s a whole lot about that experience I would care not to repeat. It’s a weird world. Everybody was trying to develop their own style but still having to fit in. If you’re too different, you’ll get eaten alive. My Junior year we had Punk Rock Day. My non top 40 taste in music included some Punk Rock so I got a flat top and sprayed it green and wore a suit. Instead of people telling me it looked cool, I found out there was a rumour going about that I had lost a bet with my Cross-Country coach and had to get my hair cut. No one asked me. Just whispered. I wasn’t the only person to colour their hair that day. But, I was the only one to get a flat top. I guess I crossed a boundary.
Also in High School different kinds of people didn’t mix. Outside of athletics black people and white people didn’t tend to mix other than to fight. There was a great deal of fear between us. There were those on the Academic Track and those on the Vocational Track and not a lot of interaction between the them. Which Track you were on was usually determined by family economic standing and what side of town you lived on. There were the Jocks and the Rednecks. Any interaction there was also in the form of fighting. There were also the cliques of close friends that could be vicious to people of other cliques. We never heard of anybody actually being gay. That would have been a death sentence.
All groups of people have their boundaries with respect to other groups of people and people who are different. We find people who are different from us to be threatening. We feel safest when everyone else is just like us. So, we create boundaries 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 boundaries is nothing new. It was a particular concern in the early church. The first Christians, the first Christian communities were predominantly Jewish, but oddly the Gospel of Jesus Christ appealed to people that were everything but Jewish. In a few short decades the early church had to transition from being ethnically Jewish to being predominantly people of other races, ethnicities, and cultures. That change came with a lot tension.
These two stories in Mark reflect and address the tensions that were in the church as more and more non-Jewish people began to come to the small gatherings of Jewish Jesus followers to follow Jesus too. They tell the story of the moment in Jesus’ ministry when he took the Kingdom of God beyond the boundaries of Israel and opened it to the nations.
Our first story tells of Jesus’ encounter with a non-Jewish woman. Christianity was very popular with such 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, or virgins with no voice, or doped-up oracles who were making the cult-priests a lot money. That’s what most of the other religions had to offer devout women and homosexuals.
Jesus’ interaction with this assertive Syro-Phoenician woman has Jesus pushing the boundaries within the early the church particularly between Jewish men and non-Jewish women. Jewish men frequently did not allow non-Jewish 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. It is likely Jesus is pushing those limits in an All in the Family/Archie Bunker kind of way – minus the humour. He was mimicking his disciples’ prejudices to expose how hurtful they were and then push them beyond their boundaries.
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. But then Jesus has them take the bread into the neighbouring non-Jewish lands to share the bread there too. This conversation that Jesus demonstrates that non-Jewish people indeed even non-Jewish women can eat the bread of the Kingdom Feast too – in the very least, the crumbs that fall from the table.
It appears that Jesus led the disciples with the bread into what is modern day Lebanon for the reason sharing the bread of the Kingdom Feast with non-Jews. Upon arrival in Tyre, this 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 answered, “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Jesus then healed her daughter on account of this woman’s faith.
Jesus’ racist, bigoted, sexist, xenophobic behaviour towards this Syro-Phoenician woman was out of character for him. It is likely he was doing what the writers of All in the Family did with the character of Archie Bunker. Bunker showed us how bad and hurtful our prejudices are in order to push us beyond them. So also, Jesus showed his disciples that such behaviour and beliefs should be out of character for those who bear his name. 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 took the disciples from coastal Lebanon all the way over to the region of the Decapolis, the Ten Cities, which is the nation of 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 cured 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 it’s that when we are doing Gospel things among people different from us we should do it in ways customary to them; you know, speak their language rather than make them speak ours.
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. It was Aramaic. Jesus put his fingers in the man’s ears and then spat and touched the man’s mouth and said “Ephphathah” (Ef-Faath-ah) which means “Be opened.” This was the moment Jesus opened the non-Jewish peoples up to the Gospel of the Kingdom of God being at hand, opened them to both be able 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, and now the Vaxxer/non-Vaxxer stuff. In all things concerning our boundaries 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 while all the while exhibiting great patience with everybody excepting the “religious” types who were rigid and hurtful with their boundaries. If our actions and beliefs are not the result of compassion given us by the Holy Spirit who leads us to address our prejudices and cross our boundaries, then we have to accept that our actions and beliefs may not be of Christ but rather just us trying to feel safe by behind boundaries of prejudice that have proven hurtful for centuries rather healing. That’s my two cents. Amen.
