2021.09.05 | Beyond Parochialism
“Beyond Parochialism”
Mark 7:24−37
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Desperate people do desperate things. When sick people have tried every home remedy that they know; when they have gone to every physician in their healthcare plan, and are still not cured—and they find themselves getting progressively worse—people get desperate. Desperate people try unconventional cures. They try doctors and therapies that they have never tried before. They charter buses and board airplanes and travel to faraway places. They order medications over the Internet which haven’t been approved by the FDA. They enroll in experimental treatments, and waive all rights to sue the prescriber if this “Hail Mary” effort doesn’t cure what ails them.
Desperate people do desperate things. But desperate people with deathly-ill children do even crazier things than grownups who are seeking solutions for themselves. I know. I’ve seen it. I bet you have too.
Desperate parents bundle up their children and drive 100 miles an hour past the cops to the nearest hospital emergency room regardless of whether it’s in their healthcare plan, takes their insurance, or takes every dollar they have and every dollar they will ever make.
Desperate parents run past security guards who wear uniforms that look a lot like those worn by ICE officers, and they beg ER admissions staff and doctors who don’t speak their language to save their child’s life from only God-knows-what. Because they weren’t born in this country. They don’t speak English. And they don't know much about Western medicine.
Desperate parents do these crazy things—they risk everything—because they want more than anything for their child to survive, and ultimately to live the “American dream.”
I wish that no one hearing this message today had ever lived through the scenario that I just described, but I know that my wish will not come true, because there are parents in our congregation and community who have lived these types of hellacious experiences, up close and personal.
So, let’s be clear, the story about the Syrophoenician woman isn’t some idle tale from an ancient land that has nothing to do with us. It’s personal, it’s political, and it’s timely.
II
The woman who pounded on the door where Jesus was trying to vacation was desperate. She was a desperate parent trying to save the life of her child. Unfortunately, for her, the Jesus who opened the door that she was pounding on didn’t immediately deliver on the messages that she had received from his marketing department.
What do we make of this passage? What do we make of Jesus’ apparent rudeness?
I’ll share two options proposed by NT scholars. One way to frame this story is to say that Jesus was testing the foreigner’s faith. The other is that Jesus was struggling to discern the scope of his calling. Let’s exam both options:
Some scholars say that Jesus was trying to test the woman’s faith. I don’t buy this, because there are no (other) examples in the gospels of Jesus’ testing someone’s faith or requiring evidence of faith before ministering to them. Instead of testing faith, theologian Morton T. Kelsey argues in his book, Psychology, Medicine and Christian Healing, (SF: Harper Collins, 1988, pp. 77-73) that Jesus’ healing ministry was performed to inspire and restore faith, and bring the shalom that God intended for all people.
Other scholars say that Jesus was resistant--at first--to ministering to people outside of his parochia, i.e., his geographic location, ethnic group, and faith community. This I buy, because there are no prior examples in Mark’s gospel of Jesus ministering outside of his home culture.
Embracing this latter explanation of Jesus’ rudeness may take a little time for those of us who were raised with the belief that Jesus was perfect. But if we sit with the idea for a while, I think it’s possible to reframe this presentation of Jesus as “perfectly human.”
Like other humans, Jesus had feet of clay, he was vulnerable to the voices of his lesser angels. He was prone to exhibit the prejudices that he’d grown up with, and he was fond of the privileges that he had enjoyed as a person with his social location.
Like other humans, Jesus had to be challenged to think outside of the box that he had grown up in. He had to be challenged to try the food, speak the language, and imagine that the ways of his people might not be the only ways to believe or to do things.
In short, Jesus had to be healed of his parochialism, before he could expand and fulfill God’s calling to be the hope and healer of all nations.
The great irony of this story is that the tables are turned twice. Instead of Jesus instantly fulfilling the Syrophonecian’s request that he heal her daughter from the unclean spirit, Jesus has to be healed of his parochialism.
He couldn’t heal himself. He needed the help of a foreign-born, non-native speaker, from a different faith tradition. So in the end, four miracles unfold in Mark 7:
1) The Syrophonecian dares to demand that her daughter receive the healthcare that she needs. Can you imagine how much courage it must have taken this woman to hope, to seek out, and to insist that Jesus would help her daughter? She was a woman in a man’s world. She was a Syrophonecian asking help from an Israelite? She was a card-carrying pagan asking a Jewish prophet for help.
2) Jesus realizes his need for healing from his parochialism. Let’s be honest here. There’s nothing in writing, in Mark 7, that states this fact, but think about the situation for a moment. There’s no way that Jesus goes from refusing to help the woman to doing what she asks, without an about-face--without a change of heart and mind.
3) That foreign-born mother couldn’t force Jesus to give up his parochialism. He had to choose to do so himself. He had to participate in his own healing process in order to receive the healing he needed. That’s the third miracle. He chose to be part of the healing process that everyone in this story needed.
4) The fourth and final miracle in this story is the one that we have all known and read about. It’s the daughter’s healing. Jesus tells her mother to go home, where she finds that the unclean spirit has left her daughter, and the demon is gone.
III
I wonder, can we embrace the challenge of the gospel message today? Can we be bold enough to insist that all of God’s children deserve health care, and persist until they get it?
Can we be self-reflective and honest enough to recognize and dismantle the ways in which lessons learned from our home culture have and continue to contradict the gospel message, and inhibit the unfolding of God’s kingdom on earth?
Can we be more like the Jesus we meet in Mark 7? Can we be perfectly imperfect? Can we face the stranger at our door, acknowledge our own prejudices, and act on God’s call to live up to the highest ideals of our nation and faith tradition?
When our answers to these questions become an unequivocal “Yes!” then we will be healed, and all of God’s children’s demons will be gone. Amen.