A Wideness in God’s Mercy

Summary

This faith business, this following of Jesus can be hard.  How is it that we walk as Christians when confronted with issues that divide and confuse?

Well, we turn to the scriptures.  We open the Bible for guidance and help and strength.  Within the Bible lies the truth by which we live.  It is within the narrative of the gospels, the teaching of the epistles, and the weight of the Old Testament that we are bound by the law of God and are saved by the gospel of Christ.  It is within these writings made holy that we learn of the works to which we are called and borne anew in the faith that gives life.  The bible reveals the truth of God’s relationship with humanity.

Yet to be honest delving into scripture can also be difficult at times, hearing stories that are hard to understand and receiving teachings that are hard to hear, as with this morning’s gospel and epistle lessons.

In Mark’s gospel this morning we read of Jesus confronting a non-Jewish woman of another faith who seeks out Jesus to ask him to heal her daughter.  When I say he confronted her I mean that he calls the woman and her daughter dogs because they are gentiles and not Jewish.  Literally Jesus speaks in an offensive manner to this woman, and so throws up a barrier between them.

Calling someone a dog is a put-down in our culture today, and we’re a culture that prizes our canine friends, spending billions upon their care and comfort a year.  In the Middle East still today dogs are about as lowly a creature as can be imagined.  At the best they are used to help herd sheep or guard a house, at the worst they are scavengers whom can carry disease and run in packs attacking the unaware.

In speaking to the woman Jesus speaks aloud the law naming the Jews as God’s chosen people and calling them children and the declaring gentiles as those outside God’s law and so calling them dogs, dogs who hang around the edges scavenging for God’s leftovers.  This is not the caring, gentle Jesus to whom I am accustomed.  Yet his speech does not cow the woman or send her away in tears, no, rather she becomes more bold.  She accepts what Jesus says, by referring to herself and her daughter as those very dogs who are waiting for the scraps to fall.  And so they do, for Jesus sends her home to a healed daughter.

I ask, and I am sure you do too, “Why was Jesus so rude to this poor woman who like so many others had simply sought him out to seek healing for her loved one?”

None of us can answer that question definitively, but we can come up with some good guesses.  One is that Jesus was using the woman to teach a point to his Jewish followers that God’s grace extended beyond the chosen people of God in a way different than how they had traditionally read the law.  It seems though, as if he had taught this numerous times already without the crude comments.

Another reading would be that he was speaking in a very facetious manner, with a smile on his face and twinkle in his eyes as he said these words to the woman and she knew that he was joking with her so as to make the aforementioned point to the Jews in the room.  This is the version I like best, as I have shared with you before I believe that Jesus knew how to use humor to teach as well as to set people at ease.

Also, some might argue that Jesus was testing her resolve and others that she caught him at a grumpy point in his day.  I for one cannot declare why Jesus responded in this manner, but I do know that we can learn from the gentile woman.

Her words of boldness and faith in the face of Jesus’ power teach us so much about how we can try to live out our own faith.  The woman approached this man of power on behalf of her child, believing what she had heard of him and trusting that he could heal her daughter.  Her faith was built solely upon the news of others and so was probably not much of a faith at all and yet in that faith she took action.  This gentile woman approached a Jewish man of power, a teacher and asked him to cure her daughter.  She answered his unexpected declaration of Jewish law with a declaration of faith that answered that law but also spoke of God’s grace by which her daughter was then healed.

This woman of little faith took action.  She did the work necessary to provide for the needs of another, risking her own esteem for the sake of her sick daughter.

How often do we work out our own faith in the lives of others?  How often do we put into action God’s law and gospel in the life of the world?

In the epistle James is goading us forward, urging us to live lives that matter for God, not for ourselves.  This world teaches us to look out for ourselves and to take care of what we need first and then we might reach out to one another after that.  James is reminding us that with Jesus we care for the other first, no matter their station in life, no matter their sinful nature, for we are sinners as well.

We cannot simply say we are Christians we need to declare that fact in the lives of other people by doing the work of faith, which is love, the hardest work of all.  It is easy to say that we love everybody, but it’s a lot harder to live that fact out.

James wanted everyone to experience the powerful love of God in their own lives.  He wanted each to know what it was like to be forgiven for their sins and called to “go and try to sin no more” knowing that God’s forgiveness waits for the failure that will come.  James knew that for the world to know of the grace of Jesus and that God’s love is for all, that the faithful needed to get to work so that their faith might burn brighter and that all could see it and experience it for themselves.

Jesus continually reached out to the declared sinners of the world.  Through his words and even more, his actions, Jesus showed to them the wideness of God’s mercy.

Back in Mark, chapter two, we read that the Pharisees observed Jesus sitting down and eating with tax-collectors and sinners.  Now that’s a phrase that to us doesn’t mean a whole lot, but back in Jesus’ day that action of sitting down and eating with these folks made waves, big waves.  For I have learned that what that phrase means is that Jesus sat down with slaves, and ate.  Yet, they weren’t just any slaves, no, the ‘tax collectors’ were the male slaves that followed that actual tax collectors, like Zaccheuss the ‘wee-short’ man.  They were the slaves that actually went into people’s homes, took what their master pointed at, and if need be roughed up, or brutalized the home owner who didn’t want to pay.

The ‘sinners’ were also slaves, sexual slaves, girls forced into lives of prostitution, often to pay off a family’s debt.  These ‘sinners’, these brutalized prostitutes did not live long lives, if you can call their existence, life.

Jesus wasn’t on earth to create a physical revolution, but rather a spiritual one.  So, he was not there to free these slaves, but what he could give to them, he did, he showed them love, he showed them mercy in his action of eating with them.

In that same way, though he spoke to the Phoenician woman in a crude manner, probably as a lesson to his disciples, Jesus then showed her the wideness of God’s mercy in doing exactly what she asked, he healed her daughter.

What actions, or words might we need to use to show the world, to show the people of our lives God’s mercy?  How do we communicate in a real and authentic manner the importance to us, of what we have experienced, off what we do experience?

Let me tell you, it’s not simply with talking, but as Jesus has shown us, it is with action, action and love.  Let the world know, there’s a wideness in God’s mercy.

Amen.

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