Talking Back to Jesus
Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146; James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37
And they said: “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
Our gospel reading today brings together two incidents from Mark’s telling of the story of the visits of Jesus to Gentile territory, to places where most people were not Jewish. In some ways Jesus repeats events that he had previously done among his own Jewish people, now in a different context. So the Syrophonecian woman in Tyre comes and throws herself down at the feet of Jesus on behalf of her troubled daughter, just as – you may remember – Jairus, the leader of the synagogue in Capernaum, threw himself at the feet of Jesus on behalf of his sick 12-year-old daughter.
And even within these two stories, we see some common themes. The first story begins with Jesus going to the city of Tyre in Lebanon, where he “did not want anyone to know he was there.” We might think this was just because Jesus wanted to take a break and get away for a Labor Day weekend, but in the second story, we are told that he takes the deaf and mute man away from the crowd, heals him in private, and ordered those who were present to tell no one about it. And yet in both cases Jesus cannot control the message; the Syrophonecian woman with a troubled daughter hears of his presence and comes to him, the friends of the man given his hearing and his speech spread the news more zealously the more Jesus told them not to. The message of Jesus that the Kingdom of God is at hand is spreading faster even than Jesus seems to have intended.
In fact, in the first of these two stories, when the Syrophonecian woman comes to Jesus, he initially dismisses her request in a way that is, to be honest, quite rude. “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” It’s hard to understand how Jesus could say something so dismissive of someone who came to him in need, knowing how inclusive and open Jesus normally is to everyone he encounters.
I have some theories about why Jesus says what he does to this woman, but I think it is more interesting to focus on the woman herself here. She is a non-Jewish woman of Syrian and Phoenician origin – a Palestinian, if we were to use modern terminology. A famous Jewish healer has come to her town, and it doesn’t matter to her that her people don’t have anything to do with his people and vice versa. It doesn’t matter to her that she doesn’t share the same religion as Jesus or that he’s not making public appearances. It doesn’t matter to her that in her culture it’s never appropriate for a woman to approach a man who’s not her relative – she’s supposed to have a man advocate for her in this situation, and for whatever reason she doesn’t have one and she isn’t going to let that stop her. And she doesn’t take “no” for an answer?
Why is she so bold? Why does she come to a place where she would have expected to be rejected and turned aside, where she knew she didn’t belong? Because her daughter was troubled, and no social convention or ethnic division or religious difference was going to get in her way of finding peace for her daughter.
I think it is significant in both of the stories we read today the person in need – the daughter of the Syrophonecian woman troubled by a demon, and the man who is deaf and mute – in both stories it’s not the person in need who comes to Jesus, but someone else comes to Jesus on their behalf. It’s the mother of the troubled young girl who comes to Jesus to ask for deliverance. It’s the friends of the deaf man who brought him to Jesus and begged Jesus to lay hands on him.
The young girl in Tyre was troubled, and she was just a child; she wasn’t in a position to get help for herself. But her mother had heard the word about the visiting rabbi from Galilee, and she went to Jesus on her daughter’s behalf. The man in the Decapolis hadn’t heard the word about Jesus, indeed he hadn’t heard any words at all – he was unable to hear, and unable to speak. He was cut off from the usual way that human beings connect with one another, speaking and listening, he was literally alone with his own thoughts. Yet he had people who cared enough about him that, when the visiting rabbi from Galilee came to town, they also came to Jesus and begged him, as the Syrophonecian woman had begged Jesus, to pay attention and help.
This time, Jesus doesn’t make a rude or dismissive remark. But he takes the man away from the crowd, in private – just as with the Syrophonecian woman who met with Jesus in the house where he was trying to lay low, Jesus is not interested in wowing the crowds. Then Jesus doesn’t just lay hands on the deaf man, as had been requested. Jesus puts his fingers in the man’s ears, Jesus spits on his fingers, opens the man’s mouth, and touches his tongue. Even in the days before Covid protocols – wash your hands! Six feet! Where’s your mask? – this is not the way people normally act with strangers, with foreigners. Jesus reaches out to this man without speech or hearing, this man who was living closed in on himself in his own world, and without words Jesus expresses as graphically as possible his solidarity with this man, sharing saliva, earwax on his hands.
And then, we read, Jesus looked up to heaven, sighed an inarticulate groan, and uttered one word: Ephphatha. Be opened. What does Jesus ask to be opened? The man’s ears and voice? The gates of heaven – Tear open the heavens, O God, and come down and save us! The man himself, who had been closed off from the connection made by human language, now open to new connections and communion with his friends who had brought him to Jesus in the first place? All of the above?
And immediately, we are told, the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was released, just as the Syrophonecian woman’s daughter was immediately released, and he began to speak plainly. The girl who was disturbed, the man who was cut off and closed up, both are restored when someone else who has heard the word about Jesus dares to set aside their prejudices, their fears, their own sense of not belonging to the world of Jesus, and in their faith in this word, all things are opened and released.
So what are we, here at Epiphany, here in Mount Vernon in the year 2021, what are we to make of these two events that happened when Jesus went on his foreign tour? I think it’s instructive to see how Jesus treated these outsiders – a pagan woman who dared to talk back to the visiting rabbi, a man totally closed off from the world. Jesus engages with them, commends the woman who argues with him and allows himself to be corrected by her, gets up close and personal with the man who was closed. The presence of Jesus, the arrival of the kingdom of God, opens many doors, opens many hearts, opens up all kinds of spaces where those who didn’t belong and those who couldn’t belong find the connection and deliverance they sought.
Because those who have had the experience of being the excluded ones, the ones who aren’t considered as deserving a place at the table, the ones who can’t communicate with the majority, these are the ones whom even Jesus can’t control when the kingdom of God comes to them. They make bold requests and talk back, they speak of the goodness of God even when told by Jesus to be silent, and Jesus is not held back by their impertinence. Indeed, Jesus will die excluded and cast out, for in Jesus God fully identifies with those who have been excluded and cast out.
The letter of James knows this about Jesus. “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters,” we just read today. “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” And if we believe that, then if we feel isolated and excluded and ignored we know that we have God who hears us and wants to open us up and release us to live into the joy of the Kingdom. And if others are isolated and excluded and ignored, then the faithful response of a follower of Jesus is to take them seriously, to listen to them and allow them to teach us, as Jesus allowed the Syrophonecian woman to teach him. And if we can do that, we will find ourselves opened up to a depth of experience we would never have known, we will be released to enter relationships we could never have expected. And then we will experience the Kingdom of God breaking into our midst.