Pentecost 15

Pentecost 15 (Mark 7:24-37) “Be opened!”

Jesus specializes in opening up hearts, minds and wills.

If you think you have life, the universe and everything figured out, then Jesus will surprise you. He will not only surprise you- he will astonish you.

Jesus certainly surprised, astonished and aggravated the people of his time. He healed everyone who came to him including those whom the religious authorities had written off as unworthy. His power to heal surprised even his students. His universal and unconditional healing aggravated the religious and political elites.

Certainly, the Syro Phoenician woman knew the religious people despised and rejected her. Under ordinary circumstances, she would never have come to a Rabbi for help. Under ordinary circumstances, a Rabbi of any sect would not have spoken with her.
These were not ordinary circumstances. Jesus was not an ordinary Rabbi. The woman was desperate. Her daughter was possessed by a demon. Demon possession is very rare. It does happen. It always results in madness and death. There is nothing casual or magical about exorcism- the removal of a demon. The more you fight a demon the stronger it becomes. It feeds on fear, anger, and pride. It flees only from the Real Presence of unconditional love.

Jesus understood all of this. He lived in a religious society that had structured itself in the distortions of fear, pride and the will to power. He lived in a xenophobic culture that despised strangers despite the clear and unambiguous teaching of Moses to welcome the stranger.

Jesus used this opportunity to teach a fundamental lesson about God, human nature and individual responsibility.

Jesus started the lesson from where people were. This is an important principle. The very presence of Jesus in the world initiates a process of revelation and self-discovery.

The first revelation Jesus manifested in this passage is the problem. The problem is three fold. The first aspect of the problem is that people believed God favored some people over others. The categories the people used to identify this favor were: race, religion and righteousness.

The logic went like this:
God called one individual, Abraham into a unique contract. The contract stipulates that God will bless Abraham and his legitimate descendants in exchange for their obedience to God’s commands.
The legitimate descendants of Abraham come through the line of Isaac and Jacob.
The Law comes through Moses.
The proper interpretation of the Law comes from the sectarian insights of those religious leader whom God favors.
And so, God favors only one specific group of people of one race in one nation who properly understand the Law and keeps the Law. God rejects and punishes everyone else.

The Syro Phoenician woman did not fit into the “favored” category. She had no claim on God’s blessing. She did not deserve God’s blessing. Even Jesus’ disciples held this point of view. And, certainly the woman understood this aspect of her intrusion into the conversation of who God will bless and who God will curse.
Nevertheless, she asked. Against all logic and against all probability she asked Jesus for help. And, everyone around Jesus, his friends and enemies alike, expected Jesus to reject the woman and send her away. That is the context of Jesus’ seemingly harsh statement to the woman.

The immediate issue is the division among people. Human beings divide ourselves and separate ourselves from each other in every way possible. Race, ethnicity, language, accent, class and so much more becomes the occasion for separation, division, conflict and war.

The religious people of Jesus’ day equated religion with politics, politics with partisanship and partisanship with pride. That pride empowered a very small group of people in one faction of one sectarian group of one tribe of one nation to assert their will to dominate all other people in their nation and all other nations. They were just waiting for the right leader to make it happen.

That is where they were in terms of religion and culture. That is where Jesus met them. That is not where Jesus left them. He invited them to take a journey in faith. He invited them to consider certain facts that did not conform to their strongly held beliefs.

The invitation was in the woman herself. Her gracious and humble response to Jesus’ harsh and uncompromising statement was the open door for the people to understand a reality they had been educated to reject.

The door is humility. The reality is unconditional love.

Jesus never argued or debated within the narrow inflexible uncompromising ideologies of his enemies or his friends. He did use their uncompromising beliefs to help them experience unconditional love.

The unnamed pagan woman walked right into the center of our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation. The Plan of Salvation is personal. Jesus is the personal reality of the infinite and eternal God.

Jesus led the woman into a process of self-discovery and divine revelation that scandalized those who considered themselves the righteous. The woman discovered her humility. The religious leaders discovered their fatal pride. Everyone discovered something about God that they had failed to recognize.

Jesus makes manifest the reality that God just doesn’t have love. God is love. That love is unconditional, universal, compassionate and holy.

Because our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation is personal there is no room for individual pride. Jesus will meet us where we are. But, He will not leave us where we are. If he comes to us and discovers we are lost in pride he will bring people and circumstances into our lives to reveal that pride to us. He will send the Holy Spirit to convict us of the fatal consequence of pride in the way we live life here and now.

There is no condemnation in Jesus. Sickness is never a punishment for sin. In certain situations, disease or injury may be a consequence of particular sins, but never a punishment.

Jesus uses all events in our lives to help us make the real choice to accept the gift of reunification with God in the waters of baptism. Jesus uses all circumstances in our lives to help us identify those sins of thought, word and deed, of omission and commission that need to be transformed back into their original virtue.

Jesus surprised the crowd, annoyed the righteous and astonished the pagan woman by reversing everyone’s expectations and beliefs about God. The righteous are proved to be lost in fatal pride. The friends of Jesus are convicted of their own rigid inflexible inherited belief. The pagan woman receives the unconditional love of God just as she feels the moment slipping away from her.

And, everyone receives the invitation to question their beliefs in order to grow into faith.

The healing of the deaf man seems simple by comparison. Mark uses the word Jesus used in that healing to comment about the prior event. “be opened”.

The words set the deaf man free from his physical affliction. The words are also given to set us all free from our spiritual affliction.

“Be open!” God is performing miracles in our lives every day. Jesus is asking us to identify where pride solidifies inherited belief and subverts faith that manifests compassion.

Be open to hear the word of God from the one who is the incarnate Word of God. Open your ears to hear Jesus speak in the Bible. Open you hearts to feel Jesus present in human need. Open your minds to ask Jesus to transform your inherited beliefs by grace through faith. Open your souls to experience the Real Presence of the Divine on the Day of Real Presence at the altar of Real Presence.