Leap
of Faith
The
Pastor Roy B. Grubbs
14th Sunday After Pentecost
Mark 7:24-30
It’s sad when your heroes don’t turn out to be the people you thought they would be. I remember how disillusioned I was when I realized that many professional athletes, actors, and politicians were not the all-American people I’d imagined them to be; or when a teacher I thought the world of made some poor decisions in his or her life. It’s hard to accept the humanity of people we put on a pedestal.
Today’s story from Mark presents a picture
of Jesus that is something less than what we’d like to see.
He seems reluctant to help out a woman who has come pleading for her
child’s life. He is unwelcoming to
this outsider who is from a region of
This whole incident seems to have caught
Jesus “with his compassion down,” as one writer puts it.
He has gone away from
What an un-Jesus-like thing to say.
Is his mission only to
Philip
Yancey says that we often have an image of Jesus that comes straight out of
But the Bible tells a different story.
The Jesus we read about in the Gospels was charismatic and compelling. People
crowded around, put up with discomfort and hunger just to hear a little of what
he had to say. He cried. He
was moved by pity. He was frustrated
with his disciples, angry with coldhearted legalists, grief-stricken at
In other words, though he was the incarnate
Son of God on earth, he was also fully human.
In this case he gave voice to some of the biased attitudes of his day, if
for no other reason than to let other people hear how bad they sounded.
Healing for a Gentile? Not
from this Jewish boy, lady. Find your own Messiah.
Here then is God in human form saying
something we would never expect God to say.
But then this God hears something he doesn’t expect to hear.
This woman, this desperate Gentile woman, will not take Jesus’
brush-off and go home. Call it quick
wits, call it ingenuity, her retort to Jesus changes the entire dynamic between
them. “Yes, the family must be fed
first. But even dogs must eat.
How about letting this one clean up the crumbs from under your table?”
I wonder what went through Jesus’ mind at
that moment. I wonder if his mind
flashed on a parable that he’d once told about a woman who was so persistent
in seeking what she wanted that the judge finally gave it to her, and how he had
used this story to illustrate his teaching about seeking until we find and
knocking on God’s door until it is opened---all to tell us to keep praying
even when are prayers are met with silence, even when the response of God is not
what we expect. “Here she is right
in front of me,” he must have thought to himself.
“And I thought that was only a sermon.”
Shaken into mercy, Jesus remembers what he
is most fundamentally about and grants the woman’s request.
Her daughter is healed.
I don’t know about you, but it encourages
me to see that someone could have that sort of impact on our Savior.
She was the wrong race, the wrong religion and the wrong sex, but she
could break through human barriers to speak to the heart of God.
I don’t know what the Syrophoenician woman
believed about God or her religious tradition.
To Jews, she was an infidel, an outsider.
But she was desperate, at the end of her rope, reaching for help wherever
she could find it. In that moment,
she made a leap of faith into the arms of Jesus.
She was willing to push back at the one who was trying to push her away,
to reach for help as a drowning person grasps for a life preserver.
And, for her persistence, Jesus calls her a paragon of virtue.
Her daughter is healed.
Sometimes faith takes that sort of
desperation: when you don’t have anywhere else to go, when your resources have
dried up and the old answers don’t work anymore.
I know I have been in that place. You’ve
probably been there, too. Then you
find out what a gift faith really is.
And someday, maybe today, there are folks in
church because they need a miracle in the worst way.
They may not have all the answers, or know all there is to know, but
today’s Gospel reveals that they are close to the heart of Jesus.
Their presence here is a testament to the love of Jesus and faith.
The woman said, Lord, never mind about the
chosen ones, or the fact that I am a heathen.
My daughter is sick. Please,
help! And Jesus said this is the
beginning place, this is why I have come into the world.
It may not be the end of a journey with Jesus; it may be where the
journey begins.
This coming Friday marks the eight-year
anniversary of 9/11. You may
remember that the first few Sundays after that awful day saw a jump in church
attendance. The terror reminded us
of how much we need each other and how much we need God.
And, in our hour of desperate need, it brought into focus once again the
comfort and the power that lie in our faith.
When our security is crumbling and so much of what we hold dear is
tumbling to the ground, God stands tall. When
our picture of God is challenged and can no longer accept the easy answers of
our youth, the deeper understanding develops of a God who will not pull our
strings like puppets nor guarantee that we will avoid evil or pain, but who will
walk into the fire at our side. God
is with us; we do not face the perilous future alone.
The spike in church attendance didn’t
last. Many who came to church for
those few Sundays soon fell away. Perhaps
they did not find the help they needed in our pews.
Perhaps they didn’t look hard enough.
But I suspect that one day they will return, as we all do in our hour of
need. Someday, life being what it
is, we’ll each be in the place of this gutsy, courageous woman, this unnamed
hero who met Jesus on his own terms and won a blessing from him.
Someday, we will be desperate enough to leap into his arms.
We will again discover what a gift faith is.
And then we will truly have something to celebrate.
Amen.
*
ECH 9-06