Jesus' temper, and truth to power

 

Sermon for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost, 2021, text here. Delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY.

I received an email from my Human Resources department a few weeks ago. The email informed me that I was about to max out on my paid time off, and that I should consider getting away from work for a while to rest and recharge. Not taking time off has snuck up on me, and it is something that I intend to act on in the weeks to come. When I read this morning’s Gospel passage, I could relate to Jesus, who was trying to get away from the busyness of his work. In Mark's Gospel readings, Jesus has been constantly teaching and being approached by crowds asking him to heal them. He gets no relief, and is getting tired. He needs to get away from it all and recenter himself. Last week, we read about him being challenged by religious authorities about not following rituals before eating, and he sets them straight on someone’s actions being more important than their intent. This week, we read where he is confronted by yet another person, a Syrophoenecian gentile woman in this case, who is asking him to heal her daughter. He declines, and is rude to her, essentially calling her a dog. There isn’t a way to sugar-coat or explain away Jesus' rude reaction and insult without being intellectually dishonest. It is shocking to hear Jesus speak this way, but amid all of the divine miracles, signs, and loving the unlovable, we forget that Jesus is also human. We have read where he wept in grief for Lazarus, where he was angry with the money changers in the Temple, and where he prayed in fear on the Mount of Olives that he not be crucified. Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, expressing human emotions as much as he acts and speaks with the power of God. Yet, it is through Jesus that God understands human life, both the good and bad, and when we are at our best and at our worst. As much as we ask God to accept us despite our weaknesses, we can accept that Jesus reacts in a perfectly human way to this woman asking for healing for her daughter.

The woman responds to Jesus’ insult, turning it back on him in the form of a question, and in doing so speaks truth to power, standing up for herself and daughter. Her faith in her righteousness gives her the courage to confront Jesus, who has power beyond her comprehension. She is holding Jesus accountable to his teaching and professed unconditional love of the people he meets, calling to his divine nature, and that results in a holy reply. This scenario, where someone of lesser power speaks to someone else with more power is similar to what we heard in James’ epistle this morning. James points out that wealth and social status brings power and opportunity to those who hold it, because money and influence can make more things happen than principles or morals can. He describes people in fine clothes who are given the best seats in the church, while people in shabby clothes and dirty in appearance are told to sit elsewhere, away from everyone else. He illustrates that power brings privilege, and privilege makes it easier to ignore undesirable people or to treat them badly. James speaks against people who have more power than he has and speaks for the poor that they dishonor. The people he describes and those showing favoritism may have been in his own church. When the Syrophoenician woman similarly speaks up, she reminds Jesus that she has worth in God’s eyes and what she has to say is as important as what he has said to others. She is not willing to be discounted, or cast aside, or put into an inferior position because of who she is.

Instead of escalating the tension between them, Jesus’ reaction is to listen to the woman. He indirectly acknowledges his own short-sightedness by admitting that the woman is right, that as a Gentile she is as worthy of his compassion as a Jew. If we think that Jesus’ perfection as the Son of God is in his wisdom in this exchange, that goes right out of the window. His perfection in this case is in his self- awareness, what he realizes that he does and does not know, and his desire to learn from someone who he just put down. He legitimizes her desire to be heard and lifts her up when he steps away from his power and status among the people of Israel. What began as a question of who was right or wrong turned into a question of who needed to hear and who needed to be heard. Jesus’ could put aside his rudeness and impatience because he could get out of his own way and see things from her point of view and how real it was to her because of her experience. And when he did, God’s presence shone through him when her daughter was healed. God was present in that very moment when her needs were met, but it didn't mean that Jesus’ needs were ignored. In his time, in God’s time, he could rest as well.

Today, we are where Jesus was in this story. We are tired after being surrounded by the sick and the dying, of hearing people argue over whether racism exists or not, of learning of yet another fatal shooting in the city, of enduring the relentless sniping of politicians. We are isolated, physically forced apart by the pandemic, and emotionally forced apart by a polarized, either/or view of life, especially in social media. We are lonely because we can no longer find fellowship that doesn’t devolve into griping or a siege mentality. We snap at each other because we seek some form of peace and rest but we can never find it. Yet it is often those we snap at who are standing up and asking us to listen, speaking truth to the power that we possess by default. The question is, how will we respond? Can we respond like Jesus did to the woman, acknowledging the truth that she spoke? What do we really lose when we acknowledge truth presented to us?

When we are spoken to in truth that challenges our position and privilege, it opens an opportunity to set aside our power when we understand that being in the wrong is a sign of our humanity, like Jesus’ humanity. James’ comment in his letter that faith without works is a dead faith implies that when our faith in our rightness is challenged, that’s when the work begins on us getting out of our own way. That work is one of asking why we are being challenged and by whom. It is finding the courage to hear what we believe is wrong because it might show where we are wrong, too. And when we discover that we are wrong, it is the hardest work of acknowledging our errors and imperfection, but it is also a time to act in faith to seek righteousness before God. When we put our faith on the line as we declare that we have the truth instead of a truth, discovering when we are wrong is devastating, because we have put everything on the line when we say that we have the truth. But when we are self-aware and acknowledge that we haven’t seen the world through someone else’s eyes, that we haven’t shared all of the experiences that others have had, we can, with Jesus’ grace, search willingly for truth. We can turn away from the question of who is right or who is wrong, who is inferior and who is superior, who has authority and who has no right to authority, and instead ask who needs to hear, and who needs to be heard. Sometimes, we have to listen, we have to acknowledge someone else’s reality that is foreign to us, and we have to meet them on God’s terms, not on our terms. We need to be able to ask ourselves what is God saying to us when we listen to someone else? What is it that drives our pursuit of righteousness?