Undomesticated Jesus
Preached at Dickey Memorial Presbyterian Church.
Scripture
Mark 8:27-30
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
Mark 7:24-30
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, for a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” And when she went home, she found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.
Sermon
Today, I’m going to start by trying to resolve every single problem you have with this passage. And since this is a generally progressive congregation, I’m going to resolve every single problem we have with this passage in a generally progressive way.
Let’s start at the top. The area Jesus is passing through, Tyre, is referenced throughout the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. It was one of the chief cities of the Phoenicians, and it was ludicrously wealthy. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, it was a symbol of the rich, heathen world [1]. This was Gentile country.
Most notably, Tyre exported the worship of Baal, the false god that King Ahab integrates into Hebrew society. It is thanks to Tyre and the Phoenicians that the Hebrew people were viciously judged by God. In the Roman world, Tyre becomes a partner to the empire. It remains wealthy and conducts quite a bit of business with Rome, particularly in the trade of luxury goods.
This woman, a Syrophoenician, was likely a wealthy woman and someone who came from privilege. Not only is she a Gentile, but she’s a Gentile whose ancestors and people have benefitted from the oppression of the Hebrew people. She might be suffering, but she suffers as part of a people who reveled in injustice, as the Hebrew Bible portrays it.
Jesus of course, comes from a very different world. As a Hebrew, as a colonized person, as a subjugated, poor minority, his world had no sympathies for Syrophoenicians or Tyre or Rome. Those gentiles aren’t merely outsiders; they are despised and for very good reason. They had proven again and again to be villains in the story of the Hebrew people.
So… that’s great news! Jesus is off the hook. This passage isn’t really bad, it just seems bad.
Yes, he uses a slur.
Yes, it seems like he was content to let her suffer.
Yes, he seems to have needed to be talked into it.
But this is the same Jesus we know. This is the same old nice, progressive Jesus we’re comfortable with. When Jesus asks, “who do you say that I am,” we know the answer: the Messiah who looks like us, talks like us, acts like us.
Right?
I don’t know about you, but something still nags at the back of my mind.
We can look at this passage rightside up, sideways, upside down; with a magnifying glass and from a hundred yards; we can try shuffling the pieces around and try to glue together Jesus until he looks like the Jesus we learned in Sunday school.
And yet, there might be a little part of us that feels unsettled and turned around. Because what have we heard? The voice of Jesus, saying that “it’s not fair to… throw [food] to the dogs.”
Whether you’re conservative or progressive or moderate or leftist, this is a passage that offends us. It’s a passage that puts a nagging feeling in our minds, a pit in our stomach. It’s a passage where Jesus doesn’t meet anyone’s expectations.
What if God is trying to get us to pay attention to that nagging feeling, that pit in our stomachs? This passage might be as bad as it seems. It might be as offensive as we fear. But those nagging feelings and pits in our stomachs might be loose threads in our lives, waiting for God to pull on them and unravel the tangled knots within us. And God might be here, wanting to unravel our expectations, and hoping that we will let ourselves be surprised by the Jesus who really exists.
What if—in trying to hold onto the Jesus we’ve known—we’re missing the very Jesus who is trying to bring wholeness into our lives?
Anne Lamott said that “you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” [2]
God has a funny way of looking like us after a while. Like Thomas Jefferson and his infamous Bible, we start slicing verses out of Jesus and pasting them back together. Our brains are wired for inventing and imagination, and in our search for meaning, we accidentally stitch our hearts onto God’s sleeve. The Jesus I’ve accidentally pieced together seems to read The New York Times, love music, and has a somewhat irreverent sense of humor. Some people’s Jesus votes blue, and some people’s Jesus votes red. Some people’s Jesus is unvaccinated, and some people’s Jesus is a union worker.
When Jesus asks his disciples, “who do you say that I am,” I think he also asks us that question.
Does Jesus play golf like Cecil? Does Jesus love music like Troy? Is Jesus a Presbyterian?
“What if—in trying to hold onto the Jesus we’ve known—we’re missing the very Jesus who is trying to bring wholeness into our lives?”
The Gospel writers had a tall task - how could they depict the full story of Christ? In doing so, they had to make a conscious decision on whether to include today’s events. Mark originated this story, and the writers of Matthew and Luke had to decide: to include or not to include today’s passage. The Gospel of Matthew chose to include its offensiveness. But the Gospel of Luke, it chose to omit this passage.
In trying to give us the full-bodied story of Jesus Christ, the Gospels of Mark and Matthew chose to disgust us. To let a complicated, unappealing Jesus touch our lives and to stir up feelings of affront and offense. They chose to include a story that seems so odd, so strange, so unfamiliar, that it puts us on edge. This is Jesus? Where did this come from?
The Gospel writers might have included this story to make a point. We don’t encounter good news by parsing out some tidy, cogent, contextualized Jesus; we encounter good news when we let ourselves be surprised by Jesus. We encounter life thanks to God’s unexpectedness and strangeness; because God’s foreignness, strangeness, unconventionality and unorthodoxy is what precipitates every miracle, every healing, every birth into new life. From Jesus’ birth to his resurrection, it was God’s unrecognizability—God’s strangeness and unexpectedness—that drew people into hope.
One of my professors, Clifton Black, is a Markan scholar and Methodist pastor. He’s an incredibly earnest, kind, and soft-spoken man, and a Southern gentleman if there ever was one. Dr. Black said this about today’s passage: “If we, too, are not gobsmacked, it’s a safe bet that we have domesticated Jesus and have neutered the gospel.” [3]
Today, the Gospels are trying to gobsmack us with a Jesus who doesn’t look like we thought, who doesn’t do things the way we’d do, or bring wholeness into the world the way we’d like.
For some onlookers, this healing was disgusting. Some may have felt that though Jesus, an oppressed, brown-skinned man, rightfully put this wealthy Gentile in her place, he ultimately granted her profound wholeness and grace. He gave her what was not hers. For other onlookers, it was Jesus’ words that were disgusting. Though Jesus, the embodiment of love and radical acceptance, does the right thing, he weaponizes a racial slur against a woman. No matter where the onlooker stood ideologically or theologically–then or now–today’s incident was prone to strike outrage.
The Gospels of Mark in Matthew, in bequeathing this passage to us, give us an opportunity to be surprised by Jesus; for us to be caught off guard, and realize that the Jesus we thought we knew wasn’t the Jesus who really is. And that surprise and challenge to our expectations will surely change us, today.
When we expect Jesus to condemn and hate people spewing conspiracies or misinformation, Jesus reaches out with unexpected empathy. When we expect Jesus to give our inclusive church a miracle, Jesus beckons us instead to softened hearts and quiet reflection. When we expect Jesus to shake the dust off his feet in the wake of leadership failures or bad decisions, Jesus draws us into the complexities of love and service.
When our expectations are thrown out the window, when we’re challenged by a nagging feeling or feel our fists clench tighter, that is where Jesus is beckoning us. That is where the Gospel grows legs, where we are gobsmacked by God’s radical, unexpected, unconventional, and surprising presence.
The disgust and offense and challenge to our expectations are pointing us toward a real Jesus, not an imaginary, ephemeral, cardboard Jesus, but the Jesus who actually lives and moves. Because we never find Jesus where we want to or expect to.
“When our expectations are thrown out the window, when we’re challenged by a nagging feeling or feel our fists clench tighter, that is where Jesus is beckoning us. That is where the Gospel grows legs, where we are gobsmacked by God’s radical, unexpected, unconventional, and surprising presence.”
Today, like throughout the life of Jesus, our ministry starts with empathy for people that make us uncomfortable. It starts with opening ourselves to foreignness, strangeness, unconventionality and unorthodoxy. Our ministry in Dickeyville starts with love and service that isn’t going to be sexy or tidy or all that interesting. Our ministry starts with love for people we don’t want to love and empathy for people we don’t think deserve it. Our ministry starts by letting go — of expectations, of victimhood, of comfortability.
Even more urgently, this congregation is discerning leadership for the next season, and that leadership might not look like our imaginations or our assumptions. The service and ministry and leadership that Jesus calls us to is never what we want, never what we thought, never what is perfectly aligned with our superficial hope. It usually strikes a chord of disgust or offense or disappointment, and in failing to meet our expectations, usually ends up leading us into what God truly wants and desires and loves for us. Sometimes God gives us an ugly duckling, knowing it’s a swan.
Affronts to our expectations are what unfetter the hope of the Gospel. God wants to unravel who we’ve made Jesus into—every one of our expectations–-and weave together something unimaginably realer, and unimaginably better. In the uncomfortability, and uncertainty, and loss, and anger, and disgust we feel, God is trying to transform us, trying to calibrate us more and more to the real Jesus, not our own self-made Jesus. And I have no reservations whatsoever, that the real, living Jesus—the one we meet at Communion and at baptisms and even in this ugly text—is infinitely worth being surprised by. Even if it challenges us; even if it is inconvenient and incongruent with what we expected.
That’s where we land today. Not with this passage resolved. Not with it making a lot of sense. But with disgust, with surprise, with gobsmacking. With any luck, we’ll leave worship today with an undomesticated Jesus—alive, living, and full of complexity—and with a brilliant, undomesticated, technicolor gospel that is making all things new.
Sources
[1] "Tyre and Sidon." In The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by Cross, F. L., and E. A. Livingstone. : Oxford University Press, 2005. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780192802903.001.0001/acref-9780192802903-e-7011.
[2] Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group 1980), 22.
[3] Clifton Black, “Commentary on Mark 7:24-37,” Working Preacher, 5 September 2021, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-23-2/commentary-on-mark-724-37-5
