ORDINARY SUNDAY 23
(5th September)
2021
Readings:
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23
Psalm 125
James 2:1-17
Mark 7:24-37
Three weeks ago I was speaking of a feisty woman named Mary of Nazareth
who spoke of an upside-down world where the mighty are torn down. Now I
encounter another desperate, feisty woman arguing with Jesus. Somehow I have to
discern the thunder-whispering voice of God through it all.
Forty years or more ago a strong woman named Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza
wrote a book about unsettling women who are given no name but whose stroppiness
reverberates through scripture for two thousand years. Today we encounter one
of the stroppiest of them all.
As it happens I am researching a chapter of a book at the moment
about the origins of this diocese, encountering several stroppy women. I cannot
but notice how hard it is to find their names amongst the narratives of men, how
deep I have to dig to find the real identity those women who wrestle with
society and with God and are generally thrown into a pile of anonymity and
owning only their husbands’ identities.
Today a woman who encounters God will not take no for an answer.
We know only that this unnamed woman has an unnamed daughter and is desperate.
Desperate that her daughter must not be cast even further to the scrapheap of
humanity, the scrapheap to which the absence of a Y-chromosome has already pushed
her. Whatever demons were and are, the biggest demon this woman faces is that
she and her daughter must fight for every scrap of hope. Demon of oppression,
demon of indifference, demon of a myriad names.
She fights. An outsider, an infidel, she encounters a Hebrew who
may just break the cycles of indifference that have been her life story and may
be her daughter’s death story. Perhaps in a timey-wimey way she finds a nation
that cries out "This is not who we are" after one terrorist attack
but turns and sends death threats to Muslims after another: for as long as
hatred is condoned, for as long as indifference is condoned, for as long as
racial demarcation is condoned this is who we are. This un-named woman confronts
Jesus with it.
Was Jesus trying her desperation, trying to
hear the depths of her heart-cry for her desperate daughter? I think not. Jesus
the Son who in Paul’s terms emptied himself and was found in human flesh steps out
of divinity into the myopia of being human. He is us, and is brought up short
by his own misjudgement. Humans absorb nonchalance, indifference, fatigue,
hatred. That’s why Paul cries out “all have sinned.”
This desperate, broken, nameless woman calls Jesus
for it; even the Messiah is stopped in his tracks. Then, chastened, feeling
compassion that gods are not supposed to feel, he reaches out where gods fear
to tread, reaches across abysses of sexism and racism. He says, with his word
from which action is inseparable, your daughter is well. Perhaps, face with the
heartcries of human loneliness, even God’s mind is changed from time to time? Love
is love.
Our task? Let’s start with being honest with
God. I hurt when I see Afghanistan or New World or a cot death. Let’s start by
telling God. Let’s continue by being vulnerable agents of compassion. Reaching across
the tiny abysses in our own world and showing love against all odds – as Jesus unexpectedly
learned in a flash to do. Let’s start by being fair and just and caring not because
hate is not who we are, but because this is exactly who we are.
We are the darkness of nonchalance and indifference, even if not mostly of hate.
It is what we are all capable of.
Jesus the human encounters desperation beyond his until-then
understanding. He is yet to experience the brokenness of the cross that reaches
further still, beyond even this woman’s pain. But faced by this broken woman’s anguish
he sees new dimensions to which divine love can reach, and he continues afresh
his journey towards Jerusalem, where hope at last can be born.
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