who wouldn't does

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8^th, 2024

James 2:14-17

Psalm 146:5-10

Mark 7: 24-30

 

In Matthew 21, and unique to Matthew, Jesus tells a little parable of two sons. Son One says he will and then doesn’t, while Son Two says he won’t and then does. That is the Readers Digest version. But it is a useful key by which to explore the two loosely related passages that pop up this Sunday.

There are one or two or more parables in which Jesus may be interpreted as a character in his own story. They’re not necessarily the ones about judgement and gnashing teeth. It was, I think originally the great Swiss Protestant scholar Karl Barth who first offered a radical interpretation of, for example, yet another parable, the much more well known Parable of the Prodigal Son. It might equally have been tortured Danish poet-philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard; either way we are invited to dare to read that parable with Jesus as the son who travels into the far country, a country of murk, mire, and human grottiness. That son becomes  desperate and unclean.

Paul often indicates that Son-Jesus goes into grot for us. Even death on a cross. As one who subscribes to a theology of divinization, or as Anne puts it in her recent book, theosis, I would prefer to say that Jesus enters into the grot with us in that parable. There he turns our sows’ ears into silk purses, our mourning into joy. 

Matthew’s Parable of the Two Sons, is often interpreted demonically. It has been used obscenely to generate what is called a supercessionist doctrine of salvation. That is an evil reflection, seeing the flawed Hebrew and an irredeemably flawed people who say yes and then don’t, and the blessed Christian people who allegedly say no but even more allegedly then do.

It’s wrong. It’s demonic.  

Read properly, attuned to the whole Jesus story, that parable is however a useful tool when stripped of those demonic undertones of racial hatred. Perhaps Jesus told the story to gently poke fun at himself, as he realised that his vision of mission had been changed by a desperate outsider, an unclean woman, a foreigner. 

At the very least the parable of the Two Sons provides a useful key to this remarkable encounter of Jesus and a desperate Gentile woman.

These parables need to be held in tension, and can provide a key as we explore the great dichotomy of James (probably the brother of Jesus) with his emphasis on getting out there and doing it, Mark telling a story of a Syrophoenician woman who redirects the mission of Jesus, becoming the son who said he wouldn’t do but then does. 

The woman’s desperate longing realigns Jesus from an exclusive commitment to the people who allegedly said yes but then didn’t, to hearing our heart cries, too. For we are the people who in our DNA (or whakapapa) originally said no but then did. Jesus Who Wouldn’t becomes Jesus Who Does hear the heart cry of the Gentiles, our heart cry,  my heart cry and yours and the heart cry of every human in a hell hole of despair.

Scholars have spent a lot of ink arguing whether Jesus was playing games with the Syrophoenician woman, knowing all along with perfect knowledge what his plan was, a sort of mucking around to test the depths of the her faith. In that rather cynical reading and variations of it, Jesus knew all along that he would heal the child. 

I am happier with a reading that suggests she in a sense “converts” his understanding of mission through her desperation and passion. God hears passion.

The argument is asking the wrong questions. The Jesus who reveals the heart of God will respond always to the heart cries of those who are suffering. And let’s not kid ourselves: this does not mean that suffering suddenly ceases. Nevertheless, as the author of the quotation in my comments on the psalm makes clear,[1] God, seen or unseen, enters into the deepest hell holes of human suffering and breathes resurrection light.

I am not expecting you to follow some sort of sequential argument here. There isn’t one. We need to take from Jesus’ encounter with this desperate woman a reminder that in Jesus the God who is revealed is the God who will enter into the deepest places of human experience. We need to take from James’ feisty passage the reminder that it is no use believing this unless we are prepared to get our hands dirty in the places where people are hurting. 

In the encounter with the feisty Syrophoenician woman, a foreigner, an outsider, a person Jesus the Jew is not meant to hobnob with, he does hobnob. 

In this encounter Jesus may or may not be coerced to change his mind, change his vision; we need not be afraid of interpretations that suggest that, for Jesus himself tells yet another parable of a desperate woman who knocks endlessly on the front door of the home of a sleeping judge in order to get her way. Jesus both reveals and speaks of the God he calls “Father,” God who does respond to the deepest cries of the human heart – though awkwardly we have to add a sort of rider saying “even if we can't see it.”

We can also rest assured that if we are going to find Jesus as a character in his own parables he will turn up in places that shatter our expectation of where a nice God should be. One of my favourite phrases which I have either stolen or coined is “what’s a nice God doing in a place like this?” Mark, James, and even the Psalmist, remind us of that tricky realisation that God will be who God will be and is not limited by our boundaries and expectations.

[1] “Happiness is not the absence of pain and trouble but the presence of a God who cares about human hurt and who acts on behalf of the afflicted and the oppressed.” J. Clinton McCann “The Psalms,” New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 5, 1264.