“Don’t Tell Anyone”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
September 10, 2006

Isaiah 35:4-7a        Mark 7:24-37

             Jesus knew human nature. Have you ever noticed, for example, that the best way to spread a story is to try and keep it quiet? You call up a friend and have a good gab session about another friend. Then you realize that you’d be devastated if it ever got back to that person, so you ask your friend if he’d mind just keeping it between the two of you. It won’t be long before everybody knows the whole story, particularly the friend you didn’t want to know. We’re a mischievous lot, human beings. No doubt, when our trusted friend shared our private conversation, he’d asked for confidentiality as well. We can’t seem to resist. The best memoirs have been written this way. Former Prime Minister Mulroney thought he could trust his old friend, Peter Newman, when he asked him to eliminate certain details from his biography. But, of course, those were the juiciest details!

            Scholars have never been able to figure out the so-called Messianic secret in Mark’s gospel. Jesus heals people and tells them not to tell anybody. He “ordered them”, in fact, not to tell anybody, in today’s reading from Mark’s gospel. “But the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it”. (Mark 7:35) Mission accomplished!  I’ve taken a crack at trying to explain this in previous sermons. I’ve surmised that perhaps he was just humble, or he was in flight from the authorities. Did he intend to downplay his own healing powers, knowing that people would just focus on his powers, not the rest of his message? I’ve tried them all. And, who knows, maybe there’s some truth in these explanations. But this morning, I’m thinking that Jesus just knew human nature. He was a smart cookie who knew how to use paradoxical injunction to his advantage. Tell a child what they’re not supposed to do, and you can count on producing that very behaviour.

            So, were you shocked by the story of the healing of the gentile woman’s daughter?  Mark portrays Jesus as exhibiting a very tribal worldview, which divides the world up into us good guys and those filthy gentiles. Gentiles were called dogs by some Jews in Jesus’ day and accorded all the attendant rights of the canine crowd.  Gentiles, of course, had their own metaphors to denigrate Jews. But surely not our Jesus!  Here’s what he says to her when she asks that he heals her daughter.

“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. (7:27)

            In other words, my mission is to my own people. Why should I care about your daughter? Disturbing, to say the least. The woman responds,

“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

To which Jesus replies,

 “For saying that, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” (7:29)

            It reads as if the woman showed either sufficient deference to the superiority of the Jews, or it could have been her witty repartee that pleased the Saviour.  What are we to make of this? I’ve taken a crack at this story in other years as well. Perhaps Jesus was having a bad day. The story did say that he just wanted to be left alone. He may have been tired, and he slipped inadvertently into the cultural default attitudes of his youth.

            The followers of Jesus understood him to be the fulfillment of prophecies, such as the one we heard from the book of Isaiah this morning. Isaiah prophesied that God would come to strengthen the faint-hearted; he would open the eyes of the blind, unstop the ears of the deaf, and give the mute a voice.  But notice that God would come to His own people, and save them from the enemy. He would come with “vengeance and terrible recompense” to save His people, according to Isaiah.  So the first followers of Jesus had a number of problems. They believed him to be the promised one who would deliver them in fulfillment of prophecy. But he didn’t do it according to the script. There were three main problems.

            First, his mission seemed to be universal. It included all people, not just our people. Second, he didn’t come with vengeance and recompense, but rather with compassion. And the third is related to the second; he was crucified by the enemy. Was this a defeat or a strange wisdom being enacted?

            Today’s reading from Mark’s gospel represents Mark’s community trying to come to terms with the first two problems. This morning I’m thinking that the story doesn’t reflect Jesus himself, but rather the writer’s attempt to explain Jesus’ strange behaviour of venturing into Gentile territory and showing the same compassion toward the Gentiles that he showed to his own people. Mark felt he needed to justify this strange behaviour. So he presents the gentile woman as acknowledging that she occupied a lower rung on the religious ladder. Actually, by admitting that she and her children are dogs, she doesn’t even belong on the same ladder. This is Mark, not Jesus.

            We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that the first followers didn’t completely get Jesus. Paul had a terrible time convincing Jesus’ disciples that the gentiles were loved by God! He had to fight with Peter, and James, and John in Jerusalem, long after Jesus death. It was simply too radical for them to deal with. Jesus exerted evolutionary pressure on the disciples. In an evolutionary universe, progress is slow. In evolution, you can’t skip steps. The universe lays down structures, physical, biological, and spiritual, necessary for the emergence of the next levels. Jesus comes on to the scene, and loves not just “us”, but “all of us”. He exerts pressure for them to jump to the next evolutionary level.

            Well, if I’ve been raised in an ethnocentric and religious worldview, in which I belong to the chosen race and you don’t, the wisdom of Christ is going to be filtered through my current stage of development. So, the gospel accounts represent the early church community’s best attempt to assimilate and pass on Christ’s consciousness. But in the transmission, it will sometimes reflect, not Jesus’ consciousness, but their own. This is why you get shocking stories like the one before us today. They didn’t totally get Jesus. But then, either do we.

             So, we have a story in which Jesus intentionally journeys into the land of the enemy, those strange Gentiles, and extends God’s compassionate healing to these strangers. When Jesus heals the deaf man with a speech impediment he looks to the heavens and says “be opened”. (7:34) This is the spiritual sensibility required for us to grow into the people God intends us to be. Jesus ventures into the strange territory of your heart and mine and invites us to keep opening up. God knows that this territory is anything but pure and stainless. If God limited God’s travels to the land of the holy and righteous, She might as well stay home. The good news of the gospel is that God crosses the borders of the holy and righteous, and visits the profane country of our hearts. The Christ comes to us, or we’re brought to the Christ as in the case of the deaf man, and he cries to the heavens, “be opened.”

            That’s all that’s needed; a desire and a willingness to be opened. When it hurts, be opened. When it’s hopeless, be opened. When it’s too much to bear, be opened. When we’ve done things that make us ashamed of ourselves, open up. Jesus is the one who helps us to open to God’s healing grace.  

            That’s all a community of faith represents in the end, a people who’ve been visited, in the strange and dark regions of their hearts, by the holy one. We’re not holy people. We’re ordinary people who’ve been “opened up” by grace, and desire to live out of that state of grace. If you’re new this morning, come back over, after the service, and visit us. We love visitors because we’ve been visited. There is such abundant life in this congregation for no other reason than we’ve been opened up. Our hearts have been cracked open, just far enough, for grace to abide. Come and see what’s going on in these beautiful, broken and healing souls. But do me a favour, will you. After you’ve seen all that’s happening in this community of faith, and you go back home, “don’t tell anyone!”