Causing a Stir- Rev Wendy McCormick, September 8,2024
Healing stories from the Bible are so challenging. Because we all know somebody – probably several somebodies – for whom no amount of prayer, no amount of faith in Jesus was enough. Despite fervent prayers for healing, despite being on every prayer chain imaginable, there was no cure. They suffered catastrophic injuries or an insidiously incurable disease, and they died. Just a couple of weeks ago a 34-year-old woman in this community, a deeply committed Christian, prayed for by many, many devout Christians near and far, died of an incurable cancer.
The overly certain believer may even say, “Perhaps you didn’t pray hard enough,” to a grieving parent or spouse. During the pandemic, I was once sent a video ostensibly to see the clever use of technology by a congregation sending videos to families so that religious education could continue. I could hardly appreciate the quality I was supposed to witness because the content was explicitly teaching the children that getting sick is the consequence of sin because the Bible says so --- children who get ear infections and viruses, children who may have grandparents with heart conditions or cancer. It made me furious.
It's true that in biblical times, illness and disability were seen as judgment from God, the consequence of sin. Sometimes in a Jesus story, when someone is physically healed, they are also told, “Your sins are forgiven.”
But something in us knows that understanding of illness and healing can’t be quite right. Perhaps we think some people “deserve” their illness or infirmity, but we know tons of people who don’t. We have a depth of medical understanding the ancients did not have. And let’s be clear: we also know God better than that. The God we know and serve is not malicious or vindictive or capricious.
Plus, we know that God created us mortal. A doctor friend, diagnosed with an advanced cancer in his early 50s, knew only too well his situation and prognosis . . . “None of us gets out of this alive,” he reminded his pastor.
So let me be explicit: I do not believe that God chooses to cure some people and not others, based on faithfulness or sinfulness or any other reason. I know we are all mortal, and I do not believe God is a micromanager. I do not believe that illness is God’s judgment or punishment. I do believe God goes with us through whatever we face. And I believe we are called by our faith to love and to care for and to pray for those who are hurting in body, mind and spirit. I believe that such prayer changes us and connects us to God and to the ways God is working in the world and in all of our lives. I also believe it is perfectly right and good and faithful to pray with all our heart and mind and strength for someone to be made well.
So here we go. Mark 7. Back-to-back healing stories
We have to start with geography because it is essential to today’s story. Jesus is seeking to be undetected is in the region of Tyre. This is in modern Lebanon. The woman he encounters is Greek from Syro-Phoenicia – AKA Syria. So, Jesus is not in Israel, and the person approaching him is not a Jew. She is Syrian, a Gentile, a foreigner, an enemy, of another race and people. This is familiar because the hostility between Israel and its neighbors is still a current reality. And this Gentile, this foreigner, petitioning Rabbi Jesus is also a woman. Addressing a man, especially of another race, just wasn’t done. In his initial response to this Syrian woman – this Gentile, this Arab, this enemy of Israel – Jesus is not kind. He expresses the views of his people, the Jews. Jews are God’s children, and non-Jews are, you heard correctly, dogs. There is no explaining away this initial reaction from fairest Lord Jesus.
But if we spend too much time on that troubling first response, we may miss a key to the story -- the power and persuasiveness of this unnamed desperate mother. Yes, she’s a Gentile, a Syrian, a foreigner, an enemy of Israel and not a follower of the one true God. But like so many mothers before and since, she doesn’t care – because she is desperate for the life and health of her child. Her daughter is possessed by a demon, which we take to mean critically ill – probably mentally ill -- perhaps seizing, perhaps manic and raving – we don’t know. But it was bad. Really bad. And yet she had heard about this man from Israel, this rabbi who had slipped across the border quietly. How did she even know about him? No ethnic, political or religious boundary was going to stop her. No propriety or custom, no discouraging words, no insult would stop her. She would do anything. Anything to save her daughter.
Her desperate yet clever response to Jesus, “even the dogs eat the crumbs from the children’s table” moves him. He acknowledges her and her daughter is healed. Perhaps the best explanation for this troubling account is that this story stands to show that Jesus’ ministry was to all people, not just to Israel, and that even he himself had to realize that and what it meant.
But surely the main takeaway is the passionate and persistent advocacy of this woman for her child. And the part advocacy plays in healing.
We know still today that children aren’t the only ones who need advocacy when it comes to health care. Even someone going into the hospital for something routine needs someone there, paying attention, asking questions, advocating when necessary. And for those who are not from the dominant culture --- foreigners, those with dark skin, and, yes, women – there are prejudices baked into the system that make that advocacy even more important.
Consider the great Serena Williams who nearly died in childbirth a few years ago.
It seems that her incredible physical fitness, her fame and fortune and her access to only the best could not protect her from the well-documented greater risk for complication and mortality that black women face when they give birth. It’s not that doctors and nurses are consciously or overtly racist. It’s that we are all products of our society, and that we unawarely absorb attitudes and assumptions. Those unconscious attitudes and assumptions cause some cause medical providers to take the symptoms less seriously and to respond less quickly, when they are coming from black women.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2022, the maternal mortality rate – that means dying in childbirth was 49.5 deaths per 100,000 live births for black women, but 19 for white women, and slightly lower than that for Hispanic and Asian women.
So, this Syrian woman reminds us of the importance, the power, the holiness, of advocacy, of standing up for someone who cannot stand up for themselves, and of how much harder some people have to push than the rest of us do. May our own blindness be healed.
We could spend a lot more time on this powerful little story, on Jesus’ initial reaction, on the cross-cultural conflict at the heart of the story, on this tenacious mother, and finally on the simple, quiet healing – all of it – but Mark goes charging on to another story. Jesus leaves the region of Tyre and Sidon, in Lebanon, goes back through the region of the Galilee and then farther east into a different foreign territory. This time, Mark says, they are in the region of the Decapolis. In Greek, the 10 cities, and also beyond the boundaries of Israel, and a center of Greek culture. Solid Gentile territory encompassing parts of both Syria and Jordan today. As if to solidify Jesus’ mission to Jew and Gentile alike, here we have someone who quite literally cannot speak for himself. “Some people,” presumably friends, bring him to Jesus and advocate on his behalf, begging Jesus to heal him.
About 25 years ago I visited Israel/Palestine with a group of pastors, and I had the opportunity to go to Gaza for one day to tour some mission sites affiliated with World Vision. The largest one was a program for the deaf. We learned that the genetic incidence of deafness is high in that Palestinian population AND that the biggest obstacle the agency faced was finding the deaf people and getting them access to services. Because in their society – and again – this is modern times – to have a deaf family member was a cause of shame, seen as a moral failure in the household, judgement from God, just like in the time of Jesus. So, these deaf family members were hidden away, never let out of the house, let alone taken to a mission with teachers and therapists.
In Jesus’ time, a person with a physical handicap faced ostracization. Their physical handicaps were seen as signs of sin, and they were closed off from the community. That’s why they had to beg. They had no one and nothing. So the healing, which Jesus performs – this time without discussion or controversy -- doesn’t just give this man speech and hearing. It literally restores him to community. It gives him his life back – he goes from painful existence to fullness of life and restoration to acceptance in society. When Jesus says, “be opened,” he is quite literally and graphically opening the man’s ears. But he is also opening his whole world, opening him to the fullness of life in community.
Be opened. Be opened to the inclusion of friends and family and full participation in the community.
The stories are so short. Like everything in Mark’s gospel, brief and almost hurried. We still don’t know how healing happens or what it means that some people get better and some people don’t. We do know that the love and mercy of Jesus which you and I are called to share are for everyone, not just our own kind. We do know that people in need of healing need advocacy, especially if they are not from the dominant culture. And we know that healing is not just about physical cure but about restoration to community, about having relationships and a life of full acceptance.
So, I wonder, how you and I might be called to advocate for those who can’t advocate for themselves? Children. People of color. People born elsewhere. People stigmatized by their condition or disability. People who cannot find safe, affordable housing not just in New York City or Columbus but right here in Licking County. All kinds of people who are marginalized, who have become invisible to those of us who are relatively comfortable. There is something here about the healing power of seeing someone nobody else sees, the healing power of advocacy, the healing power of speaking up for someone alone and forgotten.
How are we called to restore people, to bring healing restoration to community, that even the loneliest may know they are not alone, that even the dying may know that death does not have the last word because they belong, because they are loved, because their lives have mattered. Maybe if we don’t get too fixated on physical cure, we can pay attention to these other ways in which healing matters.
The story ends by saying that Jesus told the people not to tell anyone about the healing. It is Mark’s so-called Messianic Secret. In chapter 8 Jesus will reveal his identity as the Messiah, and he’s trying to control the narrative, so to speak, and not have all this wild propaganda that he is a miracle worker spreading apart from the vital connection to his full identity and the fact that his mission will include suffering, that this isn’t just a joy ride.
But the more Jesus asks people to keep the healings quiet, the more the word spreads. Spreading like wildfire even and perhaps especially beyond the bounds of Israel, among foreigners and Gentiles. Everyone everywhere is talking, raving.
So maybe another takeaway for us is that following Jesus means getting people talking . . . . causing a stir by what we do more than by what we say. Advocating for those who cannot advocate for themselves and healing the bonds of community, restoring people to wholeness. Physical cure is not always within our grasp, but as we pray for healing – healing in body, mind and spirit -- we can embody our prayers by what we do for the ill, the hurting, the invisible, the unheard, the voiceless, the marginalized. What if the ways you and I stood up for and with people who are hurting couldn’t be kept quiet? May it be so.
