There were two stories in our
Gospel reading today, but it’s not just a biblical “buy one get one free”. They
are meant to be read together, because they have a common theme. They are both
about hearing and speaking. In both stories someone is given the ability to
hear and speak properly.
In the second story that theme
is obvious. A deaf man who has an impediment in his speech is healed. “Ephthatha”,
Jesus says to him. “Be opened”. And that’s what happens. His ears are opened,
his tongue released. We are told he then “speaks plainly” – the Greek word is “orthos”
which literally means “rightly” or “correctly”. For a long time no one has been
able to make out what he is saying when he speaks, but now he can tell it like
it is. We don’t know what he says when he “speaks plainly” for the first time –
perhaps words of love or thanks, but perhaps there are some home truths to
deliver too, things he wants to say to those who may have sidelined or ignored
him over the years, as so often happens to those who can’t hear or speak
properly. Whatever he says, though, his life is transformed.
So it’s easy to see where the
hearing and speaking comes in that second healing miracle, but I think it is just
as important in the first; in fact, one leads on to the other.
To understand this, we need
to know a bit of history and geography.
Jesus is in the region of
Tyre, we are told. But why? It’s not an obvious place for him to be at all. If
you look at the map I’ve handed out, you’ll see that Tyre is to the north of
Israel, and it’s in the land of the Phoenecians. Tyre was a thriving
international sea-port; the Phoenecians had always been great maritime traders
and people from all over the world came through Tyre. It was multi-ethnic,
multi-religious, multi-everything sort of place. It was just the kind of place,
in other words, which good Jewish people were taught to avoid. In Tyre you’d be
sure to come face to face with foreign gods, foreign customs, foreign food,
things which Jewish people wouldn’t just have found strange but thoroughly
unclean. So what’s Jesus doing there?
He may have been trying to
get away from trouble in Galilee. He had been arguing with the religious
authorities, challenging their interpretation of the law, and things were
starting to get heated. But all the same, there must have been more congenial
places to take refuge.
He is heading out of what
should be a land where he feels at home into one where he definitely won’t,
where he is bound to encounter things that will challenge and disturb him.
Perhaps it’s a bit like the time at the beginning of his ministry when he went
into the wilderness. People saw the wilderness not as a place of peace and
quiet, but as the haunt of demons, the frontline of the spiritual battle. There
Jesus confronted Satan, the tempter, the one who challenged him to look deeply at
himself and his own motivation. But Jesus also discovered that in these
challenging places his Father was close at hand; angels were sent to minister
to him.
We don’t know much about the
Syrophoenician woman who comes to him to beg for her daughter’s healing, but
what we do know is important, because it explains Jesus’ initial reaction to
her. At first glance she probably seemed far more like someone sent to try him
than a ministering angel.
She is a Gentile, not a Jew, for
a start; we can assume she worshiped the foreign gods of Phoenicia. She seems
to come to Jesus on her own, which was uncommon. Respectable women stayed at
home; their husbands, fathers or brothers spoke for them, especially to
complete strangers. But where is the man who should be speaking for her? Where
is the child’s father? She might be widowed, but the Bible usually tells us if
this is the case. So perhaps the father was a sailor or a trader, long
disappeared over the horizon, just passing through. Whatever the story, the
fact that she comes to Jesus alone, tells us that there is something about her
background that is suspicious.
And sure enough, Jesus seems
to be completely wrong footed by her . His first response is dismissive to the
point of rudeness. That can seem shocking if we expect Jesus to be some sort of
all-seeing, all-knowing perfect superhero, but he wouldn’t be human if he never
had to learn anything, and no one can learn without getting it wrong. Some commentators
suggest he is just engaging in playful banter, testing her faith, but you don’t
playfully banter with someone whose little daughter is desperately ill. That
would reflect even more badly on Jesus.
Jesus must have realised he
would face unknown challenges when he set off towards Tyre, but that’s the
problem – unknown challenges aren’t things you can’t prepare for, and he wasn’t
prepared for this one. It’s a bit like those reality TV programmes that put
people in extreme situations – marooned on a desert island or having to live in
some gruesome historical re-enactment. They must know when they sign up that they’ll be asked
to eat apparently inedible foods or do things that will terrify them, but
presumably they think they’ll be able to cope. Predictably, they are all caught
out sooner or later, when they reach the limit they didn’t know they had – the TV
producers rely on it to make these programmes interesting. If the contestants
rise to the challenge, though, it is often a moment of transformation, the
moment that makes the struggle worthwhile.
And that’s where we come back
to that theme which unites the two stories in today’s Gospel. I said at the
outset that they were both about hearing and speaking. In the second story
Jesus heals a deaf man’s so that he can hear and “speak rightly”. But it seems that before Jesus can do that, he
has to have his own ears opened and learn to speak rightly himself. This determined, desperate Syrophoenician turns
out to be a ministering angel after all, someone whose words change Jesus’
ministry, just as much as Jesus’ words
change her life and the life of her child. Because of her he learns that his
message is for the Gentiles just as much as for the Jews. In fact he seems to put that lesson into
practice straightaway, because the deaf man he heals may well be a Gentile too.
He lives in the Decapolis, among the ten Greek towns on the east side of the
Sea of Galilee founded by Alexander the Great. Jesus seems to be taking a very
roundabout and strange route home. But this Syrophoenician woman has taught him
that he is just as likely to find God at work in these places as he is in the
heartlands of Jewish faith.
These stories were important
to the early church because they had to face the same struggles as Jesus. Most
of his first followers were Jewish, and
they found it really hard to welcome on equal terms Gentiles who wanted to
follow him. They argued bitterly among themselves about whether Gentile
followers should have to follow the Jewish food laws and be circumcised. They battled
too over the place of women in the Church, struggling to get their heads around
the very egalitarian vision of the Kingdom Jesus had left them. At gut level it was difficult to change
attitudes they had grown up with and never questioned. But stories like this
reminded them that even Jesus had needed to grow in his understanding of his
ministry too, and that it hadn’t always come easily to him either.
For that reason they are
important stories for us. We probably like to think of ourselves as open,
caring, tolerant people – and I’m sure we are. But I’m prepared to bet that
there are still some people whose voices we fail to hear, people we dismiss as
having nothing to say that’s worth hearing, people who we haven’t even noticed
are trying to speak. We may be deaf to whole groups who seem different to us.
We may fail to hear the voices of the poor, or close our ears to the rich,
assuming they know nothing about our struggles. We may write off those older
than us as hopelessly out of date, or those younger than us as naïve. We may talk
over people, speaking for them rather than letting them speak for themselves. We
don’t trust them to know and speak their own truths. This week many have heard
afresh the voices of refugees, seeing them for the first time as real individuals,
people like us, but it took a shocking picture of a drowned toddler to forge
that human connection.
The same deafness can affect
our relationships with individuals too. We can probably all think of people
whose voices we tend to screen out and avoid. Perhaps we’ve fallen out with
them and can’t believe they have anything to say that we want to hear. It is
bound to be loaded with their own agenda. We stick our fingers in our ears and
turn away. But if we can’t bring ourselves to listen to each other, nothing can
ever change.
It seems to me that our
deafness to each other – conscious or unconscious - usually springs from fear;
fear that giving ground to others, giving them space in our lives– will leave
us without what we need for ourselves. Jesus’ own concern seems to be that if
he gives his attention to Gentiles, there won’t be enough for the people of
Israel. But the woman’s response reminds him that there’s no need to ration the
love of God. Only those who know they have plenty to eat would let scraps fall
to the floor for the dogs. There is more than enough to go around; the table of
God’s love is laden. It’s a message which is central to Jesus’ teaching, but it
seems that even he needed to be reminded of it from time to time. And if he
did, then surely we do too.
It might sound like asking
for trouble, but perhaps this week we should pray that God would send us a
Syrophoenician to disturb us; someone whose voice we have found it hard to
listen to in the past. Let’s pray that God will remind us that it is safe to
let go of what we cling to, because our God is infinitely bigger and far more
generous than we can imagine.
Amen
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