Creation Time 2 Year B

My very strong temptation this morning was to preach on the letter of James and turn my attention away from the rather challenging Gospel reading that we’ve just heard. There’s lots to be said about the importance of balancing faith and works – especially during Fair Trade fortnight, when we’re asked to pay some attention to our own impact in the world.

The theme for Fairtrade fortnight this year is ‘Be the Change’, the tagline asks how YOU can be the change that is needed for people in the most exploited communities in our world. The combination of James and that tagline felt like a bit of a gift for a preacher to be honest. Be the change. Don’t just think about change and what it means, live it. That feels like both an invitation and a challenge and something that we would all benefit from grappling with.

We know how easy it is to make changes in the way that we think, perhaps even in how we pray and how difficult it is to make changes in the way that we live. How easy it is to have good intentions and how difficult it is to live out those intentions. We might hope to be the change, but making that a reality is a constant challenge. One challenge of being the change is that we can quickly find ourselves in a place that is counter-cultural. It’s so much easier to go along with the norms around us; so much harder to live differently.

As I was preparing for this morning, I found myself being constantly distracted by the story about the Syrophoenician woman, she got under my skin. And I found myself wondering what, if anything, she has to teach us about being the change. What voice does she have in our contemporary world?

So, what do we know about her? She was a Greek speaking Gentile from the region of Tyre and Sidon. She was a mother. She was a person of faith. And she was desperate. She didn’t know how to help her child. Nothing she had tried so far had worked.

She was so desperate that she made a total nuisance of herself, so desperate that she crossed a social norm to ask for help, And at the end of the day it worked for her, she got what she had come to ask – her daughter was healed.

There is something to be admired in all of that. Her faith made her daughter well. Her persistence ensured that Jesus’ healing ministry extended to include the most important person in her life. The outcome is great and something we can celebrate. But the content of her encounter with Jesus is neither of those things. This must be one of the most puzzling bits of Scripture that we read on a regular basis.

Preachers and theologians over the years have offered a range of explanations for the dialogue between Jesus and the woman, some of them, frankly, more credible than others. I’ve looked at quite a few interpretations over the past few days and, if I’m honest, they all feel like contortions of one sort or another. They don’t help me to understand what is really being said. Rather than seeing my inability to understand the encounter as a problem to be solved, I would like to suggest that I am drawn to the story precisely because I can’t make sense of it – and that there is something important in that realisation.

This morning’s Gospel is sandwiched between stories that are much more accessible than this one. Stories that remind us of the generosity of God, the caring nature of Jesus, his compassion for the people he encountered. Chapter 6 of Mark’s Gospel includes the sharing of 5 loaves and 2 fish; chapter 8 has the 7 loaves and a few fish. Stories that we carry with us, that make us feel that we know something about our faith. Stories that speak of the Jesus who inspires us and nurtures us.

This morning’s encounter doesn’t have those qualities. At first sight there is little compassion or care. There is rejection rather than inclusion. This is not the Jesus we know and love. It's not the man who fed the hungry; nor is it the man who had a passion for justice and fair treatment. It’s a man who engages in some form of banter that verges on becoming offensive.

And let’s turn back to the woman. Somehow, she’s not a very appealing character. She doesn’t quietly make her needs known. She doesn’t appear to show much respect for Jesus and his team. It’s tricky to imagine ourselves into her shoes. We might be able to imagine ourselves in her circumstances, but repartee about dogs and crumbs, not so much. And I think that’s why I find her so intriguing. She doesn’t beg for a different outcome, she hits right back - speaking, it seems to me, like an equal. She wants something, she desperately wants something, but her personality, her way of being in the world encourages a particular and not especially easy way of seeking it.

I don’t like the woman, nor do I like the Jesus I encounter in this vignette. That’s not the person I signed up to follow, to emulate. Some commentators suggest that Jesus was just having a bad day and this is a reminder of his humanity and his own vulnerability. But, for me, that doesn’t really wash.

My conclusion, at least this week, is that I’ve come up against that place where I am not able to understand. I’ve found myself in an encounter with Scripture that I either dismiss or accept as mystery. We’re not great with mystery. We want to understand. We’re taught that we can find ways to understand. And yet, some of our greatest thinkers remind us that the more we know, the more we realise we don’t know.

If that is true of the things of this world, it’s even more true of God. The deeper we go in our relationship with God, the more we realise that we know almost nothing of God. The longer we spend with Scripture, the more likely we are to realise that what we thought made sense is simply scratching the surface of deep and mysterious truth.

And what does all of this tell us about being the change? I think that the encounter with the Syrophoenician woman is reminding us that being the change, living the change, challenging our own societal norms, is likely to take us into places that we don’t, perhaps can’t fully understand. It will inevitably take us into places that others don’t understand, that are questioned and challenged. And at that point we can choose. We can choose to do what we understand in our hearts to be right, even when our heads haven’t yet caught up. We can choose to step out of our cultural context and to find ourselves in places that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. We can hold onto the reminder from James that we are called to find a place of balance between faith and works – and the reminder from the Syrophoenician woman that the place of balance might not be where we imagined it to be.

None of us actually has the answers – or at least not all of the answers but we are called to continue to ask the questions.

It may be hard to be the change today, or tomorrow. But we can aspire to become the change; to become the people whose faith informs and directs, the people who persist because that is the only thing to do.