From Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 15th century.
Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 8th September 2024, the 15th after Trinity
Do you feel
anxious for the future? Many of us do, I think, including me.
Different folk worry about different things. Some dread accelerating
climate change, some are concerned by the unknown dangers of new bio-technologies
or artificial intelligence, some are frightened that newcomers of different
races and religions will change their familiar communities, while others fear that
class, race, or religious hatreds will lead to disastrous
wars and social collapse.
But there is nothing new in any of this. It is part of the human
condition, as we grow older, to fear that the world is going to hell in a
handcart. Jesus himself warned his disciples not to be alarmed by ‘wars and rumours of wars’, for ‘the end is not yet’ (Matthew 24:6).
Nor should we ignore the good things that are continually happening. In
my lifetime, advances in hygiene and medicine have reduced the burden of
disease and immensely increased life expectancy. And global development has
lifted hundreds of millions of people across the world out of crushing poverty.
We should see these as signs of hope, signs that God’s kingdom of peace and
justice is growing.
I think today’s readings have much to teach us about our Christian duty
to contribute to the growth of the God’s kingdom. If we respond as we should,
perhaps it will allay some of our fears.
In the Gospel,
Mark (7:24-37) tells us two stories about Jesus ministering to foreign
strangers.
Jesus has left the Jewish homelands to travel on a circuitous route
through Gentile country in the regions of Tyre, Sidon and the Decapolis. We are
told he did not want anyone to know he was there, so perhaps he was taking a
holiday from ministry, but news of his presence got out.
In the first
story, a Greek-speaking Syrophoenician woman with a sick daughter hears about
him and comes to beg him to cure her daughter.
Jesus says to her, ‘Let the
children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw
it to the dogs.’ She boldly and wittily answers, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the
table eat the children’s crumbs.’ And Jesus tells her that because
of what she has said, her daughter has been healed.
Do Jesus’s words sound like a rude and crushing response to you? The
children might be understood as the Jews, the children of Israel, and the dogs
as gentiles like her. But I cannot believe Jesus was being rude or crushing –
it would not be like him.
What I think is going on is this. A pious Jewish religious leader at
that time would avoid contact of any kind with a Gentile woman to maintain his
ritual cleanliness. But Jesus is different, he is intrigued, and he engages
with her, no doubt with a twinkle in his eye and a friendly tone of voice. I
think his words were to the effect that, ‘Look, I’m a
foreign Jewish Rabbi and I’m on holiday – do you really want my help?’
In the woman’s witty reply, the word translated as ‘Sir’ is the Greek ‘Kyrie’,
meaning Lord. She is acknowledging Jesus’s status and insists that she believes
he can help. And that is what he does.
I ask myself, is this the moment when Jesus, fully human as well as
fully divine, realises that his ministry is not just to Jews, but to people of
all races and faiths?
In the second
story, the friends of a deaf-and-dumb man bring him to Jesus to be healed.
Jesus ‘took
him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears,
and he spat and touched his tongue’. Then Jesus looked up to heaven
and prayed over him, and the man was healed.
Notice how sensitive Jesus is to the circumstances and needs of the
deaf-and-dumb man. The deaf man could not have known what was being said, and
perhaps he was frightened by being the centre of attention in a crowd. So Jesus
treats him in private, and Jesus uses mime to let him know what is going on.
As followers
of Jesus we should model our behaviour on his.
Like him we must engage at a human level with people we meet who are
different to us, and pay attention to their needs. We must not demonise people
of other faiths and races, we must not demonise Muslims or Jews, but rather
treat them as our neighbours, and offer them help if they need it.
And when we minister to people in distress, the poor, the sick, the vulnerable,
we must, like Jesus, be sensitive to their circumstances and treat them as
individuals with rights, not merely anonymous ‘cases’.
In his Epistle,
James (2:1-17) urges Christians to break down the barriers of class and wealth
in order to relieve the distress of the poor.
We can’t be certain
who this James was, but an ancient tradition says it was James the brother of
Jesus, a leader of the earliest church in Jerusalem. At the great council there, he and St Peter supported St Paul’s case that
gentiles should be accepted into the Christian church alongside Jews without
being circumcised.
Nor do we know what church or churches he is writing
to, but they are clearly riven by class divides – the wealthy are being treated
better than the poor.
James challenges his readers to ask whether their
behaviour is consistent with their faith in Jesus Christ. He points out that
God has ‘chosen
the poor… to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has
promised to those who love him’. And he reminds them of the law
proclaimed by Jesus, ‘You shall love
your neighbour as yourself’.
‘What good is it, my brothers and sisters’, he asks rhetorically, ‘if you say you have faith but do not have works?’
By ‘works’ he clearly means good works, deeds of love and compassion toward
those in need.
He continues, ‘If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food…
and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?’ ‘So’,
he concludes, ‘faith
by itself, if it has no works, is dead’.
The message is clear. We have no right to call
ourselves Christians, followers of Jesus Christ – our faith is dead – unless we seek to relieve human
distress when we see it. For us in modern Ireland, this means, I think, that we should not
evade the taxes which fund the social welfare system and the health service –
we must pay up with a good grace, while giving thanks that we are rich enough to be obliged to do so. And we must also be generous in giving to the organisations which
support those who slip through the cracks - organisations such as St Vincent de
Paul, Protestant Aid, the Simon Community, and the Nenagh Food Bank, to name a
few.
I shall finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word for today
O God, whose word is life,
and whose delight is to answer our cry:
give us faith like that of the woman
who refused to remain an outsider,
so that we too may have the wit to argue
and demand that our children be made whole,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
