Last Sunday we examined the challenging legacy of what has been termed our nation’s original sin—slavery–and its various surviving scourges of racism in modern life. Working toward racial reconciliation and reparation is certainly one visceral example of our worship theme—healing a fractured world. It cuts to the bone when we examine such hard truths of human brokenness. And yet, how essential it is to speak and hear them, to bring all such insidious evils to light and to examine them. Debriding the wound is the first step in healing deep infection–often hidden, more than skin deep. And debriding is almost always painful.

It occurred to me that healing fractures is what the whole Bible is about, really, a collection of stories of breakage and healing—folks broken apart from themselves, from God, from Earth, and from each other, and then their stumbling, bumbling efforts to find their way to come together. The stories are painful to read and hear, but like we said last Sunday, bringing the truths of them to light is essential—and is a path to learning and to healing. So in that spirit, I chose a Jesus story for us to consider that shows a compound fracture between individuals and within their society and then what helps them heal.

Mark’s Gospel is lean and clean—no details unless they’re essential, so I invite you to notice what they are. Previously—Jesus has been seeing some real success in his work as prophet and teacher. Feeding the five thousand, speaking truth to the powers trying to stop him, teaching his disciples the ways of God. But he also is drawing the ire of those who want the status quo to continue to benefit them, and he is tired. So this story begins with a vacation.

²⁴ From there Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, ²⁵ but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. ²⁶ Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.  

Jesus is hiding out at the home of a friend– located not your prime vaca spot–but in Tyre, a cosmopolitan trading port where the sea brings in the products and the immigrants of many nations. A stranger—who is a woman, an immigrant, and a Gentile enters the house, and speaks to Jesus. It is against the law for a Gentile woman to approach and to speak to a Jewish man, even less a rabbi, and not a woman’s proper role, but she does it because, well, it’s her daughter. She’ll do anything to help her daughter.  And after she pleads her case, how does Jesus respond? Well, here’s the cringe-worthy moment. We expect he’ll respond like a good modern liberal, “Don’t worry, friend, I got you–your daughter will be fine.” Umm, no.

He said to her, “The children are fed at the table first, for it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the little dogs.”

Dogs…he’s calling her a dog, and not like beautiful, special, child dogs like ours—no. He’s calling her a dog like less than human, don’t let them up in here near the table, dog. That’s what he calls her. Jesus. You can hear his world view in his voice, as he tosses out this awful retort–a metaphor for deserving well-heeled people living out of their privilege while others (read less deserving) skulk about nearby.

Undeniably, it is a stifling story—breathless…fractured–there’s no air, no spirit in it—just a self-righteous, prejudiced, limited view of who belongs and deserves to sit at the table. Some theologians will do some interpretative backbends to try to make excuses and explain it away—Jesus didn’t mean it or he is teasing her. Other religious types want to ignore it and other stories like it with other evidences of cruel exclusions and violence against others. But, like last Sunday’s services reminded us, fearless inventory can lead to healing– for look what happens next as the woman will not be silenced. Courageously, she cleverly turns the ugly metaphor on its head and continues to speak truth to power. And Jesus, for his part, learns and responds.

²⁸ But she answered him, “Yes, Lord, but even the little dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” ²⁹ Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” ³⁰ So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.    

The Gospel writer Mark’s first readers of this story are the early church who are struggling with the same questions that compose our personal, congregational, and societal challenges— then and now: “How are we human? Who is in God’s family? Who is worthy? Where are the edges of grace and belonging and inclusion and help?” Martin Luther King and the other teachers and prophets of our age ask the same questions. We still struggle with who sits at the table and who is a dog—fractures to be healed.

This painful Scripture is an honest-to-God picture of a not-yet-woke Jesus as he responds to these questions out of the limited human perspective of his place and time and context. The people of his time who heard this story would have been shocked only by the woman’s behavior and audacity, not by Jesus’ initial response. It was normal for the time. But it was wrong and unjust and the rest of the story is Jesus hearing and seeing the truth—and then beginning what becomes a lifelong process of opening, waking up, learning what it means to be enlightened and inclusive. And how do we know this from the biblical text? Because in the Gospel, from this point on, Jesus’ ministry grows and changes. He is taught repeatedly by other women and by men, his parables filled with female exemplars and others who do God’s work in the world in powerful and often unexpected ways; his teachings and his life opened.  But enlightenment is a process and so this story is both painful and hopeful.

And it is reflected today in our world. The injustices and the micro and macro aggressions are still there. Inside us we are broken apart by fear and scarcity mentalities and outside, all around us, our culture is shattered. And yet, and still there are opportunities for compound healings going on as well. Jesus didn’t stay in the place he was. He learned. It is so interesting to me– that before Jesus meets this woman, he has just taught the religious leaders who believed in their exclusivity more than mercy, that it’s not external trappings like who we are or where we are from or what religious machinations we practice that makes us righteous, but rather how we relate to God and to our neighbor,  but apparently, Jesus himself doesn’t really get that yet–and it may seem surprising that he taught something he didn’t quite understand or practice himself, except that I do that myself quite a lot actually and maybe you do too, pontificate on the merits of stuff I am still working on and certainly don’t have down pat for myself.  I see Spirit in Jesus in this story and want to learn from his example– not because he was perfect and said the right thing to this woman. He didn’t. He really messed up—he used his privilege in a hurtful way. Been there, done that. And then he learned something.  He didn’t allow his Jewish male rabbi privilege or fragility to keep him or the woman and her daughter all locked up like compartment syndrome around a broken bone where the muscles lock and infection grows. The woman courageously and relentlessly spoke her truth and Jesus suddenly saw the fracture. And when he woke up, he set about to make it right.

The bad news is that these truths are true and hard to look at. And the good news is—these truths are true and hard to look at and when we face into them, they can lead us to reparation and reparation can lead to reconciliation and to justice and to healing for the compound fractures of injustice in inner life and outer practice.

The ancient creeds of the church say that Jesus was human like as we are human. Nowhere else in his story is Jesus’ life opened as much as from this courageous, audacious woman who will not be shut out by his closed mind and by the closed doors of her day. She helped heal him as much as he healed her daughter. But it was not on her to heal him. He had a choice. There are lots of examples, goodness knows, where the powers do not listen, turn away, hurt, kill, continue the fractures. And he could have chosen, we can choose still, to limit our mission and vision, to limit the reach of God’s hands in the world, and the effectiveness of our own lives and our own experience. I want to examine the soft and the brittle margins of my life and practice and see where there might be signs of the infections of anthropocentrism, racism and homophobia—and where I might need to do some spiritual debridement, so that I can be a cleaner, clearer conduit of God’s extravagant grace.

So if we’re tempted to be sorely disappointed in a Jesus who isn’t perfect, but then opens more to God, learning, then we are invited to be no less attentive to our own hearts and our own assumptions and closed doors. Where are the growing edges of peace with justice in my life and in yours? Who or what experiences in our lives are now pushing us to heal the fractures in our own time? Amen.