The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
Sermon
8 September 2024
The Reverend Caroline Brownlie
The poor you always have with you, you do not always have me. This well attested word from Jesus from ‘Matthew’ and ‘John’ comes from the story of the woman extravagantly (according to Judas) pouring perfumed ointment over Jesus after dinner, which He says prophetically, points us towards the greatest Act of God in the Gospels, His own Resurrection, an action out of and beyond Time … hold that thought. This morning’s Gospel from Mark, relates two miracles of Jesus which challenge the prevailing Jewish rules and culture; they come between Jesus’ wiping out the Jewish distinction between clean and unclean foods, and then ‘immediately’ (as Mark emphatically tells us) before Peter makes his first claim about Jesus; we believe that you are the Messiah.
The Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter was healed in an area which Israel had long wanted to absorb but had never militarily been able to; Jesus could be said to be retreating from the increasing Jewish hostility and threat in search of people more willing to receive his ministry …. when she refutes Jesus’ first, apparent rejection of her request, she uses the word ‘dog’ against herself, as ‘dog’ in Greek referred to a disreputable woman, or in Hebrew to an outcast; the Aramaic which Jesus uses actually means a small household pet used to hoovering up scraps from its owner’s table … and when he is bravely challenged by her on behalf of her daughter, we see that He had not closed the geographical or cultural door, but kept it open by healing her ‘in that hour’. In the second story, Jesus is back in Galilee; we see him sensitively and graciously ‘taking the man aside’ and using the most basic of medicines, his own spittle, touching the man’s tongue and ears and with an expressive sigh, saying ‘Ephatha,’ ‘be opened’ again in Aramaic. William Tyndale’s 16C translation uses the vivid expression ‘his ears and speech were stambed’, ‘stopped up’, ‘jumbled’ but after the miracle, ‘he spoke correctly’, i.e. like everyone else, letting him rejoin their longed-for company. And those present ‘were astounded beyond measure’, a word used only here in the New Testament, meaning as if they had been ‘punched’!
Jesus had gone over strict social boundaries; He had healed people not physically approached without breaking Jewish law; He had ensured Maximum Publicity by asking in both cases that his presence be kept secret; after the second miracle ‘ordering’ that no-one be told of it … wonderful Jewish irony on Jesus’ part. He had underlined his earlier rejection of the distinctions between clean and unclean food, by doing the same with ‘actual people’ ... revealing the equal value with others that His Father gives them. Two examples of what was trendily referred to in College as ‘the Now and the Not Yet’; Jesus revealing God’s ways ‘in time’; behaving in a way that reverses and upends the ‘norms’ of the human world in the way that Isaiah is describing in our Old Testament reading; his description however was a prophetic picture of the actions of God when ‘the Day of the Lord comes’; when everything familiar would be turned on its head … but ‘not yet’. Of this a little more later.
James’ letter (as head of the early Church in Jerusalem) shows a familiar NT reflection on what faith in Jesus really meant; a time when Christians were becoming rich as well as poor, “Do you, with your acts of favouritism, (i.e. choosing to attend to the rich rather than the poor), really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?”. Don’t tell me you do, when you send a naked person away with a useless blessing; when you tell the poor guest to sit at your feet, you are reinstating distinctions, re-erecting social cultural barriers, which as we’ve heard, Jesus spent his time reversing! Your so-called faith, without works (such as these miracles) is dead.
Returning to Isaiah; a world of beauty, the complete balance of nature, feeble knees firm (I wish) weak hands strong, blind seeing, deaf speaking, rough places smooth, water in the desert; we could go on. A glimpse, the evidence of God’s Day, in Jesus’ actions, the Now not Yet; the freedom from human suffering in reality, so much so that it was ‘noised abroad’. Knowing we still live in the same dimension of time as Jesus did – we have the hope of a completion, the New Creation (consistent with God’s Original cosmic act in Genesis.) Raising Jesus, God is continuing and confirming what Jesus was doing, how he was doing it and with whom, fulfilling Isaiah’s vision; as we shall hear later in the Eucharistic prayer, ‘Jesus revealed the Resurrection by rising to new life’, the kind of life Isaiah was prophesying which Jesus had been consistently revealing in healed people during His three short years …
Well, you may be thinking, where is she going with this?! We’ve heard Jesus’ word, the poor you always have with you; thank God for Jesus’ infinite realism to teach us, in attitude, perspective and actions towards the so-called poor? Are we among them? How can we show God’s ways in time as Jesus did? In a rapidly evolving society, there are many groups we could add to those in the Gospel; the victims of child abuse in the Churches; the people still living with hepatitis because of the blood scandal, and the Post Office debacle … the displaced, orphaned children of Gaza, the Israeli hostages ‘entombed’ in the Hamas tunnels for 10 months …
In our relative financial security, we may be shielded from material poverty, unless our professional life has connected us with those who suffer from it; our social and cultural circle may shield us from many of the groups mentioned above, unless we have encountered them in a close relationship, within our family circle ; God only knows our true circumstances, our outward or inner capacities and resources whether material or personal, what responsibilities and commitments we have, what involvement with any of the groups of people above already means to us; … am I the only one who feels challenged and ambivalent these days about actually exposing myself to the news on a regular basis – because if we have a modicum of human compassion, it hits us where it hurts, it can evoke our sense of personal poverty of whatever kind; it can threaten to depress in a very real way, or engender a sense of moral failure, a doubt about God’s kind of Sovereignty; if you have still felt helpless in the face of such comprehensive and global poverty, I would like to share pithy words of Rowan Williams a few months ago, in talks on Human solidarity at Christ Church Cathedral Oxford, (and on YouTube), which offered me an alternative, In-Spiring perspective on identifying with whoever the poor are. Helpless solidarity may be the most honest Christian response to poverty and suffering; rather than the ultimate proclamation of Christ’s own suffering, which can be invoked to help us avoid truly empathising or entering into the real suffering in front of us.
Anyone of us who has sat with a loved one in financial loss, homelessness, failure, distress or pain, has already shared this helplessness; we know it is costly to enter into, tempting to avoid yet another account of what is being suffered in so many parts of the world; tempting to enlist the triumph within Christ’s suffering and so avoid ‘walking in another’s moccasins’; as Rowan says, perhaps it’s the one act of solidarity we can directly offer to the Lord on behalf of those we are hearing about; as a prayer, men and women, our metaphorical ‘alabaster jar’; a solidarity with Jesus’ compassion, even ‘completing our Lord’s sufferings’ as Paul puts it, laying all we hear at the Cross as the place it belongs. And yet with Isaiah’s vision echoing down the centuries, reaching out in hope and as we come to the rail later, to the Resurrection hope for all creation, contained in the bread and wine.
Lord, instead of distracting ourselves from the present realities of poverty, war and climate change, help us to see your call to solidarity differently and offer it to you for the situations we care about, and as we hold out our hands later for the Bread of that new Creation you ultimately promise us. Amen.
