How many of your parents taught you to avoid associating with the wrong kinds of people?
How many listened?
Peer pressure. Remember that idea? Whoever your peers are, they pressure you to be this or that way. If you hang out with drinkers, you’ll end up a drinker. If you hang out with people of character, their good character will rub off on you.
When I was small, adults in my life told me that black people were dirty. And, given that they had black skin, it was easy to believe. That idea is nonsense of course. But the claim helped reinforce a system in which the clean, that is white people, were privileged, while the dirty were not.
Certain folks are disgusted by certain kinds of sexuality or by unusual gender identities. Christians who suffer with these feelings seek out and find the few scriptures that abominate them. That they focus on these and campaign vigorously to refuse such people rights and privileges demonstrates perfectly what the clean/dirty distinctions end up being about. Clean/dirty distinctions always end up there. I am clean and therefore privileged; you are dirty, and are therefore deprived.
I’m coming to believe that people are more religious about their politics than they are about Jesus. I think we’ve all experienced political purity tests from whoever our cohort happens to be, and might be subject to scolding if we depart from whatever script we’ve been given by our favorite sources. If we encounter someone with the opposing script, we separate ourselves from them, just like those old Pharisees who eschewed fellowship with Gentiles or sinners.
Jesus warned that faith in him would split families, but the only thing splitting families today is politics, which has ruined many a thanksgiving dinner. Even one’s parents can be rejected, even one’s children can be disowned, over partisan identity. And nowhere else is the desire for power over others more obvious.
To purify oneself before God is a beautiful thing to do. It’s what Brian will be doing later this morning. Having confessed his sins to God and having made the confession that Jesus is the Messiah and the Savior of the world, Brian will take a symbolic bath in the living waters of Sturgeon Creek. The bath is a symbol of the cleansing of Brian’s soul. It is a physical act because this inner cleansing will result in outer behavior.
But as we heard last week in Mark’s gospel, it’s an easy step from this salutary practice to using it as a way to deny others our concern or care on the grounds that we are pure and they aren’t. The Pharisees sought to use the tradition of ritual purity to discredit Jesus and his followers, leading Jesus to rant that impurity doesn’t come from failing to wash one’s hands or by eating the wrong kinds of food, rather it is the evil desires of the heart that defile a person.
As if to test this theory, Jesus immediately leaves Jewish territory and enters the region of Tyre, not only a Gentile region, but a hostile Gentile region, the dirtiest of the unclean. According to Jewish law at the time, to associate with such people would render Jesus unclean.
Mark tells us that Jesus did this to get away from the crowds. We see a pattern throughout the gospels of Jesus taking time away from his public ministry to renew his connection to God, and this seems to be one of those times. Jesus assumed that these hostile Gentiles would not have heard of him, or if they had, would think little of him.
But Jesus was wrong. Even though the Syro-Phoenicians were among the bitterest of enemies to the Jews, one of them comes to Jesus begging for him to help her possessed daughter.
I’m sure many of us were disturbed to hear Jesus so viciously reject this woman. It doesn’t square with what most of us think of Jesus. But Mark’s gospel presents a very human Jesus, and it probably would not have surprised Jews of Mark’s day that Jesus would react so strongly to this woman’s plea. I think Mark is telling us a conversion story.
As women have done since the dawn of time, this Syro-Phoenician absorbs Jesus’ contempt for the sake of her child. I believe God was trying to show his Son something he didn’t know: that his work would bring God glory far beyond the boundaries of Judaism. Instead of being made unclean by associating with this woman and her daughter, they are made clean by associating with him.
The second story we heard this morning from Mark also takes place in Gentile territory, among the unclean. A deaf person with a speech impediment is brought to him in the Decapolis. This time there is no resistance and no refusal. Jesus takes the man aside and gives him back his hearing and his ability to speak.
“Be opened,” he says. A fascinating choice of words, as if the man had been a closed door, unable to hear, unable to make himself understood. Healing him was like opening a door, and this whole chapter, it seems to me, is about opening a door in the wall between unclean and clean, not to allow the unclean to dirty the clean, but the other way around, to make the unclean clean.
Jesus was opened by the Syro-Phoenician woman, and so Jesus opens the ears and mouth of the deaf-mute.
All of this raising the amazing possibility that the true miracle-working power of the gospel is in the way it opens the way between God and humankind and between people and other people.
Nothing in the world, no food, no person, no idea, can make anyone dirty. Whatever filth there is in human affairs comes from within, the unreasoning desires of the heart for more than our share of whatever good there is to be had, and all the self-justifications and condemnations of others that come from those desires.
Be opened, church. Nothing can make you dirty, nothing can defile you, nothing and no one, as long as your desire is for God, and you strive to know and do his will.
Be opened.
Amen.
Mark 7:24-37
