14 Pentecost 2009
Mark 7: 24-37
“God’s Kind of Government Takeover”
Pastor Chris Enstad
Brothers and sisters, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Gospel of Mark is an incredible narrative that moves lickety-split from Jesus’ Birth to his death on the cross and his resurrection. Unlike the other characters in the Gospel we get let in on the Jesus’ secret right from the beginning when Mark writes, “the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” I have told you this before but this is my favorite Gospel because of how Mark has structured this story to communicate to us the power and energy of Jesus Christ and how that power and energy went from literally spilling off of our savior when he healed a woman who merely touched his cloak to his death on the cross. Empty, crying out to God, Eloi eloi sabachthani, My God why has thou forsaken me. Gone were the crowds, the 4000, the 5000, gone were the disciples, He had been betrayed by Judas and denied by Peter. Left to hang on the cross, hanging there with all of our sin on him to the point that not even his Father could be in his presence… just the priests, elders, guards, and in the distance a couple of women including Mary who is identified by Mark not as the mother of Jesus but as the mother of his brother James. And the first person to get it, to tell us that we aren’t the only ones who know who Jesus is, is the Roman soldier.
This Good News drips with Gospel goodness. The Gospel pours out of Christ into the world to the point where he is completely emptied of life. He leads his disciples to the cross, showing them and us that we must lay down our lives in order to take them up. So much of Christianity is triumphant, haughty, unloving, and bigoted the way we live it today. It is like Jesus accused the Pharisees in Mark when the yinsisted on clinging to the traditions of their elders, “you are only honoring me with your lips and not your hearts. This power that is pouring off of me is just a glimpse of the kingdom takeover of creation, the world, that woman over there, this deaf man right here, and even you.” God’s kingdom is breaking into the world through his Son Jesus Christ and the Gospel of Mark not only tells the story, but, when one truly sits and lets this amazing Gospel wash over them one cannot help but get caught up in the amazing turning upside down of all of our assumptions about God, our lives, and each other.
To prove the point the text today is kind of a two-for-one example of just how Jesus went about his ministry. These texts, especially when taken together, usually only succeed in raising more questions rather than answers. What did Jesus mean when he called the woman’s daughter a dog? Kind of mean for Jesus right? What kind of demon was it that made that girl unclean? Weren’t all Gentiles considered unclean? Wasn’t it taboo for a woman to address a Jewish single man, and that in public? What about the deaf man, what was with all the spit and touching of this guy? And then, just after Jesus gave this guy his speech back he commands him to tell no one about it… why so much irony? And, why didn’t anyone listen to him? Don’t tell anyone he commanded and hey they said, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
Well, we could spend all day on just those questions but I am going to let you off the hook and not preach quite that long. I will say that I think there are two key points to look for here to get an idea of just what Jesus is up to, the first being that these stories come right after Jesus declared, basically, that all things that go into a person’s body are clean (going against thousands of years of church tradition mind you) stating that it is not about what goes in a person that concerns God but the things that come out are what defile a person. See God wants your heart not your unloving obedience to the rules. So, after that statement these two outsiders, unclean, people show up and Jesus heals them thereby stating, in his word and deed, that people are not unclean either by their status or label or how or where they were born.
That’s the first key point. The second, I believe, lies in Jesus’ never-ending request to “say nothing to anyone” about what he was doing. For some reason his miracles were not the main point he was here, he was asking people to stay tuned for something that would truly blow their minds and hearts.
Well, if miracles aren’t supposed to get us to go out and testify to Jesus as Lord just what is, the answer, for Mark and for us is the cross.
All of these things that happen between the first and last chapter of Mark are glimpses of the coming kingdom of God. That means the total takeover not just of government by God but of all creation, this earth, and each and every one of us. Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection are the first fruits of the inheritance that he won for us on the cross.
And so we see a Gentile woman, unclean by any stretch of the imagination… a Gentile, woman, begging a rabbi, a man, in public. And Jesus challenges her by saying, why should we feed the dogs? This is how Jews saw all non-Jews, as dogs, unworthy of God’s covenant. And the woman appears to accept his judgment and then calls his attention to the fact that even dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall from the children’s mouth. And Jesus heals her daughter from afar. The kingdom of God is coming for all people.
And that deaf man, unclean by virtue of his affliction and his inability to speak. He is different than everyone else and the assumption is that if you are unlike the majority there must be something wrong with you and if we can’t see why, well God must know.
And Jesus performs a very physical kind of miracle here doesn’t he? I mean Jesus goes to the man put his fingers in his ears; he touched his tongue. He physically came into contact with this unclean man, which would make Jesus unclean as well and restored the man's hearing and his speech.
Shh, Jesus says, don’t say anything though.
The miracles really aren’t the main point of Jesus’ coming to live with us are they? It’s as though Jesus presence as a fully human fully divine part of the life of the people where we he lived had consequences but those consequences weren’t even the main point. When the kingdom of God comes near, as in Jesus Christ, things start to happen. God takes control of disease, of misfortune, of all those who are excluded, forgotten, and brings them in.
But that’s not the end of the story. You see, Jesus didn’t want to draw attention to his miracles as the reason to put faith in him. His destiny was the cross. We get to know who Jesus is from the very beginning of this Gospel but the followers of Christ didn’t truly understand what Jesus meant about taking up their crosses and following him until they saw that for the sake of all he must die. In order for all to be saved, for all to be in, death itself must die and so to the cross went Jesus not just to die for our sins but to take all of our sins even the sting of death out of this world and to hand back to us our inheritance, everlasting life.
Our motto around here is Finding Ourselves in God’s Unfolding Story. The tricky part for us is that we not only know how our story began but we also know how it will end, in the presence of God and the Lamb. Between those two milestones comes a life and that life is not lived to ourselves, as though we get to decide or vote on what we are going to do with our lives, our hearts, our brains, our heads, our hands, our homes, our families, our very lives have been taken over by God once and for all. So Jesus isn’t here in person performing these miracles of declaring outsiders on the inside of physically touching those who have been shunned by the rest of culture in order to heal them and restore them to community and relationships with each other but you’re here! And when we send you forth from this place this morning to go, serve the Lord, in case you haven’t got that message yet, we mean it. Remember that the Syrophoenician woman speaks for all of us who deserve only the crumbs from God’s table and yet those crumbs are all it took to win you back. Doesn’t that person that no one else would die for deserve to hear, see, feel, know that Jesus did die for them?
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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