Mark 7:24-37

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, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said 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.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go-- the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

The role of the Fool in Shakespeare’s play King Lear has always intrigued and disturbed me. A character with no name, the Fool is on stage only through the 3rd Act but plays a crucial role in the dramatic action. He’s a court jester who provides comic relief but more than this, he’s one of the few characters in the play who’s able to speak truth to power, to criticize the actions of the King in a way that’s on target, the King, a proud and foolish man who disinherits his good daughter and divides his kingdom between his two very bad daughters.

Why is the fool intriguing? For me, it’s because he’s both willing and able to deliver the truth, but with a punch line, to clothe a critical comment in wit, even when threatened with a thrashing. What’s disturbing about the fool? He prattles on and on, oftentimes nonsensically. And I find there is something irritating and disconcerting about someone who continues telling “the truth” while thing continue to fall apart.

Our Gospel story for today takes place far from the tales of the courts of powerful kings and their fools, far from the halls of kingly or religious power. Our Gospel takes place in or around a home in the Gentile city of Tyre, the town to which Jesus has traveled to get as far away as possible from the exhausting and some might say foolish role of speaking his truth to power, to Scribes and the Pharisees.

But here in this far away Gentile town, Jesus gets no rest from truth being spoken to power. He gets no rest at all—but this time it has an interesting twist. Instead of playing the role of the less powerful outsider speaking his truth to power, in this story Jesus is the powerful one being spoken to, the one being reminded of the depth and the breadth of the mercy of God when it comes to those in need of mercy.

And so in this story, the story of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman, it’s important to understand how Jesus is a person of power. He’s in or around a private home governed by specific patriarchal hierarchies. He is a man and a Jew who would have been understood to inhabit or hold to certain assumptions about his power. He’s a person whose reputation for healing has spread even to this Gentile outpost. He’s also Mark’s Jesus, the Holy One through whom God’s new order of dignity and justice has come, a new order that begins with the Jews. Jesus has all of this power as our scene opens.

Into this scene comes one who does not have much power. She is a Gentile, a pagan, potentially having entered a household where she has not been invited, a household that is in all likelihood governed by Jewish sensibilities. She is a woman in a world where women did not have power. She is also the mother of a child with an unexplainable illness, in a culture in which illness often led to shame and isolation.

She comes into the house and bows at Jesus’ feet begging that he heal her daughter of an unclean spirit—the bowing, the prostration, a reminder that he is the one with the power and she is the one without. And this is where the crucial dialogue begins. Jesus declines to enact the healing saying “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs,” meaning that he and his mission are directed to the children of Israel. To this, the woman does not ask again but, using Jesus’ own image about the children and their dogs, makes a counter argument: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs,” she says. To this clever and counter argument Jesus replies: “For saying that, you may go-- the demon has left your daughter.”

What has just happened here?

Is this just a story of a cranky Jesus that somehow got included in the canon of Scripture that we are to explain away on account of his fatigue or on account of some odd textual problem? Or is this story meant to show us something about how God’s mercy is poured out in our lives and in the lives of others?

I believe, of course, that the story is about the latter. If this is so, what we’re asked to look at here is that God’s own mercy and the healing that it brings comes to us, comes to others when the powerless in need of that mercy dare to speak their urgent need and even argue about it and also where the powerful let go of their agenda in order to participate in a new understanding of the depth and breadth of God’s mercy.

Let me bring this even come closer to home:

Who are you in this story? Are you the one who though powerless, needs, seeks and is even willing to argue with the powerful about her access to mercy and healing? Notice that it is through her voice and her persistence (spoken back in the language of the powerful) that the healing comes and her powerlessness is in the moment overcome.

Or are you the powerful one in this story—are you the one who has an agenda, even a holy agenda, who upon hearing, really hearing, the need and the argument of the powerless, is able to yield his agenda, give his power away, and be the means though which God’s healing mercy can flow.

Who are you in this story? What is this story asking you to take on or let go of in order to participate in the healing mercy of God? How can you take just one tiny step toward that participation, trusting that our God is a God of healing to the powerless and the powerful alike, in a strange kind of way to the powerless and the powerful together, a God whose ever-widening rings of mercy finally encompass the powerful and the powerless together.

In the 2004 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of King Lear, the director, Bill Alexander, made some interesting choices about the relationship between the power figure of the King and the witty, seemingly powerless, argumentative Fool whose role was to speak truth to power. Instead of dressing the Fool in his traditional motley garb, he chose to dress him in Lear’s own clothes, cast off in the course of the play and given to the Fool as he sheds his kingly role. In one scene, a scene in a battering storm, the Fool hands Lear’s coat back to his master, reversing the roles, the less powerful conferring upon the more powerful a gift that speaks of a deeper gift of compassion and mercy.

Our Gospel suggests to me that in God’s realm we are in this together, in fact, through what we do, God’s own self may discover the depth and the breadth of the realm of mercy that we all inhabit, a realm of mercy that includes the powerful and the powerless, the agenda-driven and the argumentative, the seemingly foolish and the seemingly wise.

Works Cited and Consulted

Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s website, especially the comments of actor, John Normington, who played the Fool in the 2004 production of King Lear.

http://www.rsc.org.uk/lear/current/actors.html

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