Attitude Adjustment

“Master, help me!” she cried, bursting past the astonished householder and throwing herself before the weary traveler. “I couldn’t stop her, Rabbi,” said his host, “shall I throw her out?” Jesus motioned him to be silent. The woman knelt before him in an attitude of utter desperation. “What do you want from me?” he might have thought. “Isn’t it enough that Tyre consumes most of the food we grow in Galilee? Isn’t it enough that Jewish children go hungry to feed your city’s wealthy? Isn’t it enough that your leaders kill our people whenever they think Rome won’t notice? What a nerve, asking me for help!” It’s almost as if a rich Brahmin were to drive up to the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta and ask Mother Teresa to leave a dying pauper to come sit with her daughter. Tyre and Galilee were as hostile to one another as Judea and Samaria. Of course Jesus isn’t going to do what she asks.

But wait a minute!

Jesus always responds. Jesus doesn’t buy into the local feuds, Jesus doesn’t follow the party line, Jesus talks to tax collectors and Jesus touches lepers. Jesus always does the surprising thing. What’s going on here?

“Jesus was a racist,” was the astonishing premise of an article I recently read on this passage. He was, so the author claimed, a product of his time and culture, a representative of a patriarchal and ethnocentric society who needed to have his consciousness raised. The Syrophoenecian woman did Jesus a favor, said the author, by opening his eyes to the possibility of expanding his message to include people beyond his original, somewhat narrow, objective. The lesson that we should learn from this episode is to examine ourselves for prejudice and to celebrate diversity.

As you can imagine, I had a pretty negative reaction to this interpretation. Of course I believe that prejudice is a bad thing, and that God’s people not only come in both sexes, but also in all shapes, sizes, colors and cultures. But I am absolutely unable to swallow the notion that Jesus was a racist who needed to be taught a lesson in inclusiveness by the courageous woman who confronted him with his mistake.

And it struck me that the article was an object lesson in pride, while the text is, in contrast, an illustration of humility. Let me explain what I mean.

Here you are, reading along in the book of Mark, about Jesus the son of God, the very embodiment of selfless love. And the next thing you know, he calls a desperate, grieving woman a dog! How can he? This is terrible, shocking, not the Jesus you’ve been told about. Something must be wrong. So you read onward a little further, and you notice that the woman talks him into changing his mind. “What a relief,” you think, “I don’t have to challenge any of my assumptions, Jesus is behaving the way he ought, this fits right into my world view.”

What you don’t notice is that somehow your world view manages to include the idea that Jesus was a sinner. You take the easy way out. It’s easier for you to accept that Jesus was wrong than that you might be. What you don’t realize is that you’ve recently swallowed with no trouble at all the fact that Jesus has called the Pharisees names, too. It’s acceptable in our culture to look down on Pharisees. Pharisees are bad.

Does that ever happen to you, when you read the Scriptures? Do you ever find yourself explaining away the hard parts rather than accepting the notion that either (a) you don’t understand or (b) you may be approaching the message from the wrong angle? Or do you let the hard parts challenge you to look more closely at your own biases? Are there parts of Scripture that you simply discard, saying, “Well, that doesn’t apply any more” or “We know better than that now”?

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that we DO have to understand Scripture in context before we can apply it to our own situation. Some things ARE applicable only to particular cultures and times, like washing your guests’ feet, or not piercing your ears, or wearing sackcloth and ashes to mourn. But the easy answer, the one that results on our looking down at either Jesus Christ or the Word of God from a position of smug, progressive superiority, is ALWAYS the wrong answer. It is not our place to call God to account when life doesn’t please us, or when Scripture doesn’t reflect or affirm our biases. It is God’s place to call US to account, and his tool is the Holy Spirit working through Scripture. Only when we approach God’s word with humility and a willingness to be taught does the Spirit lead us into truth.