Changing Jesus' mind
20 June 2004 – Lucy Winkett: "History belongs to the intercessors; the people who pray, who cry for justice and liberation for all people..." The reading before Lucy's sermon was from Mark 7:24-28.
This passage in Mark is a great story. It's a lively argument and it's quite shocking too. Although there is a healing in this story, that's almost incidental to the point Mark is trying to make.
This woman whose name we never know is a Gentile. Jesus is trying to hide from people. He needs a rest. But she will not let him be. The gospel writer has Jesus say that he has come to the world only for the Jewish people. She challenges him in such a way that he changes his stance. She changes his mind. She combines theology with a practical need (her sick daughter). She ignores conventions of ethnicity, class and gender. She therefore re-imagines her religious relationships. She re-imagines her relationship with God.
This conversation she has with Jesus is mutual, engaged, passionate and practical. She claims her freedom as a child of God to tell him what her life is like and what she needs. She also advocates healing and freedom for her daughter.
She is a hopeful and prophetic presence in the gospels. She teaches us how to pray. We can, if we are not careful, build emotional and social scaffolding around our lives. This woman teaches us to be free of these structures.
The Sufi poet of the 12th century, Rumi, wrote: "Why when the world is so big did you fall asleep in a prison of all places?"
The woman in Mark's Gospel ignored convention and approached Jesus. She claimed her place as a vocal and sentient woman, she contributed to the self understanding of Jesus, and thereby the mission of Jesus' body on earth; the church.
Jesus was a man in authority who had the power to make her family's life better. She claimed her own freedom to tell him how things should be. She is part of the defining process, in dialogue with Jesus. She speaks with passion and wit about her experience of the world.
It is in the nature of God to be in dialogue with us. Sometimes God is silent. God's silence waits for our shouts of protest at the injustice and suffering in the world. Like this woman, we pray for ourselves and for others in need. As Walter Wink said, history belongs to the intercessors; the people who pray, who cry for justice and liberation for all people regardless of circumstance or background.
This conversation between Jesus and the woman deepens our understanding of God and us. We are in dialogue. Sometimes we or he remain silent. But the truth, the healing, the liberation are revealed in the engagement we have one with another.
Let it be that we live lives of conviction like this woman; that we pray from the knowledge of the suffering of others, that we do not fall asleep in a prison when the world is so big.
Rev. Lucy Winkett is Canon Precentor of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. She was the first woman priest to be on the staff of St Paul’s.
