Dear Folks,
Yesterday I sat with a group of friends, and we struggled to make sense of the gospel assigned for this Sunday. In it, Jesus encounters a Gentile woman whose daughter is very sick. Belying her first century understanding of illness, the mother begs him to “cast the demon out” of her child, but Jesus’ initial response is hardly healing: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” What? His words are stunning, exposing something narrow about Jesus at this juncture, the Teacher in this moment embodying the limits of any closed religious system. Now many scholars have defended Jesus’ language here, suggesting that he spars with this clever woman and uses playfulness to make a point, but the fact is that his words equate reaching out to the girl with casting food to a scavenging animal. Why go so low if his aim is higher ground? “It’s like the curtain gets pulled back here—something about the way things usually work, about our unfinished business and about how things could be,” said one of the people in the circle yesterday. “God needs us,” offered another. “It’s the desperate mother who turns this situation to the good,” and the living God is opened up in the process. Healing is no longer for any narrow notion of the tribe, but for all, the story suggests. Maybe that’s how miracles work?
The passage goes on to include an exchange between Jesus and a man who cannot hear. “Be opened,” Jesus sighs and says, touching the man, and “immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” I want a miracle like that, the group admitted, but I wonder if we know what we’re asking for. If these stories are any example, healing is not about fixing a particular problem, but about having some part of our narrowness broken open so that the community is more complete. The first thing the formerly deaf man does is speak, and the implication is that everyone needs to hear what he has to say.
In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes at length about both our longing to see and hear and live in new ways and our tendency to throw up roadblocks to such opening up, whenever such wholeness is offered.
When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, Dillard reports, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. The doctors expected the patients to be overjoyed by their new ability to see, but the gift of sight was for most, a mixed blessing, and for some, a horror. Dillard writes, “It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair.”
How is God inviting you to be opened, and what will be healed if you see and love more broadly?
It is hard work to open up, to hear and feel and act in new ways, and I appreciate that Jesus struggles with it, too. But when we are willing to see beyond the limits of our sight—the ways we love too narrowly, the habits which hold us and others back, the people on the margin we neglect to see, the challenging opinions we refuse to hear—when we let the living God lift us up to see more clearly, the world opens up, and us along with it.
Love, David