Mark 7.24-end Blackburn Cathedral PC, CE 06 09 15
I was surprised a few Sundays ago, on return from
holiday, to learn that there was a gypsy caravan parked in
Dandy Walk. It wasn’t the traditional type with a horse
tethered nearby.[Fortunately the travellers stayed only one
night. We wanted neither disruption nor the ugly headline,
“Cathedral evicts Gypsy family”. Ironically on holiday, I had
been telling grandchildren bedtime stories about tinkers].
When Mark Pickering told me about the encamped
travellers, I remembered that Jesus was an itinerant
preacher, that the Israelites were migrants from Egypt, that
most Methodist ministers are still officially “itinerant” and
that my vocation has taken me to Cambridge, Canning
Town, Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Galloway, Lincoln,
Sunderland and Blackburn, [and both in Lincoln and here,
I have moved office three times, and soon will be part of a
community living on site here].
Most of us enjoy a settled life, but if we talked together
over coffee about how we arrived here, we would soon
discover just how many pins we could put on national and
world maps for this community gathered for the Eucharist.
For most of humanity’s existence, we have been nomads,
semi-nomads and itinerants, [and more recently – Ancient
Britons, Romans colonists, Saxons, Angles, Jutes,
Vikings, Normans, Jews, French Huguenots, Russian
émigrés, Poles, German refugees, and people from the
Caribbean, Africa and Asia have added to our mix in these
islands]. Over the centuries we have experienced and
been enriched by immigration, and even by colonisation.
Now, we are experiencing, with some of our European
partners, new waves of immigration, and refugees from
Syria, Libya, Iraq and elsewhere, crying for hope, and we
struggle to find wise, just and humane ways of coping with
this human movement. We recognise that that there is no
easy answer, and that neither a “fortress Britain” nor an
“open house” policy will work. How can we work with
others, especially our fellow Europeans, to alleviate this
continuing crisis? We need to do our share in helping
desperate families.
We cannot consider these desperate men, women and
children as a race apart. We are all made in the image and
likeness of God, and by baptism we rejoice in our common
humanity in Christ, in whom all our ethnic and cultural
identities are transcended. For some of us, in spite of the
joys of our settled life, the pilgrim spirit stirs, the call to
move on echoes in the heart, the traveller’s soul stirs with
hope or the exile’s yearning, for as the psalmist wrote, “I’m
a passing guest, as all my forebears were.”
We are called to welcome the stranger, to be radically
hospitable, while recognising that any visitor has to
respect the house rules of the host community.
The majority of Jesus’ ministry was directed to the lost
sheep of the House of Israel,” as indicated in Matthew 10,
and as exemplified in the first of today’s Gospel stories.
This morning’s gospel section is headed in the JB,
“Journeys outside Jerusalem, and stretches from 7.24 to
10.52, before Mark tells of Jesus’ ministry and passion in
Jerusalem. Jesus was a travelling Jewish preacher and
healer, an itinerant rabbi with nowhere to lay his head, and
his disciples and many of the first apostles of Europe
followed his practice. In our settled life we are indebted to
itinerants, travellers, pilgrims and migrants, people who
travelled because of famine, persecution, out of economic
necessity, or for faith’s sake.
As well as Jesus’ travelling about Judea, he entered
Gentile territory. So often in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is seen
crossing boundaries, and he crosses over into the coastal
territory around Tyre. He wanted some time off, a period of
quiet and restoration, and some anonymity, but he could
not pass unrecognised.
A Gentile (or pagan) woman, with a daughter racked and
tormented beyond endurance, begs for help. The ensuing
dialogue reflects the priorities of Jesus and the apostles –
to the Jew first. That was the focus of Jesus’ ministry to
restore Israel to its vocation to be “a light to the nations.”
What example does Britannia now set?
The short conversation of Jesus and the Syrophoenician
woman, is lively, robust and playful, and the Gentile
woman challenges the travelling preacher, appealing for
the dogs , (a derogatory term for non-Jews), to enjoy at
least a few crumbs falling from their master’s table.
Jesus crosses the cultural and religious barriers in
responding to this woman; he makes an exception,
crossing accepted boundaries, as he does in healing
lepers, in eating with tax collectors and outcasts, and in
befriending beggars.
The second story of the man who is deaf and has a
speech impediment, occurs in the area of the Decapolis, (
Ten Towns), again a cosmopolitan, Gentile region,
strongly influenced by Graeco-Roman culture and
conduct.
In this incident, as in the encounter with the Canaanite
woman, Jesus responds in a personal and particular way
to the person before him. He takes the man aside from the
crowd, and achieving his attention, heals him through
action and word. In response to “Ephphatha,” be opened,
the man’s ears are opened and his tongue unloosed. It is
as if he has a thousand tongues to sing God’s praise.
Jesus reaches out to the desperate.
Jesus asks for all this to be kept quiet, but when he says,
“Please shut up about this,” the remarkable good news is
passed around all the more.
Good news, as well as bad news, travels well. We need to
be agents of good news, including for desperate people.
We are called to have a pilgrim’s heart, and not to be too
settled in our ways.
We are invited to be open to the call of God, not only to
the stranger in our midst, but also towards some of those
who seek a safe haven.
We may also recognise even in the midst of our settled
life, that we are like travellers and migrants, who are
passing guests as all are forebears were, with our identity
in Christ, and good news to share.