An Ever-Widening & Expanding Circle – Br. Keith Nelson

SSJE

Mark 7:24-37

Ephphatha. Jesus looked up, breathed out, and said: Be opened.

And the man was opened: brought back from a closed-off place where no words could get in and no meaning could get out. Let through to a wide-open place of many possibilities, where moments before there had been few, and life was merely survival.

How wide can one human heart be opened to the life of God?

This gradual opening of the heart in an ever-expanding trajectory marks the entire arc of Jesus’ life, words, and actions among us. He stood at the center of an ever-widening and expanding circle of relationships. His gospel shows the way toward an ever-widening and expanding circle of participation in the life of the kingdom: the astonishing reality that we are called to direct participation in the inmost life of God.

This is the heart of Jesus.

But this was not – and is not – effortless. It required the deliberate crossing and breaking of boundaries – boundaries that sought to arrest that unfolding momentum at every turn. He met voices that said:

“We determine who has the right to participate in God’s favor.”

“God’s love extends this far; to this shape; to this arrangement – but no farther.”

Jesus was continually saying: No. Stretch even farther.

Put on “the mind of Christ,” as St. Paul urges. This mind has powered the momentum pushing the boundaries of participation outward in every successive age of the church. Stretch farther. Imagine more. Topple yet another wall so the words can get in and the meaning can get out, up, over and through, so that everything that has breath may praise the Creator.

Be opened. Until, in God’s time, the far frontier is found: the consummation of all things, when “Christ will be all in all.” All means all.

This is the largeness – the wide-open horizon of the heart – that comes with humility.

In this Season of Creation, we are called to contemplate the humility of the creature before the Creator. This is a humility with proportions both cosmic and microscopic; it is vast as our expanding universe and it is intimately particular as, say, the community of microbes in your own digestive tract, without whom you would be less of you.

Humility is the spiritual gift of seeing ourselves as we are. It is neither grandiosity nor an inferiority complex. A humble person knows her own wingspan, and is unafraid to unfurl those wings and fly. And a humble person knows how and when to fold his wings – to make space for the flight of another.

True growth is impossible without humility, if only because it takes making mistakes to grow. We cannot see or acknowledge those mistakes to others, and to God, if we are wedded to a vision of ourselves as perfect beings. It is often in admitting our shortcomings and making apologies that we begin to acquire character and form lasting relationships.

The wide-open heart of Jesus was marked by this earthbound humility.

In today’s gospel reading from Mark we encounter a pair of stories that are actually the second half of a series. This is important context for understanding how humility spurs Jesus to break boundaries – including his own – to widen participation in the life of God.

Earlier in Mark Jesus has had encounters with two other figures: Jairus, a male Jewish leader with a 12-year-old daughter in need of healing; and an unnamed Jewish woman with an issue of blood (for twelve years) that makes her ritually unclean. Jesus heals both of them.

Today’s diptych of stories is the sequel, as well as its foil. In the region of Tyre, a Gentile city, an unnamed woman who is not Jewish but a Greek-speaking pagan asks Jesus to heal her daughter. Then Jesus travels to the Decapolis – ten city-states with an overwhelming Gentile majority, and all Greco-Roman in cultural origin – and he heals an unnamed deaf man we can reasonably infer is also a Gentile.

Anyone brought into healing contact with Jesus participated in the life of God which Jesus called the kingdom. We cannot infer any chronological development in Jesus’ attitude toward offering this larger life to those outside the Jewish covenant. But in the literary structure of Mark, the personal attributes of these characters follow a clear pattern, beginning with a Jewish, male, person of honor; then an unclean, Jewish woman, lower in status by her gender; then two Gentiles, lower still in status and unclean by default in the ancient Jewish worldview; the first a woman, and the second a man impaired in hearing and in speech. This cast of characters is arranged in a careful sequence, from most to least likely to participate in the fullness of God’s covenant love.

Jesus’ interaction with the Syrophonecian woman offers a further window into the creaturely hierarchy in the background of all this boundary crossing.

He replies to her request: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

She answers: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Jesus concludes the dialogue: “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.”

Their interchange evokes a movement downward in space: we imagine a parent bending down to feed a seated child at table; and the messy hands of a child scattering bits of bread even further, to the dirt floor and the waiting mouths of hungry dogs. Children had no social status whatsoever and were utterly dependent on caregivers, though were of course cherished and protected. Dogs were viewed in one of two ways: valued in the ancient Near East as work animals for hunting, guarding, or herding, dogs could rank in the lowest tier of a household, so to speak along with its other domesticated animals. But in ancient Israel, as in many countries today, scavenging, semi-wild dogs also roamed streets or congregated in packs on the outskirts of villages. Dogs were not ritually impure as a species, but touching a corpse transmitted impurity, and scavenging dogs routinely did this. So, the association between dogs and impurity is ambiguous and contextual. Which kind of dog, and in what situation?

I think that ambiguity is crucial in this interchange between Jesus and this woman. Jesus’ reply conjures up a semi-wild scavenger. But the woman’s reply is a pointed reminder that there are dogs who live alongside humans, right there under the table. Are they scavengers? Technically, but of the most benign variety.

The woman insists, in so many words: Though to you I may rank the lowest, I am a member of the household, and my hunger entitles me to my share of the food, however meager.

Taken in light of the entire New Testament, I would even say that the woman’s comment anticipates the words of St. Paul, when he writes in 1 Corinthians, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” Her reply also anticipates Galatians 3: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

While it is challenging to imagine a very human, perhaps impatient, culturally conditioned, Jewish male Jesus calling this woman a scavenger, I think his final words to her are meant to underscore Jesus’ great humility. His consent to her request and the extension of healing to her daughter is also a way of saying to her: You are right. I was wrong – I didn’t see the whole picture, and now I see a little more of it. My heart is open to stretching farther.

There are creatures toward whom we, as humans, give only the scattered crumbs of our regard now and again. And there are creatures whom we relegate to the outskirts of our attention, barely conscious that they, too, are held in being moment by moment by God’s creative Word. Yet is it not humbling to think that humans comprise only 0.01% of Earth’s total biomass, while for instance, plants comprise 82.4%? Bacteria comprise 12.8%, trillions of them forming beneficial microbial communities inside each of us, barely separable from our own flesh.

There is a wide-open place of many possibilities to which we can be opened, and to which we can open others, in the household of God’s creatures. We can begin here, in this liturgy, by the ways we lift other-than-human creatures up to God in prayer, in active remembrance that our humanity subsists in relationship to their creaturehood in its astonishing complexity, diversity, and belovedness.

In a few moments, when we celebrate Holy Communion, we will use for the first time a Eucharistic Prayer composed by our Brother Lucas and authorized by our Bishop Alan, especially for this Season of Creation. I invite you to bring your prayerful attention to its expansive language. These are words that seek to shift our human consciousness; to let in the myriad beings beyond these walls who pray without ceasing; and to learn from their unique participation in the feast of Life.

As we renew our human vocation to be servants and priests of creation, may our hearts be opened to the humility of Jesus: true God, true human, and true creature, until the day when Christ is all in all.

Amen.