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| Icon of the Syrophoenician woman |
- Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 and Psalm 125 •
- Isaiah 35:4-7a and Psalm 146 •
- James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17 •
- Mark 7:24-37
The Gospel for this
week includes a very puzzling exchange between Jesus and a Gentile woman.
Having heard of his fame, she asks him to heal her daughter. He replies – oddly
– that bread for children shouldn’t be given to dogs. She responds by saying
that even dogs get crumbs. This appears to be the right answer, because Jesus
commends her, and her daughter is healed. But what is it all about? The answer
is this: an indispensible context for Jesus’ ministry is the faith handed down
from Abraham. And the principal audience are the people who share that faith --
the Jews. They are the ‘children’ who are to be fed first. The Gentile woman
understands this, and accepts her ‘underdog’ status, but nevertheless she sees
that she, and her daughter, need God’s blessing too – and she has the courage
to ask for it. This combination of insight, humility and longing is what
commends her to Jesus.
It is something of
the same attitude that James is advocating in the Epistle. This Sunday’s
passage contains the much quoted line ‘faith without works is dead’. It is a
thought that modern Christians who feel more comfortable with ethics than
theology readily endorse. Yet it was this very same line that made Martin
Luther loath the Epistle of James, because it so easily leads to faith in God being
replaced by faith in human good deeds. Set alongside the Gospel passage,
however, we can interpret it a little differently. Between what we say and what we do, a gap can open up. So our actions and attitudes
are the most convincing evidence of what we truly believe.
The reading from
Proverbs for this Sunday says: ‘The rich and the poor have this in common: the
LORD is the maker of them all’. If we believe that every human being – Gentile as well as Jew -- stands in need of
God’s redeeming grace, and that without it everyone
is pretty much a broken vessel, then the distinctions of wealth, social status,
ethnic origin and education will be things we hold in relatively little regard.
Holding this belief, however, is not simply a matter of saying so when asked.
What James in another passage calls ‘true religion’ must embody this belief in
actions as much as in words.
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