Sometimes You Have to Argue with God

Proper 18, Year B

Mark 7:24-37

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs

This is not the Gospel reading that I would have picked for this week in Baltimore.

Let’s be honest and start by owning this morning that our community is on edge because of the pre-trial hearings that went on last week and are scheduled for this Thursday for the six police officers accused of homicide and criminal negligence in the death of Freddie Gray. We don’t know what will happen, whether more riots will break out. Although I am confident that the entire Baltimore community is praying for justice, I know that we have different ideas of what that might mean. 

In the middle of all of this tension, so much of which centers around race, a topic that we were all taught to be profoundly uncomfortable about if we ever discussed it—if we weren’t just taught never to discuss it—we hear a Gospel reading where Jesus uses an ethnic slur. That’s what “dog” is in this story. No one, Jewish or Gentile, who lived in the Roman territory of Palestine kept dogs as pets. The only experience they had of dogs was of packs of wild dogs, who lived on the edges of cities as scavengers. Jews routinely used the term “dog” as a slur against Gentiles, whom they saw as wild, dissolute, and irrational, just like wild animals. In our reading, we heard Jesus use the first-century equivalent of the n-word, and this makes me deeply uncomfortable.

When we proclaim our belief that Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully divine each Sunday in the words of the Nicene Creed, which part do you find harder to believe? I typically answer “fully divine” when I’m asked questions like this. I don’t understand how that happened, how a human body could contain God. But that, at its root, is an intellectual problem for me; I find it confusing, but comforting. I don’t understand divinity, what being God means, but I am comforted by the thought that God, through Jesus, understands my humanity.

The real problem I have is with Jesus’ humanity, and I have this problem because I understand what it means to be human. I am deeply uncomfortable with thinking about Jesus exhibiting any of my all-too-human frailties. I am okay with Jesus being fully God; I do not like Jesus being fully human. That’s what our Gospel confronts us with today: Jesus’ humanity. His all-too-human prejudices, which are exactly what we should expect from a person who lived in the place and at the time that he lived. But this is Jesus. But if Jesus was truly human, then he, like all of us, made mistakes (which are not the same as sins) and had to learn and grow.

So, where’s the good news? I don’t want this to be remembered as the time Josh preached a sermon about how Jesus was racist. That’s not the point. That can’t be why Mark recorded this story and why we read it in church every three years.

I think our good news this morning comes from the unnamed Syrophoenician woman, who argues with Jesus, who pleads with him on behalf of her daughter. This woman, in the face of a pretty rude dismissal, argues with God, pleading with Jesus to be more just. That sounds odd, I’m sure. We don’t really talk about arguing with God in the Christian tradition. However, it’s an essential part of Judaism. I was told this by a Reform rabbi in seminary. Rabbi Herb Brockman was the leader of a synagogue in New Haven, and he was a lecturer in preaching and the practice of ministry at Yale Divinity School. Once, as part of a class discussion, he reflected that Christians had forgotten how to argue with God, but that this was at the heart of what it meant to be Jewish. Rabbi Brockman pointed out that Israel literally means “He struggles with God.” He reminded us of stories from the Hebrew Bible where Moses, Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha, Ezekiel, and so many others argued with God, and God’s mind was changed and evil averted as a result. This unnamed, unknown woman stands in this tradition, reminding us that arguing with God for justice can be a sign of faith.

I think that’s part of why we are hearing this challenging story today, at this challenging time. We are called to argue with God that Baltimore, this one small corner of our world, might be made more just. I’ll admit, that doesn’t sound exactly Episcopalian. It sounds a little too radical, doesn’t it? But the funny thing is that it’s very Episcopalian. The Syrophoenician woman’s words form part of the Prayer of Humble Access, a part of the Prayer Book’s communion liturgy that isn’t widely used today, but which I’m sure many of you are familiar with:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

These words, which have been in every Book of Common Prayer since the very first in 1549, reflect the story we just heard. They reflect the faith of that Syrophoenician woman, sure that if we claim the blessings that we do not deserve, God will give them to us.

May God grant us the courage of that nameless woman, that we might pray and work for God’s justice here in Baltimore. May God grant us the grace to accept when God’s justice differs from our own desires.

Amen.