Secondary

Mark 7:24-37 (James 2:1-17)

Have you ever felt that God probably wasn’t all that interested in you? Felt like God had other priorities; and whatever healing or hope or resolution you need is too much to ask?

Or have you felt confident of Jesus’ care? Sure that Jesus will always respond to your prayer, that God must and will heal or restore or resolve what you long for?

Either way, today we heard your story.

It’s not an easy story to read or hear, for many of us. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to hear Jesus call a desperate mother a dog. Jesus himself, who we would like to trust to be perfect, welcoming, universally gracious, insults this woman. Brushes her off, apparently indifferent to this mother and child and quest for healing.

It’s important that we don’t paper this over; that we hear and feel the shock of Jesus betraying our expectations of niceness; and don’t ignore our discomfort.

Because this is a story for and about those of us who aren’t at the center of the Kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God has no second class citizens, but Jesus and the prophets of ages past and present have made it clear that God does have very definite priorities. They tell us that universal healing and the gospel start with the children of Israel; that people who are poor, or oppressed, or marginalized – the people who in many cases wouldn’t feel all that comfortable at Trinity on a Sunday morning – these are the people who are God’s first priority.

It’s a priority God wants us to share – we were just reminded about that, hearing the letter of James this morning. And it’s worth noting that the many of us here who are comfortable – wealthy enough, secure enough, powerful enough to live a pretty good life – we aren’t the folks around whom the Kingdom of God and the mission of Jesus is built.

Like this Gentile woman Jesus meets today.

Now, we don’t really know anything about her except that she’s a mother, and that she’s not Jewish. She’s probably a local in the region of Roman Syria where Jesus has gone to get away for a while. She might, in fact, be one of the poor and oppressed, primary to God, “secondary” in Jesus’ mission only because she’s not of Israel.

But some scholars suggest that she represents the wealthy Gentile landlords of the area – people who tended to marginalize or oppress Jews living among them. Not necessarily by intention, but by just how their economic system works. So you could imagine her as, say, Jeff Bezos or Ivanka Trump – people who can usually command priority attention, and buy anything they want – coming to beg healing of the man who is organizing their workers to demand change.

She is, in any case, not one of God’s priorities.
And she knows it.

She starts the whole conversation from a position of vulnerability, begging at Jesus’ feet. And when he insults her, calls either her or her daughter a dog, of lesser value or priority, she doesn’t argue. She stays “under the table” at Jesus’ feet; embraces that secondary status and – with confidence and conviction – points out that there is plenty of God’s abundance to go around. The dogs eat what falls from the table without claiming a place at the table, and there’s enough. Plenty.

She’s right. Jesus affirms her words, her knowledge and proclamation of God’s abundance, of God’s grace which is more than enough for the secondary, the lower priorities, and confirms her miracle.  Her daughter is healed.

And this woman – secondary, subordinate, low-priority – is the person in this story who reveals God’s healing, abundance and grace by her confidence and trust.

It’s good news – for you and me here this morning, for the world – good news that Jesus’ priorities are different from ours.

God’s “nice”, God’s healing, God’s justice; God’s priorities are all different from ours; from yours, from mine; from the unspoken assumptions and priorities of our society (priorities here and now that definitely favor the already rich and already powerful, often at the expense of the most vulnerable).

We need God’s priorities to be different than ours, or the world can’t be transformed, saved, and made whole.

A couple days ago, I got into a conversation where we were trying to imagine a progressive utopia for a fiction writer friend. We had fun building it up – with universally accessible and excellent healthcare, a complete end to homelessness (but, you know, with freedom to live outside if you want), single page tax returns, well-funded education and parks and art and music and more…. But it was clear enough even as we built it that it couldn’t be perfect – there are conflicting and exclusive priorities even in a like-minded utopia. It couldn’t all work outside of fiction.

Not without miracles, anyway.

And the kingdom of God can’t work without God’s priorities being different than any of ours, all of ours. Different enough for true, complete, transformation ; the transformation that heals us right along with the world.

So it’s great news that God’s priorities are different from ours. Even good news that you or I or all of us might be secondary, or even last in God’s kingdom – that eternal reality where the last are first and the first are last.
Because in the kingdom of God, being secondary, being last, is a place of miraculous abundance and great joy. Where the last have the same confidence as that Syrophonecian woman proclaimed: that the least crumb of God’s grace and power is more than enough for everything we need, and seeing others be fed first is cause for hope and trust, not anxiety or fear.

The world we live in keeps pushing us to put ourselves first, to insist on our own priority, or to achieve first place.

Jesus doesn’t.

Jesus heals and loves and redeems the last just as fully as the first.

And when the world tells us that we won’t get enough if we aren’t first in line, tells us to fight to protect our status or privileges, God reminds us that there is more than enough for the very last and least. Enough, not someday in heaven, but here and now; and enough that is probably lavishly more than we would have claimed or wanted from first place.

And that lets us take joy, right now, in seeing others come first, get ahead of us. Even when everyone around us is telling us we’re losing, we know God can’t lose us.

Knowing, embracing, that we don’t need to come first in Jesus’ mission or God’s kingdom can open us up to receive and pour out and share grace and miracles in unlimited measure, confident that God cannot run out.

Because coming second – maybe even coming last – means that no matter what tries to get between us and God, no matter who or what claims to push us down the line, there is nothing, nothing, that can keep us out of God’s healing and favor and blessing.

And if that’s not good news, I don’t know what is.