I promise we’re going to get to the Gospel reading this morning, but before we do I want to start with James. Because I heard something in a commentary this week that I’d never heard before, and it blew this whole James text right open. So I wanted to share it with you because, wow.
The last verse from the second reading this morning is one of the more well-known lines from James, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” And all you good Lutherans in the room may have been like, hey, wait a minute. Don’t we say that we are saved by grace through faith APART from works”? What does James mean by “can faith save you” and “faith without works is dead”? That sounds like our salvation comes through what we do, which is the opposite of what Lutherans say we believe. If you were wondering about that, let me tell you, you are in good company. Martin Luther himself was not a fan of the Letter of James. He even considered leaving it out of his translation of the New Testament altogether; though in the end he opted to stick it at the end, along with Jude, Hebrew, and Revelations. I’m not as harsh with James as Luther was; there is a lot in there about putting faith into action that I like. But as a good Lutheran, I admit I too have struggled with what James meant when he talked about works.
But I was listening to a podcast this week called Sermon Brainwave, which is three professors from Luther Seminary talking about the texts for the upcoming week. And one of them, I honestly can’t tell if it was Matt Skinner or Rolf Jacobson, I can’t tell their voices apart, but one of them pointed out a translation error in verse fourteen. Per either Matt or Rolf, what the NRSV translated as “can faith save you” is really “can faith save him.” I thought, no way could a translation error that glaring be in here and I’d never heard mention of it. But I pulled out my Greek New Testament, and let’s face it, my Greek dictionary because my Greek is not that good, and there it was, “pistes sosai auton,” auton is the Greek word for “him,” “can faith save him.” Boom, mind blown.
Why does that matter? Listen to that section again with that switch. “What good is it my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” The person being saved by our works isn’t us; it’s the other person, the person in need, the person being affected by our works. This is God’s Work, Our Hands, friends, this I get. And this feels very true to what the Bible says about Jesus. Because when Jesus went out in his ministry, he preached and taught, yes, but preaching and teaching wasn’t all he did. Jesus also healed, he fed, he cast out demons, he restored people to community. Jesus wasn’t just about meeting people’s spiritual needs, he met ALL their needs. Spiritual yes, but also physical, emotional, social.
So let’s get to the Gospel reading for today. And I’m just going to name right off there’s a lot about this read that I don’t understand. I don’t know why Jesus seemed to argue with the Syrophonecian woman, why he made an analogy about her being like a dog. She was not the first Gentile he’d ever come across. Back a few chapters in Mark five, he healed the Geresene man who had a legion of demons, and that man didn’t even ask to be healed, so I have no idea what Jesus’ hesitation might have been in this situation.
But here’s what I do know about this story. What the Syrophonecian woman did took incredible courage. All of the scholars I read talked about the tension that existed in Tyre between the Jews and the Gentiles. And yes Jesus was the one outside of his community, but she was still walking into a house full of outsiders, demanding that she, a woman, be treated as equal to this man and religious leader and teacher. This is courage; this is Rosa Parks not giving up her seat on the bus, or the students at the Woolworth lunch counter, she demanded that her needs be met, that her daughter be healed.
And it should be noted that she did it better than Jesus’ own disciples. Part of the process of being someone’s disciple was about being able to engage the master in conversation, to discuss and even argue with them, because that’s how disciples learn. But Jesus’ disciples are terrible at it, they’re always just like, “we don’t understand.” But this woman, she took what Jesus said and just dished it right back. Jesus said to her, “it’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” To which she takes his own words and flips them on their head, “Yes, but even the dogs eat the children’s crumbs that fall from the table.” Yes, ok, you want to use the dog vs. children metaphor, sure, we can go there. But if you are who you say that you are, a God of abundance, then when you feed the children, the excess will fall. There is not the scarcity you’re claiming, we both know that there is enough, so go ahead and be enough.
And when she did that, when she took Jesus words and flipped them back to him, his response to her was plain, “For saying that.” The Greek is literally, “Because of your words,” “you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”
Friends the good news in this passage is that so strong, so powerful, so overwhelming is God’s love for us, is God’s promise of grace and healing and wholeness that not even God can get in God’s way. I get that sentence doesn’t make any sense, how could God get in God’s way, but I don’t need to understand it to feel the power of that promise. We say that not even death can separate us from God, which means that God is more powerful than death. Well here we hear that God is more powerful than God. I know that makes more sense, but that’s the beauty of God. God is beyond our understanding, beyond our comprehension.
Which means that we, like the Syrophonecian woman, can and should feel empowered to demand what we need. For ourselves and for others. When we see injustice in the world, let the model of the Syrophonecian woman give us courage to act. At its heart, this is a story about racism, about the ethnic and racial tensions that were just as real in Jesus’ time as they are today, and probably felt just as big and hard and intractable. But this woman had the courage to walk right up to Jesus and demand that he help her. And theologian Gerd Thessian points out that the biggest miracle in this story may not be that the woman’s daughter was healed, but that the race barrier that divided Jesus and the woman was overcome.
So that’s the good news. The challenge is that when we are challenged, when we have our mistakes called out, our misunderstandings named, that we respond with the same grace as Jesus, who heard the woman’s argument and healed her daughter. I don’t know about you, I can only speak for me, but I can say in my own experience that when someone calls me out for something hurtful I have said or done, even when their right, in fact especially when they’re right, my tendency is not to admit my mistake and learn from it. No, I am way more likely to dig my heals in, “come on, we both know I didn’t mean it.” Or, “don’t take it so personally.” Or whatever. So the challenge for us as, I’m going to name it a room of not exclusively but definitely mostly middle class white people, will we have the courage to let ourselves be challenged, to let ourselves be changed, to listen when someone says we’ve said something hurtful, to admit we were wrong, and to change?
The answer, from what I’ve seen as the pastor in this place is yes. Yes, Trinity is a community where we try to do that hard work of learning and growing and changing. Do we do it perfectly, no, of course not, we’re people. But we’re trying. The Reconciling in Christ process, the partnership with the Co-op, conversations with the neighborhood, we don’t do these things perfectly, but thus far I’ve never seen us be afraid to try.
So dear friends in Christ, let us let the Syrophonecian woman be a model for us of courage. Let us follow in her example and demand justice where it is needed, from our leaders, from each other, and even from God. Let us have courage to stand up for what is right, not just caring for those in need but changing the systems themselves that cause the need to perpetuate. And when we find that we are the ones who need to change, when we discover that the system that is unjust is a system within ourselves, let us follow in the example of Jesus and have the courage to be changed. Because as big and hard and scary as all this may sound, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, bigger and more powerful than God and God’s love for us. Amen.
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