‘God Loves All’ - Sermon by Rev. Won-Jae Hur, September 8, 2024

Pent 16 (09.8.24)

Isaiah 35:4-7a / Ps. 146 / Js 2:1-17 / Mk 7:24-37

Good morning. How good to be with you. As you and I start our journey together and walk the way that God has prepared for our church, I would like to reflect today on what I think the gospel story of the Syrophoenician woman tells us about the essence of the Christian path.

            No one would blame you if you listened to the gospel reading about the Syrophoenician woman and reached this conclusion: on a bad day, even Jesus can be a jerk. It’s hard to read this story, and not feel like ‘what is going on here’? The woman is a mother who is desperately seeking help for her suffering girl. Jesus refuses her request to cast the demon out, and basically calls them ‘dogs’ – an incredibly offensive insult in that time. We don’t find another instance when he insults someone like this anywhere in the gospels. So why?

Was Jesus was testing this woman? May be he knew all along that he was going to say ‘yes’ to her request, but held back, so that this foreigner and gentile, who may have looked down on Jews, wouldn’t take his help for granted. Or, may be Jesus was just following the conventions of his time, making it clear to her that he as a Jewish man couldn’t be alone with a woman, especially a gentile one. But these interpretations are not convincing. Up until this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been reaching out to people who are socially alienated or marginalized and including them in God’s Kingdom. Then suddenly, he refuses to help someone in pain, especially a child, and denies her and her mother a place at God’s table because of their ethnicity and gender.

What held Jesus back, at this particular point in his spiritual journey, from doing the very things that characterized who he was? One clue is the place where the story unfolds. It takes place outside of Israel. Jesus has travelled to Tyre, a gentile region. Mark tells us that Jesus wanted to be alone. The only other time in Mark when Jesus intentionally spends time alone is to pray before a major turning point in his ministry (6:46). Was this a similar moment? It seems like it. The story of the Syrophoenician woman is actually the start of a series of miracles which all take place among gentiles. What, then, was Jesus was discerning?

When the Syrophoenician woman finds him, Jesus is faced with the question, how far does God’s love extend? What are the boundaries of God’s kingdom? Are all included, or are some left out? Up to this point, the focus of Jesus’ ministry had been the people of Israel. His encounter with this woman pushes him to decide whether God’s kingdom includes just his own people, or even the gentiles.

We hear the hesitation in Jesus’ initial response to the woman’s plea: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Basically, ‘we are children in God’s household; you are dogs who belong outside’. Gentiles are outside the boundaries of the sacred community. Yet the woman will not be discouraged. She replies from her own cultural context where dogs were allowed in the home and says, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” And Jesus responds, “For saying that, you may go.” For saying what exactly? The original Greek word translated here as ‘saying’ is ‘logos’. Logos means a word of good news (Cadwallader 2013:98), a word of truth. And that word is: God loves all. There are no boundaries to God’s grace. God’s table is for everyone.

The Syrophoenician woman empowers Jesus to act on the basic truth that the God of Israel has no limits, and that God … is the God of abundance. The unstated challenge she throws at Jesus is, “Can you recognize this truth about God, Jesus, from an outsider like me?” Jesus is large-hearted and open enough to recognize it. And the word she speaks to him may have been the answer he needed to move forward with his mission beyond Israel. A sequence of miracles rapidly unfolds in the passages that follow: a deaf man is healed; thousands of gentiles are fed in the wilderness in chapter 8.

Inclusion is the word we use when we touch on this kind of all-embracing love. But for Jesus and the church, inclusion is not, first and foremost, a political or philosophical value; it is a theological truth. We say that all belong here, that persons of any race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual identity have equal place at God’s table, because of who God is: God is love, without boundaries; love without categories or conditions. The love of God beholds every living being as if they were the center of the universe.

Based on this truth, the early Christian movement condemned any behavior that discriminated against a person based on social status when they came together as God’s community. This is why James in today’s epistle reading speaks so fiercely against overt and subtle ways that people show favoritism to some, while denigrating others, based on conventional social labels, instead of the essential truth of God’s love for all (also Paul, Corinthians). Based on this truth, the early church developed a distinct ethos of crossing boundaries of social difference – to be in Christ means to be a boundary-crossing being! – and lived out their faith in Jesus through concrete acts of acceptance and loving service to all.

The Syrophoenician woman has done a good service for Jesus. She has challenged and awakened him. But she also challenges us. As a community, she asks how we can be intentional about crossing boundaries of difference, forming relationships with people who are different from us; practicing hospitality and welcoming everyone at God’s table. A way to practice this can be as simple as saying hello to someone we don’t know at coffee hour and spending a moment to get to know them. As individuals, her example asks us, will we claim God’s love for ourselves? Will we receive and make our own the love that God pours out to us in each and every moment? Love seeks the beloved’s response, and the Syrophoenician woman invites us to move from being a bystander to become God’s beloved. The invitation is always there. And it only takes a simple prayer to taste the fullness of God’s love: ‘Yes’. ‘Yes’ to love, ‘Yes’ to God.