Jesus changes his mind

STUDY

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JESUS was trying to have a few days break.

Maybe he was exhausted. Maybe he was still trying to work out his exact vocation, discern his future. He didn’t want anyone to know he was there – and yet word got around.

He is approached by this foreigner, a mother looking for help for her daughter.

She would look different.

She maybe had a funny accent.

She was a woman.

She wasn’t a Jew.

Everything about her was odd.

She asks for help and Jesus insults her.

“It’s not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs”.

“Children” was a term used to describe the Jewish community. “Dogs” was a term used to describe people outside the faith.

There is no getting away from it. Jesus was really very rude. It was the equivalent of saying, ‘Actually we don’t speak to you. You’re a bit beneath me.’

We all say things we don’t really mean when we are exhausted. But it also looks as though Jesus, at that time, believed that any gift he had from God was for the Jews, ‘for the lost sheep of the House of Israel’.

Then, this feisty woman, a Gentile, despised, foreign, unclean, pagan, answered back! There must have been something about her that made Jesus stop. She was intelligent and forward and determined.

She accepts that she’s not one of the children of the faith. She even submits to being called a dog – that took some doing surrounded by Jewish followers who may well have jeered at her and harassed her.

But she has a daughter whom she loves. She will do anything for her beloved child. She has risked much. She will risk one thing more; she answers back. “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs”.

She was saying, “I know I’m not a Jew. I know I’m only a woman. But I love my daughter and you can do something about her. Your words are good. You do good things.

I want a very little bit of that for my daughter.

Please. Please. PLEASE?”

Jesus could have answered her back. He was good at taking people on and giving smart answers to rulers and leaders when required.

But he didn’t. She had so much love for her little sick daughter.

Can you see him just standing there with his jaw open and slowly rethinking what had been said?

Where was his vocation to Israel now?

Did this woman come from God? Was God through her pointing to a wider vocation?

He cannot refuse a woman with so much love.

And at this point I think we see something happening that is unparalleled in the gospels.

Jesus, JESUS, CHANGES HIS MIND and opens himself to new things. Because of her, HIS vocation is changed.

His vocation grows larger, wider, greater, deeper.

From this moment his eyes see beyond a country and a people to a world.

His human eyes were limited. But his vocation was enlarged, so that we see his hands not only stretched out to heal a poor foreign girl, but stretched out on the cross to save sinners, to embrace the world in love, to suffer and die for all of us.

His the nails, the spear, the spitting, reed and vinegar and gall; from his patient body piercéd blood and water streaming fall: earth and sea and stars and mankind by that stream are cleanséd all.

This article appears in the November 2018 Issue of Life and Work

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