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“JESUS, YOU DON’T REALLY MEAN THAT!” #2
GOOD COP BAD COP
I’ve got three words for you to rate for me today. Are they kind . . . or mean? If you read them in print — and they were aimed at you — how would you respond toward the sender?
Well, here are the three words. “You’re so stupid.” That’s it. “You’re so stupid.” Someone says exactly that to you, verbatim. “You’re so stupid.” Do you tend to give that person a big hug, or a smack in the mouth?
They say that everything depends on the tone, on what the twinkle in the eye says, what the nonverbal message of the heart expresses. But it’s pretty hard to get past those three words: “You’re so stupid.” However, if you have an old VHS copy lying around of James Cameron’s two-tape extravaganza, Titanic, spin your way through to near the end where the fictional character, Rose DeWitt Bukater, is in a lifeboat. She’s had a madcap, spur-of-the-moment but very passionate relationship with a young stowaway named Jack Dawson. And of course, with Captain Smith’s rule, “Women and children only,” he’s got to stay on board the doomed vessel. Jack and the tuxedoed Cal Hockley stand there on the top deck, shrouded in the steam and mist and glow from the SOS flares being fired into the frigid April air. Both of them are in love with Rose, and she’s just about to float out of their lives.
And then all at once, she jumps out of the lifeboat. She climbs back onto the Titanic, and rushes into Jack’s arms. “I could never leave you,” she cries. “You jump, I jump.” Etc. Etc. And if you remember the scene, he clutches at her feverishly and says, and I quote: “Why’d you do that?! Rose! You’re so stupid!” Very tenderly, his heart bursting with teenage angst and love, he embraces her, saying over and over: “You’re so stupid!” What his HEART is really saying, of course, is: “You’re so wonderful. You’re so loyal. You’re so precious.” And we know that Jack is really responding to the grand, sacrificial stupidity of her generous act.
Well, friend, we don’t usually want to sail very far out into the Atlantic to find these kinds of sermon illustrations. But here in the equally iceberg-laden waters of Mark chapter 7, we read a printed “screenplay,” so to speak, and we find Jesus very coldly — it sounds like — saying to a needy foreign woman, “I can’t bother with dogs. I came here to earth to feed the children of the mansion, not the mongrels under the table.” And in print, whether you’re in Mark 7 or Matthew 15, you shake your head and say, “Wow! That is frosty! Jesus, You don’t really mean that!”
But what is the tone of Jesus’ voice? Is there perhaps more here to the story? Is there maybe a twinkle in His eye that we don’t catch on the printed page? That’s the suggestion made by my friend, Pastor Morris Venden, in his book, How Jesus Treated People. Notice:
“Have you ever been ignored when you asked for help,” he writes, “and then when you persisted in your request, been insulted? Have you ever been called a dog? It’s surprising that this woman didn’t give up long before Jesus got to the ‘dogs’ part. But Jesus must have had a twinkle in His eye during the whole conversation, and this Canaanite woman must have seen it. And now she found the opening she’d been waiting for, because she answered, ‘That’s true, sir, but even the dogs eat the leftovers that fall from their master’s table.’ In other words, if I’m a dog, then at least I’m entitled to some dog food! And Jesus answered her, ‘You are a woman of great faith! What you want will be done for you.’”
There’s some discussion among the linguists and experts about the Greek word kynaria or kunaria, and some feel that it’s almost an affection term for “little dogs” or even “family pets.” But Dr. R. T. France, author of the Matthew section of the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, remonstrates that, no, dogs are dogs.
“Dogs was a current Jewish term of abuse for Gentiles,” he asserts.
But he, too, goes on to suggest that this woman surely saw the kindly twinkle in Jesus’ eyes, and knew that if she pressed ahead, her faith was going to get a rich reward.
Let’s go ahead and concede that there certainly was a picture painted here of timing. True, the gospel of Jesus was to go to the entire world; Jesus Himself said so. Jews and Gentiles both. But FOR A TIME, for these three-and-a-half years of painfully local ministry, leading up to the crucifixion, Jesus did confess that His ministry was essentially to “the lost house of Israel.”
“The time for the Gentile mission was later,” writes this same Dr. France. “The emphasis of the saying” — I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel — “lies not primarily on the prohibition of a wider mission, but on the priority of the mission to Israel. To call Israel to repentance was the primary focus of Jesus’ ministry; the call was urgent and demanded total concentration.”
You can look back over the tumultuous history of Christianity over the past two thousand years, and plainly see how the horizons have steadily expanded. New people groups converted, new countries entered and evangelized, new truths being discovered or uncovered. My own denomination wasn’t birthed until the middle of the 19th century. Our gracious God, in His infinite wisdom, knew that the time wasn’t right before then for the theological perspectives and contributions we feel called to embrace and share.
But I think there are two more lessons we can learn here. First of all, I do believe in the “twinkling eye” concept, because there’s no way Jesus Christ ever said anything that was deliberately unkind. His entire ministry was one of selfless love. Racism and any semblance of a “caste system” were abhorrent to Jesus. Jesus would gladly have died for that desperate foreign-born woman and her demon-possessed daughter; in fact, He soon did exactly that. And yet, on this day, He was walking and ministering with 12 stubborn disciples who had pasted “dog” bumper stickers on their chariots their entire lives. They surfed the Internet every weekend, looking for web sites emblazoned with swastikas and hate speech. And is it possible that Jesus here indulged in a bit of divine “theater,” parroting the tired clichés His disciples embraced, the failed Pharisaical gospel of separatism . . . and then turning everything upside-down by going ahead and answering this Gentile woman’s request? In the Adventist commentary used by fellow pastors and students in my faith community, the writers have this to say:
“The Jews felt the blessings of salvation would be wasted if given to the Gentiles, who, according to the opinion of the Jews, lacked the capacity to appreciate those blessings or to benefit by them. Christ’s ASSUMED attitude of disdain for the woman might conceivably have discouraged her, but undoubtedly He had confidence that her faith would not fail.”
Sometimes on TV you see a case of “good cop, bad cop,” where one person adopts a negative persona just to make a point or elicit a certain response. I can picture Jesus giving this woman just a little wordless glance, unnoticed by the disciples, which said to her: “Work with Me here, lady. I want to teach these selfish guys a lesson; I want to demolish their selfish facade of nationalism. So don’t be shocked; don’t give up; don’t walk away from Me. Just hang in there while I let them hear just how cruel and foolish their ‘party line’ really sounds, but in about 60 seconds, I’m going to give you the very thing your heart is crying out for.”
Well, friend, all this is conjecture because we weren’t there. But let me ask you this: even if we read this story as straight up, is there still a lesson here for you and me? Sometimes Christianity has its high levels and its low, its exalted leaders and then those who don’t get much but crumbs. But are you and I willing to take a low position, a place of diminished glory, if it means that we will get the blessing of our Savior? Are you willing to stand by while others seem to get the good places at the banquet table, and say to Jesus: “I trust You. If others should have priority right now, that’s all right. But Jesus, be sure to give me at least the crumbs of Your presence and Your love. Even a crumb from You, Jesus, is better than all the cake, pie, and ice cream in the world served up by the devil.” Am I willing to say to God, “Lord, I’ve traveled around the world and been on the radio for You. Now, if you want Me off the air, if You have some other plan, if you want me to go out into the trenches and just pastor a little church where the attendance looks like crumbs instead of caviar, that’s all right with me”?
In that Tyndale series, R. Alan Cole wrote the section for the gospel of Mark, and he adds this:
“[This woman] not only persisted when the Lord refused to answer, she now accepted this humble position gladly, and showed that, even on those terms, she still claimed healing for her daughter. God’s abundance for His children was so rich that even the rank outsider could share in it.”
Really, when you get to the end of most of Jesus’ stories and miracles, there’s plenty of food for everybody.
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