Posts Tagged ‘Prejudice’

Change of mind – Syro-Phoenician woman

August 19, 2023

Pentecost 12 – 2023
Matthew 15:21-28
Marian Free

In the name of God who is always beyond our comprehension. Amen.

I begin this having just read the SMH report (18.8.2023) relating to the Anglican Diocese of Sydney. The Doctrine Commission of that Diocese has produced a report that will be presented to their Synod later this year. The document includes a new doctrinal statement on homosexuality that says that the mere desire for same-sex sexual intimacy is contrary to God’s will, “an inclination toward evil” and something from which Christians seek to be liberated. It concluded that people who are same-sex attracted but celibate are not “actively and consistently perpetuating sin”, and their desire alone does not demand repentance. However, it is “something to be lamented and from which we seek to be liberated”.

Rob Smith, a member of the Committee stated on The Pastor’s Heart Podcast: “Sinful desires are sinful. It’s not just the doing of sin that’s sinful, the desiring of sin is sinful,” he said. “There are not godly ways of expressing same-sex sexual desire. There’s no opportunity there, there’s no open door … It’s contrary to nature from the get-go.”

I find myself grieving for all who are same-sex attracted, who are being told that something over which they have no control is sinful and deserving of God’s wrath and at the same time I am puzzling how any mere mortal can truly put themselves in the place of God to determine what is good and what is evil, who is in and who is out.

It seems to me that today’s gospel speaks directly to this issue and it demonstrates that even Jesus did not entirely know the mind of God – that is, Jesus was sure that he knew the mind of God until he was humbled by the insistence of the very person whom he judged to be unworthy of his help and “deserving of God’s wrath” (to use the language of the language quote above).

The scenario is one with which we are very familiar. Jesus is a long way from home – in the region of Tyre and Sidon when a woman of that region – a Canaanite, a gentile – comes out and begins shouting that her daughter is tormented by a demon. Jesus’ response is to ignore her, until the disciples, unable to listen to her shouting tell him to send her away. When Jesus does speak, it is not to address the woman’s concern but only to coldly inform her that she is outside his area of concern. She is a gentile, and his role (he is certain) is only to the lost sheep of Israel. Undeterred, the woman falls to the ground and begs him to help her. Jesus remains unmoved: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs.” The woman shrugs off the insult: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs,” she says.

At last Jesus is moved to help, though what changed his mind is not entirely clear. The woman’s faith alone seems unlikely to have forced Jesus to reverse centuries of antipathy towards the gentiles and his lifetime immersion in the Jewish faith and it practices .

What is clear though, is that when the woman approached the group, Jesus was so confident in his understanding of Judaism, so sure that he fully understood his mission (to the lost sheep of Israel), that he could see no reason to give this distraught woman the time of day. Until this conversation, Jesus was absolutely sure that he knew God’s will with regard to the gentiles, that he was knew the difference between right and wrong and who was in and who was out. He was so confident in his point of view that he was completely comfortable with his refusal to show the woman any compassion and he had no hesitation in insulting her to her face. In comparison to his self-righteous assurance, the woman’s anguish and grief was nothing. According to the Jewish law, the gentiles were outside God’s grace and there (or so Jesus thought) they should remain.

And yet now, Jesus makes a 180 degree turn. He lets go of a lifetime of conditioning and prejudice and comes to the realisation that the good news he brings is intended for all not just a few and that just as he has broken boundaries to include sinners, tax-collectors and prostitutes, so he is called to break down the barriers between Jew and Gentile.

What I find extraordinary is that the very person whom Jesus (and the religious system he represents) has deemed as unclean and unworthy to be included in the healing, restorative power of the kingdom is the same person who through her self-belief and perhaps through her recognition of Jesus and his mission, opens his eyes to his narrow-mindedness, his parochialism and his judgementalism and breaks through his self-assurance that he knows God’s will. Through this extraordinary encounter, Jesus becomes aware that God’s all-embracing love is big enough to include all people.

Jesus’ encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman, should be a warning to all of us that we can never presume to speak for God, that we are foolish to think that the norms and attitudes that we have inherited from our forebears in faith are necessarily intended to stand for all time. If Jesus could let go of the beliefs, the biases, and the practices of his time, then we too should be open to the ways in which the Spirit is moving the church of our day.

Jesus saved his harshest words for the self-righteous people of his day, those who wanted to hold on to the past at all costs. Let us not be those people.

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Opening the eyes of the blind

March 29, 2014

Lent 4

John 9:1-41

Marian Free

In the name of God who causes the blind to see and the deaf to hear. Amen.

Some of you may have seen the movie A Time to Kill. It is based on a John Gresham novel and set in the Deep South of the United States. A black man (Carl) is on trial for attempting to kill the men who raped and tortured his ten-year-old daughter Tonya. The evidence is clear and the white jury have no sympathy for the grief and rage that led the man to take justice into his hand. It becomes clear that he will be condemned and that he will receive the death penalty. His lawyer (Jake) tries to persuade him to plead guilty but Carl says to him: “If you was on that jury. What would convince you to set me free?” What follows moves and challenges me every time I think about the movie.

In his summing up, Jake takes the jury on a journey in their imagination. He describes what happened to the child – how she was abducted, raped so viciously that she would never have children, used as target practice – full beer cans thrown so hard that they tear her flesh to the bone. He tells how she was urinated on, had a noose place around her neck and hung from a tree and how when her tiny body proved too heavy for the branch, she was tossed back into the truck, driven to a bridge and thrown thirty feet into a river. “Can you see her?” he says.” “I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she is white.” At that point the penny drops for the jurors. At that moment, the child is no longer a stranger, no longer a member of a race for whom they have no respect. She becomes their own child – their daughter, their niece, their granddaughter. The horror of the crime and the violent grief of the father become understandable. They would have felt the same.

Of course, powerful as that is, it is fiction and it is set against a particular background. That said, it is a reminder that many of us tend to see the world in a certain way. We tend to be blinded by our experiences, by our cultures and our religious ideals. Whether we like it or not, most of us make judgements about other people. We create stereotypes that are difficult to break and make assumptions based on false or limited information. Sometimes our ideas change gradually as we get to know the person or group we have demonised. At other times we need something to shock us out of our complacency so that we can see the other for whom they are, not who we believe them to be.

Jesus is an expert at shocking people into a new way of seeing. He wants us to see things in new ways, not in the conventional, centuries old way of seeing things. He astonishes us by appearing to disregard the law, by healing on the Sabbath and by eating with tax collectors. His parables explode existing religious truths and force his hearers to reconsider their ideas about God and about other people. His teaching and behaviour are sometimes contradictory. In Luke, the story of the rich young man is followed by the account of Zaccheus. Jesus urges the rich young man to give away all his possessions then he commends Zaccheus who only gives away half of his possessions. It begs the question: What are we to do with our possessions? Jesus is not being fickle or obtuse, the contradiction and confusion have a purpose – they are designed to destablise our preconceptions, to make us dependent on God and to prevent us from believing that we can have all knowledge and all truth. If Jesus does not conform to the party line, and if his teaching is apparently then inconsistent it is impossible for anyone to claim that they fully understand or that they have a monopoly on truth.

The account of the healing of the blind man is a lesson about seeing – seeing differently. The Pharisees, who believe that they can see clearly are exposed as those who are blind whereas the blind man gradually comes to see who Jesus really is. The Pharisees who believe that they have nothing to learn are shown to be misguided and ignorant whereas the blind man who is aware how little he knows is proven to be the one who recognises the truth. The Pharisees are so locked into what they think they know that they are unable to change their preconceptions and expectations, whereas the blind man who recognises that he knows little is open to new ideas. He is aware that he has room to learn.

Throughout the story the Pharisees dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole – demonstrating how little they really know. The blind man not only receives his sight, but allows himself to be enlightened and his ideas to be challenged. The Pharisees who represent the religious leaders, judge Jesus on outdated credentials – he is a sinner, he does not observe the Sabbath, he does not observe the law (9:16), they do not know where he comes from. The blind man uses other – also legitimate – criterion to accept that Jesus comes from God. Just as his forebears believed Moses because of the signs he performed so the blind man sees and believes in the signs that Jesus does – making the blind to see (9:16). He understands intuitively that God listens to one who worships him and obeys his will (9:31). The Pharisees believe that they give glory to God by rejecting Jesus, yet it is the blind man who gives glory to God by worshiping Jesus.

John’s gospel is written for those who will come to faith – that is ourselves. As witnesses to the drama that is unfolding, we are challenged to think about ourselves and our ability to see; to ponder whether we identify with the blind man or the Pharisees and to consider how much we know about and whether we are willing to know more. We are challenged to remain open and expectant, to allow God to reveal God’s self in ways that are unanticipated and that break apart our previous ideas as to who and what God is. We are warned against holding rigidly to preconceptions and assumptions that lock us into only way of thinking and that therefore lock us out of the truth.

The problem with believing that we know it all is that it can blind us to what is actually in front of us. confidence in what we know means that we see things from one point of view – ours. If we believe that our perspective is the only one that has a claim to truth, we are forced to protect and defend it even when the facts contradict it. The Pharisees were unable recognise Jesus because they persisted in their way of seeing things, even when Jesus’ actions seemed to put the lie to it. The blind man was not bound to one interpretation, one view of the world. He was willing to learn and to use what he did know in a different way.

Let us not be so self-assured, so confident in our way of seeing that we are blind to the presence of God or that we fail to see Jesus even when he is right in front of us.

 

 

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Boxed in

July 21, 2012

Mary Magdalene 2012 (Pentecost 8)

John 20:1-18

Marian Free

In the name of God who values us all, created as we are in the image of God. Amen.

On Friday evening Michael and I attended a play at the Cremorne Theatre called: “Head full of Love”. The play chronicles the friendship that develops between two unlikely women – a Northern Territory Aboriginal suffering from renal failure and an anxiety-ridden white woman who has run away from her over-bearing son. As the two women circle around, trying to understand each other, the dialogue between them exposes the sorts of prejudices and false assumptions that many white people make of the original inhabitants of this land and how difficult it can be to overturn those prejudices, even when contrary evidence stares you in the face.

Lilly requires five hours of dialysis five times a week. Nina naturally assumes that her kidney problems are a result of alcohol abuse. She blunders around trying to get Lilly to admit that this is true and initially refuses point blank to accept that Lilly has never drunk alcohol. It takes some time for Lilly to convince Nina that she, like many other indigenous people are simply born with underdeveloped kidneys, often as a result of low birth weight. Nina has absorbed one type of folklore about aboriginals which she unquestioningly applies to Lilly. When that view is challenged she finds it difficult to change her mindset and to see the issue through a different set of lenses.

Nina is not alone. When people do not have a wide variety of experience, or a personal knowledge of those who are different from themselves, they tend to accept the prevailing view as not only valid, but as characteristic of a whole group of people. So there are those who accept the view that all boat people are terrorists, or that all welfare recipients are lazy and don’t want to work, or that all members of Generation Y are unreliable and flighty. . The world is much simpler to understand and manage if we categorise people according to their gender, their age, their profession, their race or by any other characteristic that they might have in common. Once we have grouped people together we begin to see the ways in which they are the same and become blinded to the ways in which those within the group exhibit a huge variety of ability, intention and behaviour.

The human need to classify is as true with regard to individuals as it is to groups of people.

Our opinion of someone is formed on the basis of what we observe to be true and we find it hard to change that opinion even when all the evidence indicates that we were wrong or that the person has changed. No one expects an ugly duckling to become a swan, or the leopard to change its spots.

Mary Magdalene is one such person who has been defined and categorised to the point that many of us assume that we know all there is to know about her. Yet Mary remains an enigma. Over the past two thousand years she has been cast in many roles. She has been identified as sinner, lover, witness to the resurrection and more. Scholars and novelists have made her a person of interest – building on or breaking down the mythology that surrounds her. For example, scholars have made the claim that Mary was married to Jesus and Dan Brown has used her to forward an argument that Jesus produced children and that Jesus’ descendants continue to walk the earth.

Given the degree of interest in her that is shown in art, scholarship and fiction, it is interesting to note that Mary is mentioned rarely in the gospels. Most of the mythology that surrounds her is based on conjecture. Luke mentions Mary as one of the women who supported Jesus in his ministry  (8:1-3, cf Mark 14:40-43) and all four gospels include Mary in the accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection. She is the woman from whom seven demons are cast out (Lk 8:2) and the one who announced the resurrection to the disciples (Jn  20:18).

Even though the gospels contain so few references to Mary, she has been identified with at least two of the unnamed women – the sinful woman who anointed Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great sealed her fate by identifying Mary as the repentant sinner who washed Jesus’ feet. For centuries Mary Magdalene became Mary the reformed prostitute. It was only in the last century that feminists, determined to rescue her from this unwarranted position of subjugation, tried to reclaim her. In so doing they found the Mary of John’s gospel and the Mary of the Gospel of Philip. Mary Magdalene – the apostle to the apostles – had been buried under centuries of complacent presupposition even though she had had a prominent and leading role in the early Christian community.

Pope Gregory made Mary into a fallen woman – the perfect foil the other Mary, the Virgin who remained pure and sinless. These two women became images for womanhood -woman is either fallen or pure. Feminists may have redeemed Magdalene, but their weakness was to imply that Mary had value only when she could be demonstrated to hold a position of authority within the early church. Neither categorisation is satisfactory. The problem with both approaches is that they serve to colonize and to appropriate Mary to serve a particular purpose, rather than allow her to be herself – whatever that may be. If Pope Gregory relegated Mary to the role of repentant sinner, the feminists have inadvertently implied that for a person to be deemed as significant, they must be shown hold a position of authority.  In this way Mary is redeemed at the expense of the millions of Christians throughout the ages who have not aspired to or attained leadership roles with the Christian community.

Whatever scholars uncover about the Mary of history – and that will not be very much, we can be sure that she was a unique individual who brought to the early church a variety of gifts and talents and that her past – whether as sinner or leader – did not continue to define her. We can learn from the treatment of Mary throughout history and even in recent times, that we do a great injustice to people – individuals and groups- when we attempt to define them or when we use a few basic characteristics to classify and to categorise them.

If we believe that all people are created in God’s image and that everyone is precious in God’s sight it is incumbent upon us all to create environments that allow people from all races, genders and backgrounds to reach their full potential. It is important to value all people – especially those who are different from ourselves -, to help them to find and name their own identity – not one we have imposed on them, and to recognize and treasure the gifts that each person brings to the body of Christ.

We are all so many things, family and friend, teacher and student, helper and helped. None of us would like to be known for only one aspect of who we are and none of us would like to think that something from our past continued to define us in the present.

Life might be easier if we put individuals and groups into neat little packages, however, we do no one a service if we do not allow them to continually surprise or astonish us. We will find ourselves the poorer if we box people in and expect them to always behave in a consistent way and we will be guilty of failing to recognize the wonder and diversity of God’s creation if we hold on to our prejudices in the face of information which conflicts with what we think we know.

Centuries after Jesus walked on earth, the true Mary continues to elude us.

May she be a reminder to us that we do not always see all that there is to see and may we accept the challenge to be ready, open and willing to learn about and from those whom today we do not fully understand.

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