Something changed for me in ninth grade, and it happened in Mrs. Hancock’s English class. She teed up the year by assigning us a ton of reading for the summer, which I was less than pleased about. While others played outside in the southeast Texas heat, I was reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and other classics from a long reading list and draining the ink from highlighters like there was no tomorrow.
We’d been instructed to mark comments and underline in the books themselves, which was new to me. I admit that I didn’t care very much for Hamilton’s Mythology. The world of the gods and goddesses was bizarre to me, and frankly, I didn’t see the point of reading about them. I said as much to an aunt who’d majored in literature in college, and she reminded me that reading about mythology would be helpful in making sense of allusions in other literature. I inwardly thought, okay, whatever. But I dutifully did my reading, and I’m glad I did. It changed me.
It was in Mrs. Hancock’s class that we devoured Shakespeare, parsing it for allusions, foreshadowing, paradox, symbolism, and above all, irony. It was in her class while reading Lord of the Flies that I learned that Piggy’s glasses were not just glasses, and owls in Shakespeare were not just cute animals. Although I was a complete and utter bookworm as a kid, I’d never realized that words weren’t just words. Stories weren’t just stories. The text was more than its literal meaning. There was more than met the eye. Things were not as they seemed.
Those high school literary exercises foreshadowed the way I would come to think about life in general. They might only have been interesting mental exercises for a ninth grader, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that the art of de-literalizing our speech and our thinking is part of what it means to be a mature human being. Finding echoes within a text and savoring the multivalence of words moves us from a simplistic, binary mode of thinking into honoring the complex nuances of our humanity.
I’m not sure why the lessons from Mrs. Hancock’s English class don’t always translate to the reading of Scripture. But since the word of God is a living word of God, then even and especially in Scripture, things are more than they seem to be on the surface.
I wish we’d read Mark’s Gospel in Mrs. Hancock’s class. We could’ve had a field day in discussing irony. Why do we always think of irony as sarcasm or skepticism or equate it with the hermeneutic of suspicion? Irony is also theological. Irony can tell us a great deal about the dissonance between our lives and the vision that God has for us. And if we can understand the irony of our spiritual lives, there will always be an invitation to something greater and deeper than what meets the eye. Irony can even move us into spiritual maturity.
There’s one person in today’s Gospel passage, other than Jesus, who understands that there’s more than meets the eye. I think she understands irony, too. It’s the Syrophoenician woman, whom tradition has called Justa. Let’s use that name, because she deserves a name. Justa is an outsider, a Gentile, and she inserts herself rather boldly into Jesus’s mission to the Jews. And that’s the root of the problem.
But poor Justa has been used by countless commentators to promote their own agendas. For some, she’s the one who “bests” Jesus in an argument. Give it to him, Justa! they say. For others, she’s the victim of Jesus’s rudeness, yet one more reason to try to exhaust the complex intricacies of Jesus’s humanity rather than embrace its mystery. But rather than go down one more rabbit hole with this story, what if we let Justa be the one who sees that there’s more than meets the eye.
Here's where we need Mrs. Hancock’s English class and a generous helping of faith to discern how Justa fits into the larger story of Jesus’s ministry. Context is everything. Justa appears from out of the blue after Jesus has fed the 5,000 and before he feeds another 4,000. Justa appears after Jesus has questioned traditional understandings of what’s clean and unclean. As one of the Gentiles, Justa might be offensively likened to a dog by some, and she emerges on the scene and aces the English test on literary devices.
Meanwhile, Jesus’s disciples are clueless and missing every question on the quiz. Although they’re of the chosen people and are chosen as disciples by Jesus, they’ve still failed to understand the meaning of his feeding of the 5,000. And even after he feeds another 4,000, they still don’t get it. They can’t understand that Jesus’s healing of the sick is more than meets the eye. They don’t understand that bread in the miraculous feedings isn’t just bread. They don’t understand that when there doesn’t appear to be enough, there might be far more than they need lurking below the surface. The disciples are royal failures in humility most of the time. Some want to be first in line and have the best seat at the table, but Jesus reminds them that the first will be last and the last will be first. But what does that mean? they wonder.
And then here comes Justa, with the unshakeable expectation that Jesus is more than meets the eye, that he can, in fact, heal her daughter who’s possessed by a demon, that even though he’s a Jew and she’s a Gentile, perhaps Jesus’s mission doesn’t have to rigidly follow a neat ethnic and geographic map. And when Jesus abruptly remarks that the children—that is, the Jews to whom he has been sent—must be fed first and that the dogs—the Gentiles—should not receive what the Jews deserve, she won’t take no for an answer because she knows that there’s more than meets the eye. Justa must comprehend that beneath Jesus’s remark, there’s a spiritual test, or better yet, an invitation to rise above petty emotions and reactivity. Is she offended by Jesus? Who knows? But what she does know is that a crumb is more than a crumb. It’s a gift from God. And no one else in the Gospel, at this point, seems to understand that.
And yet, commentator after commentator will tie themselves into knots trying to figure out how Jesus doesn’t sin here while behaving rudely. Or they use this as an opportunity to direct their latent anger at Jesus by accusing him of deplorable behavior. But Justa, the only one who might have a right to take umbrage at Jesus’s curt reply, rises above it because she knows that there’s more than meets the eye. The woman understands that even a few crumbs from the hand of the Lord are enough. She’s utterly persistent in that belief. She won’t take no for an answer because she knows in the depths of her soul that a little bit can go a long way. It doesn’t matter if the crumb is small. It doesn’t matter that one must eat it from below the table. It doesn’t matter if the acquisition of a crumb seems like an afterthought. This woman is most interested in the fact that the crumb is food indeed but also that eating the crumb is more than sating hunger. It’s about being spiritually fed, and it’s about being healed and made whole. And Jesus’s response to her gumption proves her right.
The irony in Mark’s Gospel is that we, the readers, know exactly who Jesus is and how the story will end. The disciples don’t, but oddly, Justa the Gentile outsider knows something that the insider disciples don’t. And yet, this irony is more than just an interesting literary device. It also points to the dissonance between our lives and the lives that God desires for us. Too often, we’re like the disciples and others who can’t see that there’s more than meets the eye. We see the unanswered prayer as the absence of God. We see our meager situation in life as a reason to be angry that we’ve only been given the crumbs beneath the table. We see someone else’s success as our failure. We imagine that we’re simply one more participant in the great game of competition, where those who are fed first are favored and those who eat last get the short end of the stick. And if we’re the ones being fed first, we imagine that we’ve done something right and that those eating the crumbs are inferior. The irony is that no matter how many literary devices we can pick out of a Shakespeare play, we often read the story of our lives on a literal level. But faith and charity demand that we rise above the literal level, because there’s much more than meets the eye.
In the kingdom of God, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear like Justa, those who have perfectly good hearing fail to hear, but those who physically can’t hear are healed and understand who Jesus is and what he’s done. In the kingdom of God, a crumb is far more than a crumb. It’s a sign that when we think there isn’t enough, we’ve failed to see that there’s more than meets the eye. In the kingdom of God, every tongue that is fettered must be unloosed to tell the world that death on a cross is more than death; it’s life. In the kingdom of God, Jesus can’t remain hid. He must be recognized and loved, and his marvelous works must be told out among the nations. In the kingdom of God, things aren’t what they seem to be, and we should never take no for an answer. Because in the kingdom of heaven, what’s impossible is always possible with God.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 8, 2024