Reflection -- Fully Human

I'm cranky now and then.  There, I've said it!  In fact, sometimes more than cranky -- downright irritable and defensive and hard to get along with.  It is not a quality I admire.  In fact, as time goes on, it becomes more and more painful to me.  Perhaps that is because the more that God permits me to grow closer to the light of God's presence, the more aware I become of my flaws (and yes, there are others too -- lots of them).

Part of the way that I attempt to deal with this tendency is to ask myself a question when I feel annoyance coming on; a question that has become a guide for Christian living for many people:  "What would Jesus do?" 

I have gained enough familiarity with the gospels by now that, most of the time, I feel that I can answer that question with some confidence.  But then there is this story of a Syrophoenician woman's quest for healing for her daughter.  Jesus' response to her is hardly what I would expect -- certainly not what I would have guessed that he would do in such a situation.  Here is Jesus, God incarnate, who while visiting Gentile territory dismisses a Gentile woman asking for his help.  What's worse, he does it with, bluntly, a bigoted slur.  (Some Jewish people of that day dismissed Gentile people by referring to them as "dogs.")  He seems to go into this situation with the idea that his ministry is limited to his own Jewish people (identified here as "the children").  But this woman knows better and persists.  She is not about to let a little crankiness get in the way of the good that she knows is at the heart of who Jesus really is.

One of the things that Christians struggled with in the early days was trying to figure out just who Jesus was.  They knew he had been in human form, but also knew that there was a great deal more to the story.  How could Jesus be, at the same time, both human and divine?  How could these two seemingly irreconcilable natures coexist in the same body? 

A "heresy" (called "docetism") dismissed at the outset was that Jesus was totally divine and only "seemed" to be human.  Eventually, believers came to see Jesus as both fully divine and fully human.  A sentence in "Confessing the One Faith"* puts it this way:  "In the way that he is human, in his words and deeds, his anger and love, Jesus embodied fully true humanity."

While some theological debates can amount to little more than "counting the angels on the head of a pin," this is not just some abstract intellectual exercise.  Jesus' little display of momentary human frailty in the story of this Gentile woman who came to him for help is a great comfort to me.  The One I follow experienced full humanity, "warts and all;" fully understands my human frailty (because he experienced it); and loves me fully and unconditionally anyhow!

And this story is, in the end, instructive when answering the "what would Jesus do?" question.  What Jesus did was to work through his lapse to see the deep faith of the one whom he at first rudely dismissed.  He gave her the answer that God's love required.  In the process, he broke through a centuries old wall of prejudice.

So a point of the story for our daily living is to "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again" when we fail.  The story invites us to be tolerant of our own human failures and to continue to love ourselves just as Jesus loves us while we try to do better.  It teaches us not to wallow in guilt and self-pity, but to learn from the situation and persist in our lives and our ministry. 

"Confessing the One Faith" also reminds us of this:  "Jesus' life is capable of showing unconditional trust in God and love for God's world; any limited life, however frustrated or apparently diminished, can therefore be transfigured to show forth the truth and love of God.  In God's eyes, every human life has the chance of reflecting the life of Christ." 

When you fail, lean on God's grace and move on.

revclay

* Confessing the One Faith:  An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic Faith as it is Confessed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), Faith and Order Paper No. 153 (Geneva:  World Council of Churches Publications, 1991).

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Mark 7: 24- 30

Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret.  In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet.  The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia.  She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.

"First let the children eat all they want," he told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."

"Yes, Lord," she replied, "but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

Then he told her, "For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter."

She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. [NIV]