A parishioner
gave St. Thomas a book of icons last week called Christ in the Margins. On the front cover, there is a picture of
Jesus as a young Middle Eastern man with curly hair and a slight beard,
standing behind a barbed-wire fence. The strands of sharp, twisted wire cut
across the whole portrait, slicing even through the halo behind his head. He peers
out from behind the fence with eyes full of yearning, and he pulls one strand of
wire down so that he can see us better. The author calls this icon, “the Christ
of Maryknoll,” in honor of the Maryknoll communities, Roman Catholic missions
to the poor and destitute throughout the world.[1]
I first started looking at the icon this week because of our readings, from
James and from Proverbs, that urge us, in no uncertain terms, to serve the
poor, as the Maryknoll brothers and sisters do. I thought that I would find in
it an illustration of our Christian duty to the poor. The icon took me, though,
as icons do, on a journey to a deeper place, beyond our reading from James. Is
Jesus the one who is imprisoned behind the barbed wire fence, I wondered, or is
he just looking in on us in our human cage? In the icon, it is impossible to
tell for sure. Could it be that Jesus and I are both locked behind such
fearsome fences? Surely, God is stronger than barbed wire?
To me, there
is no barrier more frightening than a barbed wire fence, recalling war zones
and concentration camps and the crumbling infrastructures of inner city chaos. No
one can pass beyond barbed wire without pain and injury. Its sharp, irregular
spikes are like tiny explosions of anger, ready to wound anyone who touches
them. How often our words carry the barbs of our unloving, unwelcoming
thoughts, encircling us and ripping through anyone who ventures too close.
Barbed wire is the ultimate excluder, crying “Keep Out!” in a loud and scary
voice. How often our set beliefs and narrow opinions surround us and isolate
us, as though we were woven round with barbed wire. In this season of political
ads and speeches, barbed wire menaces from all sides of the political spectrum,
as words serve to wound and tear down. In this season of fear and mistrust, we seem
to build more and more barbed wire fences, and we eye each other—rich and poor,
foreign and native born, conservative and liberal, creationist and
evolutionist, black and white, believer and atheist, Christian and Muslim—from
behind the thousands of painfully sharp and rigid barriers that divide us.
When Jesus and
the Syrophoenician woman meet in Mark’s Gospel, they too are looking at one
another through barbed wire. The Syrophoenician woman and her daughter are not
languishing behind a barrier of their own making; they are instead imprisoned
behind the isolation and exclusion caused by the barbed wire of disease. The
power of evil and death has encircled them, placing the barbs of an unclean
spirit between them and their world. God, present in Jesus, could save them … yet
Jesus, when he first meets the woman, is also stuck behind the barbed-wire
fence of the culture into which he has become human flesh.
Jesus, the good Jewish teacher, knows
that Scripture says that the Children of Israel are God’s chosen people. It is
through them that God will save the world. It is first and foremost to them
that he has come to bring Good News. Of course, God also cares for the
Gentiles: the Greeks, the foreigners, the poor misguided souls who do not know
the Law. But the Jews must be saved first, and then, through them, the rest of
the world will be fed with the bread of life.
Resting in the strange Gentile house,
in the strange Gentile country, surrounded by foreign ways, Jesus can only peer
at the Greek woman through the barbed wire of his worldview, and her tender
flesh catches on the barb of his insulting word: “Gentile Dog!” For Jesus, the
good Jewish teacher, dogs are unclean animals, better than pigs of course, but still
… Dogs are not pets, and they do not belong in the kitchen. With their
snarling, aggressive ways, they belong outside, scavenging for unclean scraps,
roaming at the margins, scratching their disease-ridden hides.
We are shocked at our sweet Jesus,
meek and mild, who would allow such a barb to come from his mouth. But the Syrophoenician
woman does not seem to get hooked by it. For her, coming from a wealthy,
educated Greek background, the Jews are nobody special, and Jesus’ references
are lost on her. Her culture has taught her that there are all kinds of
teachings in the world, and an educated person has only to open one’s mind and
sample them, picking truth from here and there like a bouquet of flowers. If
there is a God who can set her daughter free, then he must do it; she must bow
down at his feet and convince him to do it. On the other side of the fence, in
this suffering mother’s world, dogs are pets who join their families in the
kitchen at mealtime, scrounging for bits of food that fall to the floor,
waiting for scraps and a friendly pat on the head. The suffering mother, at the
feet of the new healer in town, looks at Jesus through the barbed wire of sickness
and death, and she doesn’t hear the insult in his barb. She sees a man whom she
calls “Lord,” a man filled with a divine power that can heal right now. In her
mind, to be a dog is not such a bad thing, if it means that she can snatch a
share of foreign healing for her daughter.
In Mark’s
version of this scene, the barbed wire is replaced by healing not because the
woman is so clever or even so faithful, but because Jesus changes his mind. Jesus
lifts the taut wires with which he was born and puts loving action above human
teaching. Should we be surprised? We know that God changes God’s mind all the
time, replacing judgment with mercy, sickness with health, death with life,
responding to human need, ripping away the world’s carefully-laid barbed wire.[2]
As God, the true Jesus changes his mind, as well, able to sweep away prickly
cultural worldviews, as easily as he chases away demons.
This healing story found its way into
Mark’s Gospel in a time in which the Jewish worldview and the Greek worldview
were at odds within the Christian community. Jewish Christians and Greek
Christians were eyeing each other through layers of barbs and wire barriers,
struggling to become one Church. Mark wanted to be sure that the all of the Christians
in his community knew that Jesus had learned long ago that God’s grace can tear
down well-entrenched fences and heal stubborn divisions. I wonder if we can
allow this Jesus to tear down the fences and heal the divisions in our world,
as well? What we all tend to do, instinctively, is to imagine a Jesus who
stands unconditionally with us, behind our own worldviews. We imagine a Jesus
who is liberal or conservative, like we are. We imagine a Jesus who is American,
who believes what we were taught to believe. We imagine a Jesus who holds fast
to those points of view on which we are just certain that we will never change
our minds. And in our certain and stubborn rigidity, we imprison Jesus himself
behind a barbed-wire fence. With Jesus behind a fence, we limit God’s abundant mercy,
even though, as James points out, “mercy triumphs over judgment.”
On Friday, Episcopalians celebrated
one of my favorite saints: Elie Naud. Naud was a French Huguenot, a Reformed
Calvinist who lived at the turn of the 18th century, during the
ferocious persecution of Protestants in France. Calvinists are not known for
the suppleness of their belief systems, and years spent in prison for his
beliefs must not have helped soften Naud’s rigidity. After all, all that he had
to do to leave the barbed wire of prison for his comfortable home and place in
society was to renounce his Protestant beliefs. But firm, steadfast Naud did
not renounce them, and when he escaped from prison, he had to flee his country,
ending up in the Colonies, in New York City.
As early as 1703, Naud, horrified by
what he saw of the conditions of the African slaves in his new home, began to
fight for permission to begin a school for slaves, to teach them to read and to
introduce them to Jesus Christ. Since the power for such a decision resided in
the Church of England, Naud, who was French and Calvinist, became an
Anglican—not because the beliefs of the Church of England fit in his worldview
(I imagine that they were rather contrary to it)—but because he understood that
mercy triumphs over judgment. As an Anglican, he continued, for the rest of his
life, to fight the authorities, the slave-owners, the ignorance, the poverty, and
the despair and anger of the slaves themselves, and he established his school,
and he taught the slaves, and he loved his neighbor as himself. He could have
shrugged at their plight and kept to his old belief system. But love brought
change, and it was out of love that he chose to live his life.
How do we keep
the barbed wire that imprisons us from locking up Jesus, as well? We reach
across it, says James, pulling it away and reaching for the hands held up to us
in need. In the Maryknoll icon, Jesus’ palms bear the bloody mark of the nails
from his crucifixion... or does the blood come from the barbs that he crushes
as he pulls away the wire from our hearts?
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