 Readings: Isaiah 35:1-6, Mark 7:24-20, Divine Love & Wisdom 395:2 (see below)
See also on Youtubeyoutu.be/0pVdNdopHRU Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash Welcome friends, to a new church year. Hopefully we have all been able to enjoy some restful times over our summer, taken some space to renew ourselves. This is exactly what Jesus was trying to do in our text today. He had been engaged fully in ministry for a while, healing and teaching, which included some intensive debates with the religious leaders of this day. He was clearly exhausted. There are many ways that this gospel reading humanizes Jesus. The first is that we see he was not limitless; his mind and body were capable of exhaustion and overwhelm just as ours are. The second is more implied, but clearly, for Jesus to have been experiencing such tension and exhaustion over the course of his ministry meant that Jesus very much cared about his mission. He felt the stakes of it all. He wanted to succeed. Sometimes when we focus on the divine and other-worldly Jesus of the Easter story, we forget about the humanity of Jesus - he wept, he loved, he slept, he ate, he laughed. And he also made mistakes. Many times we don’t want to think about Jesus as someone who made mistakes. It makes us uncomfortable, for we base our entire tradition on things that he said and did. Can we base a whole tradition on someone who is fallible, even if just a little bit? But when we look at this entire story, we find that there is a deeper teaching, one that the gospel writers made sure to include. And I think we know from our own lives, we can learn just a much from our mistakes as we can from our triumphs, probably more even. And so we have this exhausted Jesus, just trying to find a moment to himself to recharge. We know this person; he is us. We are told: He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. How frustrated, how grumpy he must have been to have yet another person come for a piece of him. He had nothing left in the tank to give. And so, as this Syro-Phoenician woman delivers her request, he lashes out at her with an insult. It is important not to try to explain this away. Many do, saying that it wasn’t really an insult in his day, or saying that Jesus was trying to test this woman’s faith. Neither of these things are true. It was an insult and it was intended as such. Dogs as beloved pets is a relatively modern concept, which we cannot overlay here. The woman was a gentile, of Greek and Syrian extraction. In Matthew’s version of this episode, she is explicitly termed a Canaanite, the Israelite’s antagonists of old. And even as Jesus encountered and healed different people from different places, he also had a specific mission for his beloved Jewish people. At a moment when it felt like he had nothing left to give, he didn’t want to waste his energy on someone outside of his tribe. In his exhaustion, he gave way to his own bias about this woman’s value. Which brings us to a discussion of a more modern concept: confirmation bias. In our increasingly divided and siloed cultural landscape, you may have heard of this idea already. Basically, it is the tendency to prefer information or interpret information in a way that validates our pre-existing views and conversely to reject information that contradicts our pre-existing views. It is the phenomenon behind what feels like the increasing intractability of all our positions, our inability to agree on even the most basic terms of fact, science, or reality. The truth is, once we have decided that something is true, our brains work very hard to justify that decision, latching on to anything that confirms it, and rejecting, ignoring, or re-interpreting anything that doesn’t. Studies have shown that when we receive information that confirms what we already think, our emotional centers in the brain light up. It feels really good to be right. Conversely, when we are given facts that refute what we already think, the reasoning regions of our brain “go dark.”(1) It feels less good to be uncertain or unsure, and so we instinctively avoid it. Evolutionarily, it may have benefited us to create mental patterns and structures upon which to make decisions, and to feel good when those constructs are borne out well. Could we imagine if every decision was made from zero? We’d never get anything done! But like any tendency, when it goes into hyperdrive, when we become overly reliant on the way certainty feels good, then we are tempted to constantly oversimply, to avoid flexibility of thought, and to habitually ignore reason itself. These habits, more than anything, invite us into us vs them thinking. There is no quicker way to boster our own self-esteem, our own sense of value and belonging, than to place ourselves conceptually into some sort of in-group, over and against “those people.” Confirmation bias is the way of thinking (or not-thinking) that more and more convinces us that we are right to do so. Jesus, in his circumstances that we are considering today, was in a moment where confirmation bias could have been at play. All his life he was likely subject to a cultural confirmation bias about the gentiles, about anyone who wasn’t Jewish. The gentiles surely did the same for the Jews as well. It built up Jesus’ internal idea of who this woman was. In a moment of weakness and frustration, he relied on this bias instead of seeing the person who was in front of him. Yet, in a powerful moment of self-determination, the woman turns the insult around, refusing to own the intended injury but instead claiming it so that it might be wielded as a rhetorical reply in Jesus’ own style. She stood unshakable in her own dignity, and in her desire to save her daughter. Can we imagine then the multitudes that exist between v 28 and v 29 of our text today? The silence after her statement: “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” What did those seconds hold for Jesus? There were two ways that it could have gone. Jesus could have leaned in to his confirmation bias, let his rational mind ignore what he just saw, let his emotional mind get a glow up of superiority and rightness, and interpret what she said in a way that supported the insult he had delivered. “Those Syro-Phoenicians, so rude, so conceited, who does she think she is? How dare she say such a thing to me. These people are always taking advantage.” And we can imagine his next words might have been “Get away from me.” But they weren’t. Instead, Jesus rejected the human tendency towards confirmation bias. He let his rational mind receive new information, and reflect upon it. He saw this woman stand firm with confidence and wit, yet without rancor. He saw the lengths a mother would go to save her child, a given among all cultures and creeds. He saw the courage it took to speak up in a culture where women were socialized to be deferential. And with this new information, Jesus saw that he had acted wrongly, and chose to act differently, the second time with more compassion. This in itself is a small miracle. It’s not actually the norm. Studies show that when human beings are presented with facts and information that refute what we might think, that we tend to dig in to our strongly held notions, rather than entertaining new ones.(2) We want to avoid uncertainty, and especially, avoid any repentance and repair that might be a consequence of our strongly-held ideas. We are not told how Jesus felt about this episode, but we can imagine him sinking to a chair once the woman had left, feeling regret for lashing out. Having to re-evalute our ideas about the world, and especially our ideas about ourselves, is not usually pleasant. Yet, the fundamental work of the spiritual life is change and growth. We heard in our Swedenborg reading, how even in his time, it was clear that people will defend and justify whatever they want by any intellectual means that they can. Swedenborg writes that human beings were created with a will, to act as a vessel for love, and an intellect, to act as a vessel for wisdom, and it is through these two vessels that God can dwell within us. They mirror the relationship of God’s own Divine Love and Wisdom within Godself, and they are designed to act in concert, with love being the fuel for wisdom, and wisdom being the structure for love. For the sake of our freedom of choice, and the development of our spiritual life, we human beings have the ability to both choose what kind of love we ultimately want to serve, and to see the intellectual truth of something when our hearts haven’t quite gotten the memo yet. But when self-love becomes the fuel for everything we think, causing us to abdicate the ability to see anything else, then tendencies like confirmation bias are given free reign. Today, in this one short episode, Jesus shows us that it doesn’t have to be so. A key discipline of the spiritual life is the ability to sacrfice short term good feelings like complacency or superiority or self-satisfaction, for the chance to grow in our ideas and perspectives, for the chance to grow in wisdom. For as we grow in wisdom, we make more space for empathy and compassion within us, which in turn helps us grow even further in wisdom, a holy virtuous circle. But this circle can’t get going unless we commit to regularly challenging our own ideas, and to keeping an open mind. Studies have shown that this can be as simple as training ourselves to notice our own thought processes. (3) I feel for the exhausted and fallible Jesus in this story, and seeing him grapple successfully with a very human tendency, increases rather than decreases my faith in what he was trying to do. This small moment is a nitty-gritty miracle, theology embodied in relationship between two human creatures. What would Jesus do? Jesus didn’t hestitate to change course when he was reminded of the humanity of another. May it be so for all of us. Amen.
Isaiah 35:1-6 1 The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon; they will see the glory of the LORD, the splendor of our God. 3 Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; 4 say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” 5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. 6 Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. Mark 7:24-30 24 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. 25 In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. 26 The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter. 27 “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 the dogs.” 28 “Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” 30 She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. Divine Love & Wisdom 395:2 From the intellectual faculty called rationality, and from the volitional faculty called freedom, a person acquires the ability to affirm whatever they wish. For the natural person can elevate their intellect to as high a light as they desire. However, a person who is caught up in evils and their resulting falsities does not elevate it further than the higher region of their natural mind, and rarely up to the region of their spiritual mind. The reason is that they are governed by the delights of their natural mind, and if they elevate their intellect above that, their love's delight perishes. If they do elevate it further and see truths opposed to their life's delights or to the assumptions of their own intelligence, they then either falsify those truths, or pass them by and scornfully leaves them behind, or they retain them in memory as means to serve their life's love and conceit in their own intelligence.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
October 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed