Sermon 9/5/2021 “Transformers”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection, 2800 Hope Way, Alexandria, VA
Text: Mark 7:24-37
Day: 15Pentecost, Proper 18, Year B
If you have youngish children or grandchildren, or if you just hang out with children of a certain youngish age, you will know what a transformer toy is. Transformers are toys that can be configured to be more than one thing.
The “Transformers Generations War for Cybertron” series, for instance, has a “Kingdom Autobot Ark Titan Action Figure” that—with 26 twists and turns— transforms from a brawny, gadget-encumbered and nearly headless superhero, into a spaceship called The Ark, complete with landing gear, lights, and a cargo ramp, all for only $159.99. (The tiny optional computer is extra.)
But I’m not here to sell you transformers. Instead, I want to call transformers to mind as I reveal the two transformers hiding in plain sight in our gospel lesson today.
We know that Christ Jesus was and is a “transformer,” both the original one and the ultimate that any transformer can be: Both fully human and fully divine, as our theology teaches. Viewed from one angle: human; viewed from another angle: divine, but always both, at the same time: God in human form.
Today, Jesus’ humanity gets a close look, at least at first. Jesus apparently is bone weary, trying to “get away.” If you flip back a few pages in Mark’s gospel from today’s lesson, you will see that Jesus had been heading for a retreat with his disciples when a huge crowd found him—thousands of people—and he stopped to teach and feed and heal them. Along the way, he fended off some verbally hostile Pharisees and taught his disciples. Is it reasonable to think Jesus’ human energy must have been rather depleted?
If so, exhaustion might explain why Jesus found his way to the region of Tyre. Tyre was a prosperous pagan seaport city in Phoenicia on the easter shore of the Mediterranean Sea. In short, Jesus was a long, long way from home. Our lesson says he tried to be incognito there, and implies that he was in Tyre alone, without his disciples.
You just heard the story of Jesus being “Caught with his compassion down,” as one of my preaching colleagues says. He flat-out refused to heal the very ill daughter of a woman who sought him out in the house he was staying.
This is where we meet the second transformer in today’s gospel lesson: The Gentile Syrophoenician woman who bowed face-to-toe with God in his apparently exhausted human flesh and argued him into changing his mind. We don’t know from the text if the woman argued meekly with Jesus or confrontationally, but argue she did, and very effectively, because Jesus changed his mind. This is not something we expect of God, whether in human flesh or not. We do not expect God to change his mind.
Or maybe we don’t WANT God to change his mind. We think we have God all figured out, so it would be too confusing for our wholly human minds to understand if God changed his mind. The theory is that God is omniscient, all-knowing, perfect, and any change of mind would mean God hadn’t been so all-knowing in the first place, not perfect.
But there are instances in scripture that say God changed his mind. Moses, for example, stood face-to-face with God and successfully bargained God into changing his criteria for how many righteous people in Sodom it would take for God to spare that city. And Jonah’s argument with God was that God was sending him to prophesy that Ninevah would be destroyed when Jonah predicted that if his mission was successful, God’s mercy would spare Nineveh, and everyone would think him a false prophet. Jonah’s prediction proved true; God spared Nineveh after Nineveh repented so completely.
There are a few other examples, but these will do: Scripture gives us instances where, it says, God changed his mind.
Right about this point you would tell me that God knew all along that someone would bargain with him, and he would relent, or that someone would repent, and God would show mercy. But what if Moses hadn’t bargained with God; what if Jonah hadn’t preached repentance in Nineveh? What if the transformer woman in today’s gospel lesson hadn’t confronted Jesus and persisted?
But really, don’t we WANT God to change his mind? Don’t we pray all the time for God to change his mind? Our experience is that God DOES change his mind sometimes when we call on him to do so. “Cure my cancer, Lord,” we pray. And our cancer is successfully treated, gone. “I need food I can’t provide for my children to eat, Lord.” And we visit a food pantry and find what we need, a pantry that God had inspired into being. But what if we hadn’t asked God in the first place?
Which brings us back to the second transformer in today’s lesson. She was an unnamed Gentile woman who looked subservient, bowing at Jesus’ feet the way she did. She looked subservient, until Jesus called her a “dog” and chided her for asking him to heal her very ill daughter. THEN she auto-transformed into Momma Bear. “Call me a dog,” she argued, “but even dogs need to eat.”
- Had Jesus been only human, he might have said, “Well, for arguing with me your daughter can just take her chances with the disease.”
- Had Jesus been only human, he might have said the girl couldn’t be cured or that HE couldn’t or wouldn’t heal her.
- Had Jesus been only human, he might have told the woman she made him unclean by her presence. What WAS this woman doing alone with Jesus, anyway?
Instead of any of these human responses, Jesus’ divinity made her clean and he healed the woman’s daughter. The transformers also were transformed themselves, Jesus AND the woman.
We hear nothing more about this woman in scripture, or about her daughter. However, a curious fact is that the region where this healing took place was one of the first areas to accept Christianity. SOMEONE told the Phoenicians there about Christ Jesus.
I also find it curious that, while Jesus apparently had not taken his disciples with him on the trip, SOMEONE told them of the events, or we wouldn’t know of them.
So, what lessons will we reap from today’s gospel lesson? For me, the first message is to ask God boldly for what we need, and to not take “no” initially for the final answer. Argue with God, if you need to; this is a far better response than blaming God, especially as God sometimes changes his mind. Argue with God, if you must, but do it bowing down: your face to Jesus’ toe, so to speak, not nose to nose.
Then, too, today’s lesson is that the faith of our family members and our friends can “save” us. The female transformer in today’s lesson didn’t ask for healing for herself, but for her daughter.
I’ve likened the woman in today’s lesson to a transformer, someone who looks like one thing: a subservient begging woman, but who also is another: one able to convince Jesus to change his mind. She was also transformed in the more usual sense, not from an action figure into a spaceship, but perhaps from unbelief to belief, from ill in a way herself to being healed by her asking, not just her daughter.
How has Christ Jesus transformed you? And how have you transformed someone else by sharing what Christ Jesus has done for you?
