“THE UNDESERVING”


*In both of these healing narratives God’s awesome power and amazing grace bring healing and wholeness to people who were considered undeserving! They were Gentiles, people outside the covenant and undeserving of God’s grace and favor.
•    Gentiles were thought of as undeserving of God’s favor.
•    However, as he tells us about these healings, Mark is intentional and deliberate in letting us know that Jesus is healing Gentiles – undeserving people!
•    These healing accounts are intended to challenge and expand our human understanding of the boundaries and limits of God’s grace.
•    These healings reveal that even the undeserving receive God’s healing grace! Indeed, that may actually be the real point of these two healing stories; the good news of the Gospel will flow according to where God intends and directs it.

*God’s grace will not be contained and constrained by our limited and often glaringly incomplete human understanding of where it deserves to go.

*It is fascinating that in the first healing story the actual healing appears less important to Mark than the fact that Jesus speaks to a Gentile woman. Without a doubt, her identity as a Gentile is the most prominent feature of this narrative – not her daughters healing. It seems that covenant identity is the real issue.
•    In response to her plea for healing, Jesus points to the fact that she and her daughter are undeserving. He compares them to dogs. In fact, he has not come for her, but for the children of Israel.
•    The woman however, will not be denied. She tells him that even the dogs receive the crumbs that fall from the children’s table. In her mouth we hear the real point of the story: God’s grace and power is sufficient for both the Jews and the Gentiles, the deserving and the undeserving.
•    God’s grace encompasses both! So, Jesus speaks and it is. This is the way God’s power works. Remember in Genesis, God’s speech is creative. God speaks and it is. God’s word is powerful and creative.
•    In a very skillful way, our author Mark affirms both Jesus’ primary mission to the children of the covenant and the fact that the Gospel spills out and over to the Gentiles.
•    God’s grace is expansive! It seeps and flows beyond our ability and categories to define it.
•    God’s word and healing power cannot be contained, AND will not be contained by, our limited human capacity to understand and express God’s will.

*In the second healing account a Gentile deaf mute man is healed. We know he is a Gentile because Mark is deliberate in telling us the geographical detail that the healing takes place in the Decapolis region of the northern Galilee; a Gentile region.
1.    In sharp contrast to the previous healing and his simple pronouncement of healing, this time Jesus’ actions are dramatic. He sticks his fingers in the man’s ears. He spits on his tongue. We hear Jesus use a dramatic Aramaic phrase, Ephphatha, meaning “be opened!” This time around the crowd oohs and ahhs! All in all, it is a showy moment.
2.    In this healing account God’s power to restore and make complete this Gentile man’s life is front and center. Again, identity is a critical element in interpreting the meaning of why Mark included this story. Even this Gentile man, this man outside the covenant identity as a child of Israel can be made whole!
3.    Undeserving as he may have been, God’s power made his speech clear for others to understand him.
4.    Undeserving as he may have been, God’s power opened his ears so that he could hear others clearly!
5.    God’s power made him whole and complete – undeserving as he may have been.

*Taken together, these two accounts reveal that God’s power makes all things complete and whole. Nothing is too great a challenge for God’s grace and power – not even being a Gentile.
•    Deserving or undeserving, God’s grace can heal.

*These two accounts are GOOD NEWS for us! None of us are deserving of God’s power and grace.
•    All of us are sinners. We sin through omission and commission.
•    We fail in following God’s will.
•    We are disobedient in so many ways. Sometimes intentionally, and sometimes unintentionally.

*Yet, we hear in these passages the good news that we too can be healed – even though we are undeserving in so many ways.
1.    God can and will take away the demons that hold us and hinder us in our discipleship. Have we asked him to heal us?
2.    God can and will open our ears to receive the good news of his love and grace for us. Are we listening?
3.    God can and will free our tongues to proclaim his good news in Jesus Christ. Are we looking for ways to speak and proclaim?

*There is also more good news in these two healing accounts. They reveal for us that, following the path set for us by Jesus himself, we are free to extend God’s grace and favor to all that we meet.
•    It is not up to us to decide whether or not someone is worthy or unworthy of God’s love. God makes that decision, not us.
•    When we discover a situation that needs healing, we can extend and claim God’s grace and power. It will be God that actually heals.
•    When we encounter someone in need of healing, we can extend and claim God’s grace and power. It is not our job to determine whether someone deserves to be healed or not. It is God who will bring the healing.

*In turn, this reveals that
•    We are called to care for church members and non-members alike.
•    We feed the poor, regardless of why someone is poor
•    We love and accept those who have chosen to live differently than we do through their ethical decisions. We can extend God’s love without affirming people’s disobedience!

*Ultimately, these healing narratives reveal for us that God’s providence is always at work. God decides how and when to extend grace – not us! Jesus came to heal and love Jew and Gentile. We are but his arms called to embrace an undeserving world by receiving and proclaiming the truth. So may it be for us – the undeserving! Amen.

Reverend Marc V. Mason
September 6, 2009
Trinity Presbyterian Church
Travelers Rest, SC