Two women

So, Jesus. If he is God in a body, and he is, then what he does when somebody pushes on him tells me something about what God does. Two stories, both in Mark, both women, both uninvited.

The crumbs

Mark 7. Jesus has gone north, into Gentile territory, and Mark says he didn't want anyone to know he was there. A Syrophoenician woman finds him anyway. Her daughter has an unclean spirit. She begs.

And he says no. "Let the children be fed first; it isn't right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."

I've read a lot of attempts to soften that line and I don't think any of them fully work. It's a no, and it's a no with an insult inside it.

She doesn't argue with the picture. She gets inside it. "Yes, Lord. And even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

Verse 29: "Because of this word, go. The demon has left your daughter."

Because of this word. The Greek is dia touton ton logon, because of this saying, this reply, this argument. Other Bibles have "for such a reply," "because you said this." Jesus names what she said as the reason. Matthew tells the same story and swaps that phrase for "great is your faith," which is Matthew reading her argument as faith. Mark leaves it as her words.

Now. Was he testing her? Maybe. He does that elsewhere, and John even says so once ("he said this to test him"). Was it banter, a tease with an edge, the way Tom Wright reads it? Maybe. Did he actually change his mind? The text doesn't say and I'm not going to make it say.

What it does say is that a stated no became a yes, and that the hinge was her sentence. And I notice she didn't come in on the Psalm 1 ground. She didn't say "I've been faithful." She asked for crumbs.

The hem

Mark 5. A woman who has been bleeding for twelve years, who has spent everything on doctors and gotten worse. She reasons with herself: if I touch even his clothes, I'll be well. She works through the crowd, touches his cloak, and is healed. Instantly. She feels it in her body.

And Jesus, Mark says, felt power go out of him and turned around. "Who touched my clothes?" The disciples think he's lost it: the whole crowd is pressing on you, and you ask who touched you?

This is a different kind of story from the first one. Nothing changes Jesus' mind here. He didn't decide anything. She reached, and the power was... there. Available. For her and, it seems, for anyone. Mark 6 says people begged to touch the fringe of his cloak and "as many as touched it were made well." Luke 6: "power came out from him and healed them all."

I was tempted to say she activated something, like a circuit. But a whole crowd is touching him and only one person is healed, and when he finds her he doesn't say "your touch made you well." He says "your faith." And then, on his way to a dying child, he stops and won't move until she has told him, Mark says, the whole truth. He turns a transaction into a conversation.

So I have two stories and I'm not sure they make the same claim. The first woman turns a no into a yes by arguing. The second changes no decision at all; she takes what's already there. Prayer as dialogue, and prayer as access. Those might be two different things.

The other side of the same coin

There's a mirror image to the hem story, and it's in the very next chapter. Nazareth. Mark 6:5, "he could do no mighty work there," apart from a few healings, "and he marveled at their unbelief." Matthew softens it to "did not do many." Mark says could not.

I don't know what to do with that either. The same power that went out to a woman who grabbed his cloak seems to have had nowhere to go in a town that didn't reach.

And Jesus himself, in the garden, asks the Father to take the cup, and the Father doesn't. The one perfect pray-er in the story is refused, and goes to the cross saying "not what I will, but what you will."

Next time, the last post, I'll lay out the three ways people have tried to hold all of this together. And then the questions.

To sit with

Have I ever been told no and found the sentence that turned it? What was in the sentence?
When I pray, am I arguing, or reaching? Is one of those more honest for me right now?
"He could do no mighty work there." What would it mean for me to be Nazareth?
The hem woman went for the healing and got a conversation she didn't ask for. Would I have wanted the conversation?