Jesus Isn’t Always Good; What Now?

“Frenzy”
Rev. Miller Hoffman
MCCNY

September 9, 2018

Here is a parable.

From there he arose and went away to the region of East Harlem at Harlem River Park. And he wore Ray Bans and pulled his ball cap down and tried to hide out in the back of the Savoy Bakery, but a woman whose girl had been picked up for solicitation heard and came and threw herself at him. Now the woman was trans, Puerto Rican by birth, and she begged him to post bail for her girl. And he said to her, “Let the white trans teenagers first pee safely at school, for the t-girl hookers ask too much.” She answered, “Yes. And my girl wasn’t hooking, just walking home, and we’re tired.” He said, “That was a messed up thing I just said.” And when she went home, he had rallied the neighborhood and the charges were dropped.

Jesus told parables, story fable koans. Probably. He recited poetry. He probably asked questions. Which of these three was a neighbor to the man? Whose face is on the coin? What do you do with a lighted lamp? Did not the one who made the outside make the inside? If salt isn’t, what will make it so? To what shall we compare God’s Presidency?

Telling stories and asking questions maybe is to unlearn, unknow, reinterpret.

Last week, Jesus had already begun to talk in radical and subversive ways about what and who is clean or not clean. It’s important to realize that in this parable about Jesus meeting a Syro-Phoenician woman, we move directly from ritual hand washing to physical geography. We are pressed into Gentile territory from the opening words: “And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon.” In case that isn’t plain enough, the first character is described in the literary equivalent of a cartoon mouse holding a giant mallet: “Now the woman was a Greek, a Syro-Phoenician by birth.” (Hello! Hello! Do you get it now? We are in “Other”land, two doors past Outsider House on Gentile Street.)

There was probably an argument about religious and cultural group differences going around within the Jesus Movement communities when Mark’s gospel was written. Paul gave his answer when he wrote in his letters about circumcision being optional, when he wrote about food sacrificed to pagan gods being okay to eat, and when he said “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Mark’s answer is to tell a parable about uncleanness coming from inside, not out, and then to tell a parable about Jesus in Gentile territory, and name the character by both her religion and her nationality as Idolator McHeretic and have her receive a blessing. Kind of.

That’s why what happens next is critical.

Part of me wishes it didn’t happen. Part of me wishes that Jesus says decisively here, “Come one and all! Whether or not you wash your hands, come in! Of course I will heal your child like so many others I have already, there are no restrictions, because the gifts of God are for all the people!” I hate it that Jesus says what he does. Why doesn’t Jesus just heal that woman’s daughter? Or if somebody had to say this awful thing, why couldn’t it have been Peter, or Judas, or any one of the disciples, frankly, who seem constantly to be getting things wrong? Why not one of those idiot disciples fighting over who would be at Jesus’ right and left hand in heaven? Why not one of those dimwits arguing over who was greatest? Why does Jesus call her that derogatory slur? There’s no exact modern equivalent, but it’s like he called her a gutter rat, or a pigeon. Something we think of as dirty that lives in the street and eats garbage and rotten dead things.

It’s awful. I like Jesus a lot. He’s a great person. He’s a hero. He says the right things, he does the right things. He teaches by word and deed. He seems to never get a moment to himself without somebody running after him, pressing against him, touching him with their sick, oozing bodies or carrying people up to him or lowering them down on him through the roof, and they never think to pack a lunch and most of them don’t say thank you, and still he takes the time. Still he honors and touches and heals and feeds and is with them.

Except now. “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

I hate this story. I hate this parable about Jesus. I love this parable about Jesus. It may be one of the most important stories in the gospels, partly because of what we learn from the ways people respond to it. Here are some of the ways people respond to it.

Some people soften the name he called her. Like, no, no, no, it’s okay, because he didn’t call her the n-word-dash -ER, he called her the n-word-dash-A, like he’s Larry Wilmore and she’s Obama. Like he’s YG and Jeezy. Or some people say he never said it, he didn’t actually say this hateful thing to this woman, coming to him asking for help for her tormented daughter. Because it’s just a parable, so nobody really got hurt. As though representation doesn’t matter. As though the rhetorical dehumanization of a woman in order to make a point about her determination or to make a point about God’s expansive and unbounded love for us all doesn’t hurt real women, doesn’t harm real people who look like her.

Here’s a parable.

From there he arose and went away to the region of Gold’s Gym at the Life Fitness strength machines. Someone was using the triceps press minding their own business, listening to Code Switch with Gene Demby and Shereen Marisole Meraji on an iPod. Now he thought the person was a woman, assigned female gender at birth. And he said to her, “You should smile more.” She answered, “Do you need this machine?” He said, “No, I just see you here a lot and I think you should smile more.” And she put the earbud back in her ear and went back to her tricep sets, and as he walked away he said, “uppity dyke snatch.”

Some people try to justify it, explain why it would have made sense to the original readers. Because this Syro-Phoenician woman was cheeky. Because she barges in. Because she has no business there; she was not invited. Because she threw herself at Jesus’ feet, not in a decorous way like Jairus back in chapter 5, not in a controlled and civilized way like him. The language doesn’t register in the English translation, heavy sigh, which is one more reason we really need to probe our bibles and dig into translations and research contexts. I did it for us today, don’t worry. Jairus’s verb is pipto, to lower oneself before, to humble or prostrate oneself before. This woman’s verb is prospipto and it means a rushing forward, beating against, like a winds-beating-upon-a-house kind of falling before. It’s a frenzied verb, it’s hysterical, not in a good way. Some commentators say that, not only is it not surprising that Jesus responded like he did, it would have been expected.

This is important, because we know how this works. Women are hysterical when they are angry. Women are emotional and menstrual and angry when they speak their mind. Lesbians are angry. Feminists hate men. Women who don’t smile are angry and ugly. Black women are angry. Black people who talk about their experiences of indignity and oppression are “playing the race card” and “carrying a chip on their shoulder.” When trans people talk about our experiences of indignity and oppression, we are crazy and “a hot mess.” Language is used to emotionally distance, to abandon, to discredit and disparage the Other. Jairus piptos. This woman prospiptos. He is dignified. She is frenzied.

Some people say politically correct, I say language has consequences.

Let’s pretend she was hysterical. Let’s say for the sake of argument she came running in that house, scratched at the eyes of men in the door, tore off her clothes, and gnawed on Jesus’ ankles. Jesus still has no business talking to her like that. Since when does Jesus talk to desperate people like that?! Go back and read the description of that guy in the Geresenes catacombs who was naked and snapped chains and smashed shackles and shrieked at Jesus; Jesus asks for his name. Go back and read about the boy convulsing and foaming at the mouth; Jesus asks how long has he been tortured. Why does this woman’s emotion and desperation disqualify her from help? Why doesn’t her desperation justify her, instead of Jesus? Why doesn’t his callousness invalidate him?

This woman was not hysterical. That prospipto business is a linguistic trick, a lie of the devil, trying to distance us from her. She isn’t frenzied. She isn’t hysterical or shrill. This is clear, because Jesus says this awful thing – “Let our own children first be glutted, for it is not right to take from people we like and waste it on people who disgust us” – and this is her response: “Yes, Sir.” Calm, respectful, deliberate.

“Yes, Sir, and yet even the mangy strays eat the crumbs.”

Here is a parable.

From there he arose and went away to the region of Staten Island at Bay Street in Tompkinsville. A man selling loose cigarettes was there, selling loose cigarettes. Now the man was Black, a former horticulturalist for the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, husband and father of six, generous and congenial by birth, and he was selling loose cigarettes. And he put him in an illegal chokehold from behind without provocation. He answered, “I can’t breathe.” He said, “All lives matter. I can breathe thanks to the NYPD.” He died. And when he went home, people who kneeled during the national anthem were Unamerican.

I hate this story. I love this story. It may be one of the most important stories in the gospel. And not because it teaches us to reach out to and include the people we think of as disease-carrying street animals. Think about that. The parable I started with feels offensive to me. It’s a brilliant inversion to say love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. It is a first-rate subversion to say you can only be the captain of all the people if you will scrub all the floors. It is radical and transformative to say that no one is free until we are all free. And it is becoming more and more distasteful to me to tell these stories about human beings on the margins, folks that people disregard and ignore and actively harm, as if they/we are some special case, as if they are unfortunate, as if they are the ones who need to be fixed, as if Jesus is saying love even them, include even them, which I’ve done before, maybe every other time I’ve preached on this passage. And it’s offensive, it’s obnoxious to me that I have tried to redeem these stories in this way.

I don’t want to think about these anymore as feel-good stories of including social castaways. I want to reframe them as chastening stories of arrogance. I want to understand this parable of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman as a story that exposes Jesus’ self-importance and bigotry as much or more than one about her value and perseverance. I want to condemn conceit and contempt, and nevermind who says I am angry. Nevermind who calls me hysterical. I want this parable to compel us to consider complexity and contradiction and nuance and paradox.

Jesus isn’t always good. I hate this story. I love this story. This story may be one of the most important stories in the gospels, because Jesus is bad in it and Jesus is usually not anywhere else ever bad. Sometimes things are important because they happen a million times, like Jesus and meals. He’s like a hobbit with meals. And sometimes things are important when they almost never happen. Jesus is absolutely not almost ever bad, and yet the gospels tell this story. They tell it twice. This story may be one of the most important parables in the gospels, because Jesus is bad in it. And because Jesus is bad in it, and lots of people try to make him good. And because people try to make him good and try to make her bad. And it exposes our tendency to a particular kind of Christianity. That kind of liberal-whatever, well-meaning (maybe), wet-bread neither hot nor cold, insubstantial words without action, as long as it doesn’t cost anything Christianity. There is something important, I think, that we are supposed to learn from a story like this.

If Jesus is bad sometimes when it is hard to comprehend Jesus being bad, when so much depends on Jesus not, in fact, being bad, then what else that we always thought was right is actually left? What else is not up but down? If the gospels do not tell a monolithic, uniform story of Jesus (the messiah) as always good, but tell a rare story about Jesus (the Christ) as bad, then maybe a small crack might appear in the massive blue monument. Perhaps we could imagine that sometimes police are corrupt. We might conceive that what makes it harder for good police isn’t Black Lives Matter, or investigating and indicting and convicting bad police, but that bad police are what make it harder for good police. That good police acting like there’s no such thing as bad police are what make it harder for good police, and harder for a lot of us.

If a woman abused by Jesus is discredited and dismissed in order to save his reputation and salvage his potential, maybe a small crack might appear in the monumental phalanx of rape culture. There is no piece of art, no film, no sport worth more than the life and well-being of even a single, anonymous victim, hysterical or not. Drunk or not. Dressed however. But most sexual assaults are committed by people we know, people we are supposed to trust, who use that trust to abuse. Victims are targeted who are available and vulnerable. And people are vulnerable when we discredit them. When we dismiss them. When we don’t like them. Everybody really, really liked Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino and Annabella Sciorra until we didn’t anymore. Remember how much we all really liked Annabella Sciorra? Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence were our best friends. Then they weren’t. We bestow favor and discard favor, and we act like it means something. We act like it is evidence. Who do we like better, Jesus or this crazy, unnamed woman? And that’s how we decide who is right, that equals who is good. Who do we like better, Polansky or some 13-year-old who never made a movie? Kobe Bryant or some woman we don’t know who can’t play basketball? We take sides, and so often that is how we decide who we will side with.

But sometimes Jesus is bad. Sometimes the ultimate good guy is bad. We need to make sense of that. And it’s not a one-off. This is not the only time this happens ever in the bible. God told Abraham to kill his son, for pity’s sake, and we turn it into a story about great faith. There are a dozen stories about killing the enemies’ children, swinging their heads against rocks. So we skip that part. Pharaoh and Herod are evil for killing children, but God kills every firstborn kid for holy reasons? I guess they had that coming. The bible says both that money is corrupt and also that it is God’s reward for righteousness. The bible says welcome the immigrant and also kill them. The bible literally says beat your swords into plowshares and also beat your plowshares into swords. The bible is a mercenary. The bible is a minion. It will back us up, no matter what we say. It has all our backs. It will support whatever you decide you already believe, and I’m only exaggerating a tiny bit. I’m almost not exaggerating. And what is Christianity? What does that mean, to you? Hitler was a Christian. Jim Jones was a Christian. Fred Phelps is a Christian. Pat Robertson is a Christian. And Pat Bumgardner and Boon Lin Ngeo and Yvette Flunder and William Barber and Gene Robinson and Troy Perry.

I really like the bible. I hope we all keep reading it deeply. It holds so many truths that are dear to me. But we have to figure it out, maybe without just the bible, maybe with other stuff, too. Because sometimes God hates fags, but we don’t want to. Sometimes Jesus is racist, but we don’t have to. We may have to just decide first who we are and what we want – and that means we have to pay attention to our impulses to simplify, our impulses to automatically side with the one we put a white hat on, the one who siding with will most benefit us, the one we like better. We have to pay attention to our impulses to blame the one we’re not siding with, to call them hysterical, frenzied, ugly, untrustworthy, we have to notice our impulses to believe that our desire, that our friendship is evidence, is fact. It’s not.

We have to recognize that we can still love the person who is wrong, we can love the person who is bad, if you will. That feels weird; it feels dissonant. And we have to pay attention to our impulse, whether as punishment or defense, to act like holding ourselves to account amounts to shame and self-loathing. We can be screw-ups, and own it, and hold ourselves to accountability, and still love ourselves, and even like ourselves. We can love our abusers and love abusers of others, and still hold them accountable; we can still support and defend the person they hurt. That will feel weird; it will feel dissonant. It is really hard. We can love them and stick with them and hold them accountable: Breaking bread with them doesn’t have to mean collusion. And alternatively we can love them and depart from them: Breaking ties doesn’t have to mean contempt. But these are hard. It’s much easier to pick sides.

Complexity. Incongruity. Paradox. Is any of this good news? Is it good news that Jesus was bad? Is it good news when there is no clear absolute, no simple, obvious right and wrong? I think it is immensely good news. Definite and certain and finished is what frightens me. Decided scares me. Closed scares me. Uncertainty is wonderful. Open is holy. And it’s hard. It’s really hard and uncomfortable. It’s discordant; it rankles. But Rilke famously wrote,

…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and learn to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions…

There surely is right and wrong, though they are not simple and easily defined. The bible gives us hints. Some of my favorite hints from Jesus are to look down when we have been taught to look up. To look to the east when we have been assured that good will come from the west. Our hearts give us hints. We surely will find our way when our compass is love, though we should expect there to be as many variations on love and what that means and to live those questions as much as any of the others.

Jesus probably told parables and recited poetry. He probably asked questions. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Who is my mother and who are my brothers? Which is greater, the gift or the altar which makes the gift sacred? Can Satan drive out Satan? What is the White House of God like? To what shall I compare it?

Telling stories and asking questions maybe is to unlearn, unknow, reinterpret.

Jesus was almost always good. He did so much good and transformed so many lives. But not every time; now we know. It’s hard to find good in Jesus in the lesson today. To find anything redemptive or healing in his actions feels to me like a betrayal of the Syro-Phoenician woman he abused. And. It’s possible that Jesus getting this so utterly wrong and so completely (I hope) screwing up our essential notions of Goodness may actually open up for us new avenues, open for us hard, uncomfortable ways, open to us possibilities to discover unanticipated goodness for one another and in ourselves.

Peace.