Thank you - I found this such a helpful piece on this passage. Helped me to see how I could speak of its challenges without an anachronistic misreading.
Or ... and here I venture into potential heretical territory, Jesus is fed up with being challenged and harangued and scolded by those who "know better" than he does what God requires/desires (if only in their own minds), and first lashes out with that accusatory list of what evil comes out of the hearts of human beings and then stalks off into foreign lands out of frustration, desiring a break - length undefined - from all that; he desires a quiet anonymity for a time. Then this woman, not Jewish, comes and asks of him the same thing everyone else wants, and he snaps back at her, too.
But she answers him, and I wonder whether he hears the voice of the Father in her response- a voice that says, no, you can't quit, no, you have more to do, no, you can't walk away and you can't hide from who you are.
So when he heals the deaf mute man, he sighs, deeply, in his soul, and in saying to this man "be opened," he is also saying it to himself.
That's a very human Jesus, one I think most of us might recognize in our own ministry, on the days we are so tired but the needs never go away....
Because after this, his life and work are just as demanding, just as fatiguing, just as challenging, and the ultimate conclusion is coming closer and closer. He *needs* these two moments of clarity to see it through.
Thank you - I found this such a helpful piece on this passage. Helped me to see how I could speak of its challenges without an anachronistic misreading.
Or ... and here I venture into potential heretical territory, Jesus is fed up with being challenged and harangued and scolded by those who "know better" than he does what God requires/desires (if only in their own minds), and first lashes out with that accusatory list of what evil comes out of the hearts of human beings and then stalks off into foreign lands out of frustration, desiring a break - length undefined - from all that; he desires a quiet anonymity for a time. Then this woman, not Jewish, comes and asks of him the same thing everyone else wants, and he snaps back at her, too.
But she answers him, and I wonder whether he hears the voice of the Father in her response- a voice that says, no, you can't quit, no, you have more to do, no, you can't walk away and you can't hide from who you are.
So when he heals the deaf mute man, he sighs, deeply, in his soul, and in saying to this man "be opened," he is also saying it to himself.
That's a very human Jesus, one I think most of us might recognize in our own ministry, on the days we are so tired but the needs never go away....
Because after this, his life and work are just as demanding, just as fatiguing, just as challenging, and the ultimate conclusion is coming closer and closer. He *needs* these two moments of clarity to see it through.