Everybody has their favorite diversions.
In recent years I have become interested (my wife Kathy would say “obsessed”)
with Japanese cinema. On my day off
afternoons you will often find me sprawled on the sofa watching a movie by Akira
Kurasowa, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Yasujiro Ozu. Kathy doesn’t usually join me in
these enjoyments; indeed she says that when she walks through the room she is
greeted either by the image of a screaming samurai or a whistling kettle.
Japanese movies are not everyone’s cup of tea.
I’m not sure why in these
last years I have found Japanese films so compelling. Certainly the great directors of Japan are
masters of cinema in their own right.
But something else is going on here. When I look at Japanese culture on
screen, I see something that illuminates my experience of being an
American. In the same way we learn
foreign languages to understand our own, so we engage other cultures so we may
better see ourselves. The poet James
Merrill used the term, “a kind of clarifying mirror” to describe the poetry of
Elizabeth Bishop. Her poems, he said, reflect and clarify the
self-understanding of their readers. The “clarifying mirror” idea applies not
only to art. It also works more broadly
with cross-cultural experiences. Other people, other traditions, other
languages serve as clarifying mirrors in which we can comprehend ourselves more
fully. We cannot truly see ourselves until someone “other” reflects our image
back to us.
I have had another—perhaps
obsessive—viewing interest this summer, and I do not mean True Detective or Show Me a
Hero. In the last months I have become nearly overwhelmed by the plight of refugees
and migrants attempting to cross from Africa and the Middle East into the
European Union. I think the discovery in
Austria of a van with 71 dead Syrian refugees pushed me over the edge, but for
months leading up to that horrible news we had been pummeled with stories of
refugees drowning at sea, being preyed on by gangs, or jumping into trucks
entering the English Channel Tunnel at Calais. And just this last week we saw
new images—a Kurdish boy dead on a Turkish beach; thousands of refugees trapped
on a train to nowhere in Hungary.
In the same
way that samurai pictures tell us something about the old west, these stories
of Africans, Afghanis, and Syrians seeking refuge in Europe have illuminated
for me something in our own national character.
While we Americans might decry the callousness of European nations
refusing to offer shelter to those who suffer real persecution in their home
countries, we seem to tolerate presidential candidates who describe Latin
Americans seeking refuge here as rapists and murderers and who describe
children born to immigrants as “anchor babies”. Yet many fleeing Central
American countries like Honduras seek to escape the same violence and suffering
that emigrants from Libya and Syria face in their homes. Demagoguery is easier
to see from afar than it is up close.
The dead
child, the packed train, the Austrian van remind us, as nothing will, of what
occurs daily on our own border. Death in Austria, Hungary, or Turkey reflects
back to us the hard truth about death in the Sonoran Desert. Sometimes we can
only see our own callousness in the clarifying mirror of someone else’s.
A similar clarifying reflective process is going on in
today’s Gospel [Mark 7:24-30], a story that I have always found truly shocking.
Jesus leaves Israel and goes to Tyre, one of the major cities of what was once
known as Phoenecia. A Gentile woman, called by Mark a “Syrophoencian”,
approaches Jesus and asks that he heal her daughter. She is a foreigner, a
Gentile, a non-Jew. Following Jesus around
Galilee, we have come to expect that he will embrace her warmly and cast out
the girl’s demon. Instead, he says a really ugly thing: “Let the
children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw
it to the dogs.” I always thought of Jesus as a nice guy, and here he is
expressing a sentiment worthy of a demagogue. In Jesus’s figure of speech, Jews
are children, non-Jews are dogs. The translation: go back where you belong.
So the first
surprising thing about this story is that it shows us a rare instance of Jesus
when he wasn’t compassionate, forgiving, or warm. But there’s a second
surprising moment here. The woman, not
cowed at all by Jesus’s holy man stature, responds in kind: “Sir, even the dogs
under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” OK, buster: you want to call me a
dog, let’s carry that logic out to its completion. Even if in your eyes I’m a
dog, I still deserve some kind of humane consideration. Although in Gospel wit
duels, I usually root for Jesus, I’m happy here to score one for the woman.
And then here
comes yet another surprise. Jesus gets
converted. He changes his mind. “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left
your daughter.” Something about this interaction—the woman’s perseverance, not
to mention her audacity, I suppose—has altered Jesus’s understanding of things. In these seven short verses Jesus has moved
from being an exceptionalistic religious rule-abider to a healer possessed of a
new, expansive vision of what it means to be human. Something in the
Syrophoenecian woman’s argument has showed Jesus to himself. As the
representative of a culture outside of the one Jesus inhabits, she has served
as a clarifying mirror of his own.
Once we’ve
recovered from the several shocks this story delivers, Mark’s Gospel invites us
to open ourselves to its transformative personal implications. If Jesus—the
Messiah, not to mention the Word become flesh and the pre-existent Son of
God—if Jesus can change his mind about something, then so can you and I. We
tend to think about Jesus as an omniscient deity walking around the Holy Land in
human disguise, but theologically we have always understood him to be truly and
fully human too. And, frankly, to be truly and fully human means that one
cannot help carry around a lot of unexamined social attitudes. In his interaction with the Syrophoencian
woman, Jesus finds himself confronted by the ugliness of his attitudes and
changed in the process. He has to look
under the rock of his own prejudices, and he is not pleased with what he finds
there. And so he changes his mind. He
relents. He opens himself to someone he
would have previously shut out. If Jesus
can do that, so can I. So can you. So can we all, together.
Jesus changes
because he sees himself in the clarifying mirror of someone from outside his
own usual frame of reference. Jesus
changes because the woman shows him himself, and in that moment of self-discovery
he realizes what few of us ever get to know.
He learns that he is not normative. He is not the standard. His way of
being human is one way, but it is not the only way of being human. There are
other, perhaps quite different, maybe even better ways of navigating the
world. Jesus can learn this because he
is lucky enough to be encountered and engaged by another, by a woman from a
different race and culture. How many of us regularly hang out with people who
come from someplace else? How many of us have the opportunity, much less the
grace, to readjust our self-understanding in the light of an outside
perspective? Lucky for Jesus that he
entered that house. Lucky for us that he did, too.
As this summer
marked by demagoguery at home and suffering abroad comes to a close, and as our
leaders play to the fears of our national and international electorates to
build higher walls and razor-wire fences to keep the refugees out, let us hold
on to this precious gospel moment shared between Jesus and a woman who would
not let him let her go. “Let the children be
fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the
dogs.” “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” In this
moment, Jesus saw not only the truth but also the truth’s implications for his
need to act. We Americans destabilized
the Middle East in the first place. We
should take in a generous share of these refugees as well.
It is an act of
divine grace and mercy to get to see under the rock of our own social
attitudes. God doesn’t always give us the chance fully to see ourselves, and then
often only by the light of the clarifying mirror of someone from the outside. We need that mirror—we need those others—in
our lives to show us ourselves in all our contradictions and complexities. We may not like what we see there, but if we
never see it, we’ll never change. And if we never change, then we will never
become the people God is calling us to be. If Jesus can grow, then so can
we. That’s hard news, but it’s life-giving
news as well--both there and here, today and always, for you, for me, for
Jesus, and for the world. Amen.
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