Makes Me Wanna Holler

Makes Me Wanna Holler
By Briizn K Blount

Brian K. Blount preached this baccalaureate sermon last year to the graduates of the Princeton Theological Seminary. It is published here with the kind permission of both Dr. Blount and the Princeton Seminary Bulletin where it was first carried. Dr. Blount is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. It was called to my attention and recommended for publication in Christian Ethics Today by my long-time friend, and missionary statesman, Dr. Dwight L. Baker.

Text:  Mark 7:24-30

“And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house, and would not have anyone know it; yet he could not be hid. But immediately a woman, whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophonecian by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he said to her, ‘Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’ But she answered him, ‘Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ And he said to her, ‘For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.’ And she went home and found the child lying in bed, and the demon gone.”  (RSV)

Text: Isaiah 11:6-9

“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (RSV)

Let me tell you about my parents, Edward and Doris, When I was growing up, my two brothers and I thought they were omnipotent. I can remember being in church, and my mother working with the Missionary Circle and my dad sitting on the deacons bench and my brothers and myself thinking, well, we’re all by our lonesome in the pew now; we can do whatever we please: laugh a little, move around a little, play a little. Our parents can’t get up in the middle of the service and come over and tell us to quiet down. It’d be too embarrassing for them. But, you see, they had this power that reached out across vast distances, a power that enabled them to transform situations without actually having to move over tothose situations. They had this look. This dark pall would come over their eyes as they heard our gleeful disrespect for the worship, and all they had to do was do that look. The look God used to give parents the moment a child was born, the look that says, “I don’t have to come over there, I can stand right here in the now and make you know that in the not too distant not yet you’re gonna pay.” That’s what we biblical scholars call eschatological power. That kind of countenance makes three little boys sit up straight, quiet down, and start praising the Lord.

I found out though, as I got older, and life got more complex, there were other powers—other greatpowers. And they didn’t always wield their strength to help make a person stronger and better. When I went to the eighth grade I left my segregated elementary school and entered the world of integration. My cosmos was transformed. And so was my concept of power and who thought they really manipulated it. My brothers and I had done remarkably well in our segregated environment. But now, my parents were being told, “Things are going to change. Those boys aren’t going to be so smart when they start being compared to those white children.” My first year, my grades taught the doubters a lesson. But my next year I learned a lesson of my own. There are principalities and powers over which your best effort and your most sincere determination have no control. During the first six weeks of my first advanced college-preparatory course, World History, despite all the effort I’d put in, I received a D—just a hair trigger above failure. News of it spread. And it spread fast. I don’t know how it spread; I was so embarrassed that I hadn’t told a soul. But everywhere I went, everyone knew. I remember one teacher telling me, “I wouldn’t want to be at your house when this report card gets opened up.”

My World History teacher also taught Advanced English and Advanced Chemistry. Anybody on a college track was going through her one way or another. That meant that all black children who went through her on their way up to college went down in the grades. My older brother, who would graduate at the top of his university class in physics and chemistry, barely passed her chemistry class even though he gave the class a maximum effort. My parents knew what was going on. They understood the message being sent. But they didn’t, as omnipotent as I’d once thought they were, have the power to transform the situation. The school considered her a rough teacher. The school understood why the best black students struggled in her classes but in no others; she was tougher than any other teacher. The school maintained that she needed to be in a position to work with every black child headed for college because she would teach them how much they needed to work to survive in college. She didn’t fail me or my brother. But I knew later on what I didn’t know then. That was never her intention. She wanted to destroy something more precious than a report card or a summer that would have to be spent in summer school, making up for failed credits. She wanted to destroy something in our spirit, our self-confidence. She wanted us to believe what we’d been hearing—that we weren’t good enough, that no matter how hard we worked, we’d never have the capacity to compete with the best and brightest college-bound white students. And she wanted us to infect my younger brother with that fear so that by the time he got to her he’d already know. I couldn’t get out of that class; I couldn’t get around her. She stood across the horizon of my college track like a sentry, the way many others like her stand guard at the portals of opportunity even today. And my parents didn’t have the power to stop her. I had to take it. And take it. I remember how, every time I handed her my report card to have a grade entered on it and took back a D, it made me wanna shake my fist in her face and holler!

That year, I learned from the power of my parents’ determination. No, they weren’t omnipotent. But they did still have a power. No matter what was happening now they had the power to see into the realm of the not yet. And it was on that “not yet” that they focused my vision. They taught me that even though the way she treated me—oppressed me—made me want to holler against the wind, to scream out my fury, I ought to channel it in other ways. Not extinguish it but feed off it. Not silence the scream but holler in another way. Make my life the kind of scream that would make people like her, and the people and the institutions that created them and used them, see that, despite them, and even because of them, I could muster the power to transform the picture of life they wanted to paint for me and people like me. What that teacher did to me, what people and institutions like her continue to do to people every day in every place in this country, makes me wanna holler still. I figure a person can’t stop hollering until the world, weary of the sound, weary of the challenge, takes notice and transforms. As a matter of fact, I think that is exactly the kind of thing that Syrophonecian woman was thinking as she walked up before Jesus and his disciples. Her effort was for Mark, I think, a symbol, an example of how a screaming life can transform an oppressive life situation.

Now, this is the historical situation that confronted her, a situation she thought, given the condition of her possessed daughter, was supremely unfair and oppressive. The gift of divine power incarnate in the man Jesus was cordoned off so that her people were unable to avail themselves of its transformative benefits. Jesus, she’d heard, and was about to hear again from Jesus himself was sent only to the Jews. Her people, no matter how possessed and oppressed they were now, would have to wait until some unforeseen, uncalculated not yet to receive the kind of spiritual, physical, and social deliverance he represented.

Consider Mark’s presentation of Jesus in the passage we are considering this afternoon, Jesus’ statement, the one where he says he isn’t supposed to help her, the one where he compares gentiles to dogs, is so inflammatory and so clear that the conclusion is certain. Jesus felt he was sent only to the Jews. Even this gentile woman, who has just been supremely insulted, agrees. She contests neither Jesus’ harsh remark nor the reality it conveys. As one commentator puts it, “She accepts the analogy and its implications, only pointing out that when the children are fed, the dogs also get some small benefit incidentally.” [1]

But there is an opening that allows for a transformative possibility. At 13:10 and 14:9, we have two statements by Jesus that suggest the gospel about him will be preached to all the world, to all peoples. In 10:45 and 14:24 Jesus proclaims that his life of service was on behalf of not some people but the many,suggesting his concern crosses national and ethnic boundaries. It appears, then, while Jesus didhistorically focus his mission efforts on his own people, he ultimately believed his mission and message would incorporate the gentiles as well. And even as Mark is recording his now of Jesus’ limited ministry, he seizes upon this universal possibility of the not yet and he looks for a point and place of transformation. A place where the turn from one people to all people was made. A place where somebody’s scream for transformation turned Jesus around in his Palestinian tracks and turned around the very destiny of his gospel message. Mark looked, I think, to this Syrophonecian woman.

There is no doubt Mark sees Jesus’ confrontation with her as a transformative moment. When Jesus leaves her, having granted her request he doesn’t go back home; he doesn’t return to his own people. He goes directly to the Decapolis, a network of the Greek cities, and engages his liberating, healing ministrythere. A turn, a transformation has occurred. And the pivot point is the narrative holler of this Syrophonecian woman.

I imagine, when Jesus told her he was specifically sent not to help her daughter but to help his own people, she must have wanted to shake her fists in his/ace and holler. And in her own way that is exactly what she does. She stands there toe to toe with somebody she thought had the ability to control cosmic and demonic forces and she challenged what he was saying. Here’s power! The power of a woman so determined to see her daughter’s life transformed that she would dare to challenge the very system of salvation. Maybe in the “not yet,” maybe somewhere in the not too distant future, the power that Jesus represented would be represented on behalf of her people. But she couldn’t wait for the “not yet.” Her daughter needed Jesus’ power now. And so she acted now!

In Matthew’s Gospel the story is even more detailed. We know Mark has a tendency to shorten the stories, to make them more compact, so it’s nice to have Matthew’s longer versions to open up the accounts some. In Matthew 15, he describes how the woman came crying out to Jesus, “Have mercy on me, Son of David. My daughter is severely possessed by a demon.” But Jesus just ignores her. Ignores her! You don’t think she was ready to holler? Then, to make matters worse, Jesus’ disciples say, “Send her away, Jesus, for she is crying after us, disturbing us. Make her stop whining and go away.” And Jesus backs them up! He turns to her and says, “Lady,” and this was the line that Mark couldn’t get out of his mind or his narrative account, “I wasn’t sent to help your people. I wasn’t sent to help your daughter.” And then, Matthew says, she got down on her knees in front of Jesus and begged for his help. She must have been thinking, “I hear all these great things about you, I hear how powerful you are, how compassionate you are, how you make the impossible possible, how you turn night into day, how you bring life up out of the grave. If you turn away from me, I am without hope. Please, help me.” But that’s when Jesus says that thing about not throwing his salvific power to the dogs. Can’t help you and your people, who are like dogs. It’s at that point you figure, this woman’s got to break. I know his disciples must have been thinking, now, now she’s got to break. Now she’s got to shut up and leave us alone.

Scholars have long wondered why Mark and Matthew kept this story in their Gospel accounts because it tends to make Jesus look like he didn’t want to help her. I think they kept it in, particularly Mark, because she is exactly what Jesus is: a transformer. Because she doesn’t break apart. She breaks back bad on Jesus. She does to Jesus what Jesus does to the Pharisees and Sadducees. She takes his response, stands up to what that response means, and then turns the response upside down and inside out. “Sure, Jesus, I don’t care if the food is meant for the children, that doesn’t mean that your loving, gracious Abba God wants everybody and everything else to go starving. That can’t be what you’re saying, Jesus, is it?” And Jesus marveled, evidently as much at her guts and determination to say it as for what she’d said. And when Jesus celebrates her remark to him, her standing up to him, I think Mark thinks he was maybe smiling inside and saying, “Yeah, this is what I want. This is what I’ve been looking for. What a contrast to the sheep who follow me.” I think this was the message Mark wanted his sheep,his flock to get. Yeah, this woman’s attitude is what Jesus celebrates, not the people like the disciples who never really seem to understand what he is doing or have the determination and the courage to do what he is doing.

Look at Mark’s portrait of the disciples. As the story unfolds, Jesus gets progressively tired of their obtuseness. At 4:40 he laments when he sees them frightened over a storm, even though he is in the boat with them, because they have no faith. At 6:52, when they are again terrified because of a storm in their lives, Mark laments that their hard hearts prevent them from understanding Jesus’ real identity and power. At 8:18 Jesus himself wonders so greatly at their lack of faith, courage, and understanding that he asks them if their hearts are hardened. And we know that, after every moment when he explains they must suffer and die, their fear throws them into disarray, and they simply cannot understand it. Yes, Mark likes the fact they follow Jesus, but it’s their lame, sheepish kind of following he apparently dislikes. We get this constant narration of the twelve men grazing along behind Jesus, rambling around, getting lost half the time, the other half not quite knowing exactly where they are, what they are doing, or what they are doing it for. No wonder Jesus told the parable of the Lost Sheep. That’s who Mark thought was following him. Lost Sheep. Wandering. Grazing. Baa, baa, baa. So, when he celebrates, he celebrates the example of someone who is not a follower, not one of the flock. She walks into Mark’s story out of left field in a striking way, as striking a picture as, say, the picture of a wolf cutting a swathe of turmoil through a flock of once content, once comfortable, once calm, flaxen sheep. A she-wolf of determination to create transformation. When she challenges Jesus, he doesn’t get angry. Instead it’s almost as if he smiles proudly at what she does. His response to her acerbic, surprising, bold, ravenous remark is, in Matthew, “Nowhere have I seen such faith.” Mark doesn’t call it faith. He defines it as nerve. Nowhere has Jesus seen somebody so desperate for transforming someone else’s world that she would have the nerve this woman has. “Look, you sheep,” Mark appears to be telling his readers, “here’s a wolf She’s what I think Jesus wants you to be like.”.

You know, I can see those sheepish disciples with Jesus wondering what to do when they hear this woman, this Syrophonecian woman, yelling after them. And I can hear them tell Jesus, “That woman is yelling after us. Maybe you’d better go and shut her up, because it isn’t right, doesn’t look right, tohave a man of your stature going around having strange women hollering after him— especially strange gentile women. Let’s not diversify our discipleship-cause with somebody like her.” In fact, I think Mark knew that, in his community, diversity was probably one of the top ten words folk didn’t want to hear. But this Syrophonecian woman doesn’t care what they want to hear; she’s determined that Jesus will hear her.

When I think of her situation, I think of an athletic-shoe commercial by the actor Dennis Hopper. You sports fans will remember it. It’s one of his football ones. Hopper is dressed up as a deranged referee rifling through the locker of pro-football player Bruce Smith. He finally stumbles upon what he’s been looking for—Smith’s athletic shoes. And as he holds up one of those shoes, madly sniffing in the aroma, we see pictures of Bruce Smith crushing opponents on the football field. Then Dennis Hopper turns to the camera and says, “You know what Bruce would do if he saw me messing with his shoes?” Before he tells us we get another picture of Bruce Smith crushing some hapless player. The camera then shifts back to Dennis Hopper, who is now shuddering down to his knocking knees, as he says, “Bad things, man. Baa-a-ad things.” Now it may seem old that, in a Reformed pantheon of such luminaries as John Calvin and Karl Barth, I would find a quotable from a rogue actor like Dennis Hopper, but for Mark I think this fits quite nicely. This is the maverick kind of thing I think appeals to Mark. You gotta imagine Jesus walking along with his twelve sheep, coming upon this she-wolf, and when those twelve turn and see her, see the ravenous look in her eyes, see the fury in her spirit, see the guts and determination in the way she gets up and comes over to them, you can almost hear those twelve shuddering sheep bleating out, “Bad things, Jesus. Baa-a-d things.”

Every sheep pen needs this kind of bad thing, this kind of Syrophonecian wolf, every now and then. She’s not so much an eat-’em-up kind of wolf as she is a shake-’em-up kind of wolf. She doesn’t devour flesh. She devours complacency. She consumes the tendency to follow without understanding. She annihilates the tendency to try to understand without believing. She obliterates the timid desire to hide behind safe tradition. She demolishes the tendency to get caught up in the commonplace of ritual and habit and thinking that religious or academic routine is the same thing as faith. In fact, you know, she isn’t so much a carnivore as she is a “routinivore.” She isn’t so much a carnivore as she is a “do-it-theway-we’ve-always-done-it-ivore.” She isn’t so much a carnivore as she is an “I’m-gonna-go-with-the-flow-vote-with-everybody-elsestand-with-everybody-else-even-if-where-they’re-standing-troublesme-ivore.” She isn’t so much a carnivore as she is an “Im-gonnasit-here-and-be-silent-even-though-I-know-I-ought-to-stand-up-and holler-but-I’m-afraid-people-won’t-want-to-heat-what-I-havesay-ivore.” She eats up doubts and fears; she devours that sheepish tendency to say, “Well somebody powerful told me to shut up so I’m gonna go over and blend in with the flock and shut up before I get sheared.”

Remember, Jesus himself, the Good Shepherd, was a wolf of sorts. In the eyes of the leaders of his people in Palestine he wasn’t a sheepish follower who did what he was told when he didn’t think he was being told what was right. He wasn’t a sheepish follower who observed the traditions he was given when he knew those traditions were damaging to God’s cause and God’s people. The religious leaders in Palestine felt they were shepherds of God’s flock, too. But Jesus wasn’t following. He said to them what this woman was saying to him. “If this is the way the kingdom road is going, I’m for an off-ramp, I’m not following. I don’t care if the priests who follow in Aaron’s and Moses’ footsteps are doing the driving. No, I’m driving another route, even if I have to pave the road myself. I’m raising a contrary voice. The cries of my people make me want to holler out for a different direction, where the Sabbath doesn’t stop healing, where the temple doesn’t stop believing, where the Romans don’t stop freedom, where Satan doesn’t stop liberation, where the systems that bind don’t hold God’s people. I hear their cries, I see their struggles, I recognize that their leaders are shepherding them in the wrong direction and it makes men wanna holler.”

There’s nothing so wrong with being a sheep. I guess most of us are. I know I am much of the time. But when life threatens you, when circumstances oppress you, or people you love or the people whom God loves are oppressed like the way they oppressed that woman, you need to become a wolf. You don’t go to church quietly; you don’t listen to sermons and advice quietly; you don’t go into seminary quietly and go out just as quietly; you don’t take over a church and run it like a quiet professional administrator only looking at the bottom lines of money and membership; you howl against the night and the people who impose it. You raise your voice. You wanna holler like that woman until your voice and the actions that accompany it change your world. That’s why every sheepfold, if you ask me, if you ask Mark, needs a wolf every now and then, needs somebody like this boundaries-breaking, shut-up-refusing, bold-being, back-talking, change-demanding, transform-tripping, Syrophonecian woman.

You’re going out to do ministry in a world that is very much like the world faced by that Syrophonecian woman, a world like Jesus faced, a world about which Mark wrote. It’s the kind of world Marvin Gaye sang about in his song entitled “Inner City Blues,” where he sang the line, “It makes me wanna holler and throw up both my hands.” There are many voices in this world unfairly silenced, many lives oppressively trampled, many hopes brutally decimated. I know you know about this world because I’ve been reading your papers these last three years. In our course just this semester on the kingdom of God, many of you wrote passionately about the fiefdoms of humankind.

One person wrote about black males who not only have a life expectancy that is ten years shorter than their white counterparts but who also have the highest rate of infant mortality in this country. They are being decimated on both ends of the life cycle. One in twenty-one of them will die before they reach adulthood. Fifty percent of them under twenty-one are unemployed. And while they make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they make up half the population of male prisoners in the penal system.Doesn’t that make somebody wanna holler? Another paper told me there is this community where you’ve worked and lived in field education that is so troubled by drugs, violence, abuse, and hopelessness that it seems as if it is, like that Syrophonecian woman’s daughter, possessed. Doesn’t that make somebody wanna holler? Another paper told me how brutally women are treated in our society, in the world, and even, and sometimes especially, in the church. Doesn’t that make somebody wanna holler?Your papers have told me about the struggles of the homeless, about the plight of the impoverished, and the inability and sometimes the contracted lack of desire on the part of our governments to create transformation that truly transforms for those in society who truly need change the most. Doesn’t that make somebody wanna holler?

I read in the newspapers that the Governor of the State of New Jersey has declared, after talking to two or three, maybe five or six of her citizens, that all us black males are out playing pregnancy games, and I figure she figures she can say it and get away with it nowadays because the president of her primary state university has already told her and the world that black folk are so intellectually inferior that maybe they won’t even know they’re enduring a class-action insult. That makes me wanna holler!

But I’m also wondering. Where are the hollering wolves? I know where the sheep are. I can count on them being where I always expect them to be because, as sheep usually are, they’re fenced in. I can go to any green pasture on any Sunday morning at 11 AM. (maybe 10:00 A.M if they graze early in the summer; maybe 9:30 and 11:00 AM. if they have so many sheep crammed into the pen that they need to graze twice on a Sunday) and see the flock gathered. What I’m hollering for nowadays are a few wolves who’ll run into the flock and drive the sheep out of the pasture onto the rocky terrain where people are socially and politically and economically suffering, struggling, and dying with the terrible holler of transformation rising up from their prophetic throats. I’m hollering with my heart in my hands to see the passion in your work here in this seminary translate into passionate pocket moments of the kingdom of God that resist the destructive trends out there.

I remember a revival service in my home church when I was growing up. Those services were always pretty powerful emotionally and spiritually. I remember an especially powerful preacher. And even though I was only eleven or twelve years old, I still remember him as probably the best preacher I have ever heard. Outside the sanctuary on this hot August night, a frightening, dog-days-of-summer electrical storm was erupting. We could hear the thunder roar as the preacher whipped the congregation into a spiritual frenzy that became a storm all its own when the choir got up to sing. About halfway through the invitational hymn, the lights flashed out and darkness swallowed us. The electric organ was gone, but the choir didn’t stop. Neither did the organist. She slid across the organ bench and down the big drop to the lower piano stool and caught up with the choir and led them like a shepherd through a valley of darkness right on time. I remember how that smooth move fired up an already explosive congregation. There in the darkness I heard more noise in worship than I had ever heard before in my life. Screams, shouts, and the constant echoing of that name, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” I suspect that the darkness allowed some of the quieter folk the freedom to shout in a way they ordinarily wouldn’t have shouted in the light of the religious day. But they were shouting now. It was loud now. If I pause for a second, I can still hear the fury and see the lightning flash. The one thing I always had against those revivals though, even as a young child, was that the people who engineered and participated in those loud raucous worship services could be awfully quiet when they walked out of the church and walked into the screams cluttering up the audio tracks of the world. Seemed like the allegedly agitated screaming in church was really a form of comfortable quiet because it didn’t agitate the kind of screaming that needed to be heard in places like those integrating schools.

That night, that service provoked in me one of the angriest nightmares I have ever had. I couldn’t get the service out of my mind. I couldn’t get the name of Jesus that kept being shouted over and over and over and over again in the darkness out of my mind. And the next thing I knew I was shouting myself in the darkness of my bedroom. There were people all around me, in the sanctuary, and they were all focused on me, shouting, yelling, screaming, I don’t know what. It was just that they kept yelling. Wouldn’t stop yelling. And the next thing I knew I was yelling back. I kept yelling back until I heard this calm voice calling my name instead of Jesus.’ ‘Brian, Brian,” my mother was saying. “It’s just a dream.”

But dreams are so real to children. And this one, she could tell, wouldn’t let go. That’s when she offered up what she knew would be a calming remedy. “Think about Jesus,” she said. “Just think about Jesus. That will calm you down. Just think about Jesus.” I felt my mother’s calming embrace. I listened to her soothing voice. I looked in the darkness for her gentle expression and I wanted to say, but I couldn’t quite form the words, because I didn’t know how it would sound to her, but I was thinking, “You know, it’s precisely because I am thinking about Jesus that this nightmare is happening to me.” I found out that night what I’ve been finding out ever since: Thinking about Jesus will mess you up! Thinking about Jesus will quiet the shouts of hallelujah and the joyous, saved acclamations in sanctuaries of worship and raise the decibel level of the cries of protest and the whispers of agony outside the sanctuaries until the sound slashes our saved souls and shatters our salvific slumber.

Jesus, I’ve found, won’t let you rest in peace. His reputation, his power, his mission call out to you the way they called out to that Syrophonecian woman. When your world is turned upside down, his very being hollers out to you. He won’t let you graze in the fold quietly, he won’t let you slumber in the sanctuary indefinitely, he won’t let you contemplate the power of being immersed in the Spirit without challenging you to use that power in the physical terrors of the world around you. The way his reputation and power pulled that tormented woman out of her home, from the bedside of her daughter, to holler for his help, to holler for his transformative power, to become a hollering instrument of that transformation herself. So now who and what he is call out to us. Thinking about him makes you sensitive to noise. You hear people crying around you. To think about him makes you vulnerable to hope. You believe things you never would have dared dream of believing before.

I think that’s why Mark kept this story of this Syrophonecian woman in his Gospel. He wanted us to holler for transformation the way that woman hollered for the transformation of her daughter’s life situation, even when all the signals say, “You ought to shut up, give up, and go home.” If that woman could stand up to Jesus, I think Jesus was telling us, we ought to be able to stand up to anybody else or anything else on this planet. “You want change?” he seems to be telling the woman. “Then you’re gonna have to fight for it. You’re gonna have to raise your voice.”

ˆ That’s what I think a good seminary teaches people to do — to holler. Think about our master plan. We start you hollering from the moment we put you in OT101 and NT101 and CH101 and TH101 and General Ministries. I’ve heard seminary students in my own day and your day holler about the situations that confront them in seminary. I hope your voices will really howl once you go forth from this place and confront the situations that confront our people, God’s people. ‘Cause there’s a seminary out there where you’re gonna learn lessons about faith and doubt, victory and defeat, God and Satan, that we could never teach you in here.

Sometimes people tell me that we live in a time without prophecy. Perhaps we do. But perhaps if we can’t have prophets, maybe we can have Syrophonecian women; perhaps we can have people like you, people who, like that woman, hear the cries of people around them so acutely that they are willing to stand up to anybody and any power and demand transformation.

Isaiah, you know, has this vision. It’s an eschatological vision. It’s about the wolf lying down with the lamb in peace and tranquility. That’s Isaiah’s not-yet vision. New Testament writers like Mark appreciated that not-yet vision and all, but they also wanted to drag pieces of that not yet into the now. I think this Syrophonecian woman represents for Mark what it would look like if that not-yet vision of the wolf and the lamb was dragged into the now. It’s still a good vision. Because in the now the wolf sure would make that lamb mighty nervous. In the now the wolf sure would keep that lamb sorely agitated. In the now the panting, salivating wolf sure would keep that perspiring little lamb thinking about what he could do and ought to do urgently to bring God’s not-yet future a little closer to present reality. In the now, when the wolf lies down with the lamb, you’re gonna hear a little bit more than some quiet bleating; you’re gonna hear some hollering for transformation.

What’s it gonna take to make you wanna holler? And when it happens, what are you going to do about it? Or perhaps a better thing to ask is, what are you going to be about it? Don’t be sheepish. Be Syrophonecian, like a wolf.

Endnotes

1 D.E. Nineham, The Gospel of Saint Mark (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 199.

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