Rev Hugh Perry
Readings
Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9, 22-23
This is a selection of short proverbs encouraging generosity to the poor and the quest for justice rather than wealth. Maurice Andrew places this section as straddling the second and third collection of proverbs. The second section is short sentences often using antithetic parallelism (lines of similar length and rhythm but opposite meaning). The third selection may have been used to educate young men entering service in the royal court and, unlike the third person style of the second section, the style now moves to a direct address to a second person.
Maurice notes that robbing the poor because they are poor sounds very like revising the finances of a country by reducing the benefits of those with the fewest resources. [1]
Proverbs are exactly that, short wisdom sayings that do not fully explore issues as a story might so are therefore dangerous as proof texts. They are wisdom of a community and can warn us of recurring injustice and stupidity.
Mark7: 24-37
This reading from Mark contains an exorcism by remote control and a healing. The woman with the possessed daughter, not only is a foreigner but, intrudes on Jesus’ private space. Jesus’ response is not only a very human response but a cultural response. He was interrupted in his ‘time off’ and Jews did not associate with foreigners. In contrast to the Jesus of John’s Gospel we see in this episode a very human Jesus growing in divine awareness through his dialogue with the woman. This is the not the only story in the gospels where Jesus changes his mind and it is a woman who led him to do so. [2]
In the next story Jesus heals by physical means, putting his finger in the man’s ear, spitting and touching the man’s tongue. This, according to Hooker, was typical of healers of the time and place so Jesus is practicing as a regular healer of the day.[3]
What both Borg and Hooker point out is the significance of the summary in verse 37 ‘he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’ This is typical of Mark’s irony where those who should be speaking and listening like the Pharisees don’t but the physically deaf and mute do.
Sermon
This morning, we read from the book of proverbs which, along with Job, Ecclesiastes, and the wisdom psalms. is considered part of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. One of the recent lectionary readings was about God granting wisdom to Solomon. But acquiring wisdom is incremental and is not usually uploaded from the cloud. It comes in programme updates over time. Likewise, communities acquire wisdom over generations.
Such wisdom is often recorded as wisdom literature but, as the rest of the Hebrew Bible tells us, the stories of a people’s journey both record wisdom and tell how the wisdom was acquired.
Our Gospel reading contains an incident where Jesus acquires an incremental dose of wisdom from a foreign woman and another instance where, through Jesus, the blind and the deaf can see and hear but the rich and powerful are both deaf and blind. A situation not unknown in our world.
The meeting with the woman of Syrophoenician origin appears to be one of the incremental spring times of Jesus’ journey to divinity and September is officially the beginning of our Spring and a reminder of the call for new beginnings in our own life.
There is in fact a growing green consciousness in our community that, in turn, leads to concern about the damage caused by introduced species.
Phoenix palms used to be very popular in people’s front lawns. So much so that people would come with cranes in the middle of the night and steal them. However, it has been discovered that they thrive in the northern forests and crowd out the native nikau palms. So now it is illegal to sell them, and people need to pay to have them removed.
The stoats and weasels people imported to control the rabbits found it easier to kill native birds, and I recently spotted a neighbour’s cat leap up, over a metre, straight off the ground at our bird feeder. It landed straight back on its feet and ran off with tail feathers protruding from its mouth. Hamish Kerr might have a gold medal for high jumping, but he has nothing on the grey ghost of a cat from two houses down the street.
Thinking about these struggles with our environment I am reminded of a biologist friend who told me that the most invasive species in Aotearoa is people. Wave upon wave of people have colonised these pristine islands and each group have done their share of damage. Each and every fresh set of colonisers have changed the landscape to survive, and each change has had unfortunate side effects.
What my friend didn’t mention was that each group felt, and continues to feel, more entitled, safer and more self-righteous amongst people they see as their own people, rather than those who came before them.
That of course is not unique to Aotearoa. In this morning’s Gospel reading we see Jesus reacting to the woman of Syrophoenician origin in exactly the way his cultural conditioning proscribed. She was a different race to him, so his reaction was to rebut her pleading.
“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” (Mark7:27)
To which she replies “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” (Mark 7:8)
This is one of those very special passages where the very human and cultural conditioned Jesus learns to be more divine. Mark’s Jesus was not beamed down from heaven. Mark’s Jesus was born, learned and grew to become more God like. So, if we are to become more Christlike, we too must grow through our own experiences and indeed through the rebuttal of others.
Furthermore. we certainly also learn to be Christlike from the Gospels. We should also remember that the Hebrew Scripture spoke to Jesus so it can certainly speak to us.
As we move into Spring our society could certainly learn something from this morning’s text from the Book of Proverbs.
‘Do not rob the poor because they are poor,
or crush the afflicted at the gate. (Proverbs 22:22)
Perhaps I am oversensitive because I can still remember my very ill mother and I struggling to live on a widow’s benefit and then trying to finish high school on an orphan’s benefit. To be fair we were better off than many because Mum owned our house.
But it still disturbs me that we are now embarking on a series of ‘economic reforms’ that sound to me like robbing the poor because they are poor.
Government policies come and go but it disturbs me that ordinary people can be extremely annoyed at the thought that that some people are receiving benefits. As long as I can remember people have been upset about solo mothers getting benefits but don’t seem concerned that men get women pregnant without any thought about caring for the resulting child.
I also wonder about plans to raise the price of obtaining a visa for people who come here to work, from low wage economies. Will they be crushed at the gate.
In my working life I have been fortunate to have three different careers that I have thoroughly enjoyed. I was once made redundant for about fifteen minutes because the firm I worked for went bust. The fact that I was employed again so quickly was pure good luck along with a first rate gossip network within the industry in which I worked.
I have never resented the fact that some people have difficulty getting employment and many can’t work because of illness, injury or lack of mental capacity.
I was brought up to believe that, in a civilised society, one of the reasons we pay tax is to make sure that less fortunate people are looked after. Furthermore, my mother always told me that no matter what circumstance a child was born into, in the country she immigrated to that child deserved the best possible chance to have a first-rate education and a successful life. They deserve a free lunch to help them learn as well.
So, I felt the need to check out just how much damage the unemployed and the unemployable are doing to our economy.
I discovered that in 2023 64.9% of New Zealand’s population was of working age. In round figures the population of New Zealand is 5.3 million, so 3.4 million are of working age. Of those 173 thousand receive the Jobseeker benefit.
Rather than celebrate the fact that 94 percent of working age people have a job we not only get upset about the six percent who don’t, but we pass legislation in parliament to make life difficult for them.
Even people of six figure salaries are inclined to wallow in ashes and tear their clothes at the thought that someone is getting $350 a week without working.
Personally, I don’t care and am happy that some of my tax goes to help such people. Certainly, if Proverbs 22:23 is to be believed, God cares for the disadvantaged. ‘For Yahweh pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them, (Proverbs 22: 23)
God certainly has plenty to care about because in January last year Oxfam announced that the richest 1% of the world’s population bagged nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together.
We need to ask if that wealth came from robbing the poor because they are poor.
Furthermore, we are currently very aware of wars raging between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Palestine. We are however less aware of ongoing wars in the rest of the world, but people suffer in those wars too.
The people who profit from wars are the mutation manufactures in the rich and powerful nations. Those same nations use other people’s wars to extend their influence around the globe to benefit trade and the exploitation of the world’s resources.
Those activities are now spreading into our part of the world as a further wave of exploitation and destruction of our once pristine world.
The second part of our gospel illustrates the dilemma of world leaders who seem unable to listen and reluctant to speak. The story of the healing of the deaf-mute parodies the inaction of those we expect to hear the issues and speak about the solutions.
As the Spirit calls us all to mission the Christ within us does not just open our ears to the plight of the displaced people of the world. Christ calls us to speak out about the injustice that drives people to lethal combat and the destruction of our world.
We are called, in whatever way we can, to support our Christian Agencies who form global partnerships that promote self-sufficiency and the raising of standards of living.
Such missions are vital because people will only beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks (Isaiah 2:4) when they can look to the future with hope. And the call of the Christ within each of us is the call to be part of delivering that hope.
It is also the Christ inspired call to speak out and open the ears of the leadership of our communities, our nation and our world. Open the minds of our leaders , to the reality that an increasing gap between rich and poor will only bring disaster.
As bulbs burst into flower, trees explode into blossom and buds burst into leaf, let us all play our part in making this Spring a Christ inspired Spring of hope.
As we celebrate the beginning of Spring let the dawn chorus of birdsong welcome a new realm of hope and the recognition that we all belong to the universal family of all humanity.
[1] Maurice Andrew The Old Testament in Aotearoa New Zealand (Wellington: DEFT 1999), p.377,378.
[2] Marcus Borg The Gospel of Mark (Harrisburg-New York: Morehouse Publishing ,2009),p.66
[3] Morna D Hooker The Gospel According To Mark (London: A&C Black1991), p.186.