Grace in the Devil's Territory

 Homily for Sunday, September 8, 2024
The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Mark 7:24-37

Jesus said to [the woman], “Let the children be fed first,
for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Mark’s Gospel – from which we just heard this troubling line– [Mark’s Gospel] is in one sense a Passion narrative to which has been appended a series of short stories.  And I want to get back to Mark’s Gospel and how it is a Passion narrative preceded by a series of short stories, but first, Flannery O’Connor…

In “The Life You Save,” the 1957 TV adaptation of O’Connor’s The Life You Save May Just Be Your Own, Tom Shiftlet, a one-armed vagrant (played by Gene Kelly), shows up at dusk to the ramshackle farm of Lucynell Crater.  As the two exchange pleasantries on the porch, Tom spies on the property an old automobile and desires to have it, so he convinces Mrs. Crater to take him on as a handyman.  She agrees because she, too, has an agenda, which is to marry off her thirty-two-year-old deaf-mute daughter.  To make a short story even shorter, Tom does indeed repair a few things on the farm – including the car – the two do indeed marry, and on their honeymoon, when they stop at a diner and the daughter falls asleep at the counter, Tom leaves her and drives off with the car.  So ends the story by Flannery O’Connor – (so “O’Connor…”) But in the TV version, Tom has a change of heart, turns around, comes back and picks up the daughter.  When O’Connor saw it, she said “the best I can say… is that conceivably it could have been worse.”

I like think that Mark and Flannery O’Connor would have hit if off because Mark, too, had an original story onto which someone else pasted a happier, “Hollywood” ending.  In Mark’s original ending, the women fled from the tomb and said nothing to anyone, “for terror and amazement had seized them… and they were afraid” (16:8).  In the pasted-on ending added later, the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples and sent them out to proclaim the good news; and they cast out demons, spoke in tongues, picked up snakes and laid their hands on the sick and healed them (16:15-18).  “The best I can say,” I hear Mark saying, “is that conceivably it could have been worse.”

And I like to think, too, that Mark and O’Connor would have connected, not merely over the pasted-on, happier endings to their respective stories, but also because both authors tend to write stories that are “dark”and have the capacity to unnerve.  For example:

In Wise Blood,a World War II veteran, because of a life-long crisis of faith, when he returns to his hometown in the rural South, starts an “anti-religious” ministry. To the scribes and Pharisees who fill Mark’s Gospel, Jesus started an “anti-religious” ministry.

In Good Country People, a traveling Bible salesman knocks on a family’s door, seduces the daughter, steals her glasses and wooden leg and, leaving her helpless in the loft of the hay barn, boasts, “Onetime I got a woman’s glass eye this way.” Mark tells the story of a boy possessed by an unclean spirit that left him unable to speak, that seized him, dashed him down, and sometimes threw him into fire or water to destroy him; and his disciples could not cast it out (9:14-29).

In A Good Man is Hard to Find, a family of six on their way to vacation in Florida is murdered by an escaped serial killer (so “O’Connor…”). In Mark, because the dancing of a young girl pleased him and because of an oath, King Herod has John the Baptist murdered and gives the girl John’s head on a platter (which is so “Mark…”)

Both Mark and O’Connor write stories that are “dark” and have the capacity to unnerve.  And yet, if you’ve read any O’Connor, you know that her stories are filled with grace.  (She was a devout Catholic, and her faith bleeds through her writing.)  Mark and O’Connor do not fill their stories with cheap redemption or dramatic changes of heart that might bring about happy “Hollywood” endings.  But O’Connor and Mark write about – as O’Connor puts it – the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”  

Which is where Mark places Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson.  

In the first story in today’s Gospel lesson, the story of the Syrophoenician woman (the “Syrophoenicians” were indigenous peoples whom the Hebrews had displaced), [in this first story] Mark reports that Jesus left Jewish territory and “went away into the region of Tyre,” which is Gentile territory.  In the lesson’s second story, the healing of the deaf man with a speech impediment, Mark writes that Jesus “went… into the region of the Decapolis,” which is likewise Gentile territory.  While in Gentile territory, when the Syrophoenicianwoman begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter, Jesus said, “Let the children be fed first,” referring to the Jews. Then – using an ethnic slur referring to the native peoples – Jesus added:  “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  

We could try to get around this line by focusing our attention on Mark’s artistry, how these two stories are beautifully-written, at once parallel yet mirror images...  But that would highlight the fact that Mark made an intentional choice to include Jesus’ slur.  We could try to get around this line –  as Augustine tried – by suggesting that Jesus was testing the woman to see if she really did have faith…  But nowhere else in Mark does Jesus test someone before healing; indeed, in Mark “testing” is what the Pharisees, Jesus’ enemies, do to Jesus (e.g., 8:11; 10:2; 12:15).  Or we could try to get around this line by ignoring it, like Luke did; in his Gospel, Luke omits this story altogether.

Today’s passage in Mark is “so O’Connor…”  And yet – like O’Connor’s writing –  today’s passage is soaked in grace.  Yes, there is the grace that in the end Jesus heals the woman’s daughter.  Yes, there is the grace that Jesus extends the Gospel not merely to Jews but also to Gentiles.  And, Yes, there is the grace that even Gentiles, at the end of today’s passage, are “astounded beyond measure” at Jesus:  “He has done everything well,” they say.  But on a deeper level, too, there is grace.  And to get at that deeper level of grace, I want turn to a story about John Huston’s 1979 movie version of O’Connor’s novel, Wise Blood.

Wise Blood was adapted for film by brothers Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, who chose Huston to direct because they assumed his avowed atheism would faithfully represent the views of the “anti-religious” minister and not be afraid to skewer the pieties of O’Connor’s native South.  But on the last day of filming, Huston purportedly turned to Benedict and said, “I’ve been had.”  Huston realized he hadn’t told an atheist’s story at all but rather O’Connor’s, which was – like all her writing – soaked in grace:  “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

O’Connor once said that understanding good stories requires,“the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”  Mark’s stories can be “dark;” but by these stories that lead up to the Passion, Mark prepares us to decide whether or not we truly want to follow a Christ who dies by crucifixion and who says that:  “If any wish to come after me, let them take up their cross and follow” (8:34).  In his Gospel Mark gives no quarter to stories of cheap redemption or to pasted-on happy endings, and he stymies any who would box Jesus into conventional expectations.  That we might be affronted by Jesus is a sign of spiritual health, a sign that we have not fully domesticated Jesus or neutered the Gospel.  May God give us the grace to see Jesus at work even in – or perhaps especially in – “territory held largely by the devil.”  And may God give us the grace, too, to “be had” by God, and someday to see Jesus in all his mystery and reality.

‍