mission & ministry | practical theology | priesthood

Common Worship reading for this coming Sunday: Mark 7:24-end

Here is this woman… who is desperate to see her child released from the pain and anguish she lives in day after day.  Some of you will be able to sympathise with her, knowing members of your own family who likewise struggle with some affliction day after day.  Such anguish, watching someone you love, in daily pain and misery, is very hard to bear.

This woman comes to Jesus, willing to endure insult and embarrassment and humiliation; crossing all kinds of social convention and expectations; to come to the only place where she knew to go.  The only place worth going to.  The only place to find peace: Jesus.
Things are very different for us today.  We have a health service that helps us to patch up our bodies and manage our pain.  We have an organised church to help us encounter Jesus in the security of social conventions and practices.  Our situation is very different from this Syrophoenician woman.

And yet on Monday evening I sat in a concert at Greenbelt weeping in public waiting for Jesus to do something for someone I love.

I guess things aren’t so different.  We still struggle with things we can’t explain and pain we can’t bear to live with.  Still the only place to go is Jesus, to find peace, healing, comfort, strength, grace, mercy…  And we still get desperate enough to humiliate ourselves in public, to ignore social conventions, risk insult and embarrassment in order to get to a place where Jesus will hear us.