SUNDAY SERVICE

14th Sunday after Trinity Sunday 6 September 2015

Isaiah 35:4-7a James 2:1-17 Mark 7:24-37

The passages set for us this week teach us not to show partiality in our applications of the transforming gospel but to embrace outsiders.

Isaiah’s prophecy of the redeemed of the LORD returning to Zion with everlasting joy is a beautiful picture of the new exodus he anticipates. Soaring over his own day and age, the centrepiece of this magnificent vision is the coming of God himself: “Behold your God!”

What happens when he comes to save? The eyes of the blind are opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame leap like a deer and the tongue of the speechless sings for joy.

He is also to come “with vengeance and with terrible recompense” (which in Isaiah 34 turned the once fertile nations into a haunt for jackals), but our passage this week focuses mainly on the positive side of God’s arrival. That royal visit will see transformation, and the world turned upside down: water in the wilderness, burning sand becoming an oasis: places that once absorbed all moisture now provide it in abundance. Reversal and restoration come to an inhospitable environment where the dogs lie down and roam free.

In the Gospel, God incarnate goes beyond the borders of Israel to find a Gentile pup suffering at the hands of a demon (the Greek word he uses here for ‘dogs’ is diminutive; it is not the same word used in Isaiah 35, because the LXX has no mention of jackals here). Though Jesus’ mission at this point in redemptive history was first and foremost to the people of Israel, the wider saving purposes of God are foreshadowed in what he does. The troubled Gentile girl will lie down and sleep in peace because of the faith of her nursing mother (Lamentations 4:3), who comes to Jesus with persistent humility (like the jackals in Isaiah 43:20 who honour the LORD).

Continuing on his foreign adventure, Jesus goes from Tyre to Sidon to the Decapolis. “Galilee of the nations” enjoys his light (Isaiah 9:1-2). Just as Isaiah said, the ears of the deaf man were then unstopped and though he was once speechless, he is enabled to speak again, with joy. Jesus commanded people not to talk about what he’d done: a very effective evangelistic strategy! (Many today find, ironically, that they become speechless and mute the moment they read Jesus’ positive command to take the gospel to all nations!) People are astounded beyond measure at the great reversal and healing that he brings, even outside Israel.

James challenges us— do we really believe in the same glorious Lord Jesus Christ, who did these astonishing, levelling, things, if we show partiality in our churches? He bites at the prejudices of his day, and the preferences we have for the comfortable classes who dress well and speak well (and went to the right school, college, or camp). This is not a picture of the Sunday welcoming team showing favouritism as they allocate seating, though obviously it could apply. The context is more of “judges with evil thoughts” in a church court, deciding a dispute between two parties — a court that has forgotten that Jesus promised a great reversal of the ways of the world: the poor would inherit the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20).

We are not to run church the way the ungodly run the world, judging by outward appearance. And in the same way, we are not to simply wish pious wishes over people’s needs, but with living faith care for the needs of others, both in body and soul, as Jesus did. Dr Lee Gatiss is editor of The Effective Anglican: Seizing the Opportunities of Ministry in the Church of England, and

Director of Church Society (www.churchsociety.org).