Jesus needed an attitude adjuster. I really don’t know how else to say it. Clearly, he needed a break. He had been ministering to the masses who would not leave him alone. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of him.  Including a Syrophoenician woman whose daughter’s illness led her and everyone else to believe she was demon-possessed.

St. Mark sets it up for us:  Jesus is making an attempt at getting away for a few days.  Just a little R&R over a 3-day weekend perhaps. The region was Tyre, extending just to the east of the Sea of Galilee. It was clearly Gentile territory, although there were many Jews who also lived in the area. But Jesus wasn’t going to the region of Tyre to preach to the Gentiles. Nor was he going to the region of Tyrie to preach to the Jews.  He was going to the region of Tyre to get away, to take a break.

St. Mark writes, “(Jesus) entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” This is the human part of Jesus that might make us something less than comfortable. This is the Jesus who needed a break now and then. This is the Jesus who wanted no demands, no pressures, no recognition – just an incognito breather from the burdens of being him.

“Yet,” St. Mark writes. “Yet.” In this case, what is to follow is not good news for Jesus. “Yet…he could not escape notice.” Dang! Jesus is busted in his little vacation cottage in the region of Tyre and it’s a desperate Syrophoenician woman which is Bible code language for “turn quickly and run in the opposite direction.”

It is not a pretty scene, and Jesus gets caught with his proverbial divinity down. Not only was he hoping to retreat from the Savior of the World biz for a day or two, but this woman shows up demanding reasonable health care for her little girl. There is no recent health history form. She cannot produce an insurance card. Clearly there is a pre-existing condition, and there has been no pre-authorization for any treatment. In fact, she has no coverage whatsoever. But besides all that, Jesus reminds her she doesn’t qualify for his compassion because of her ethnic origin: she is a Syrophoenician – a Gentile – a non-Jew – and, summed up in words as only our Lord in all his humanity can speak: a dog. It was a word the people of Israel often used in reference to those who were not of their ethnicity. We are not unfamiliar with similar parallel words in our culture. Low-life. Skank. Trash.

“Let the children be fed first,” Jesus tells her snottily, “for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Jesus had confined his mission and ministry to Israel. He wasn’t thinking outside the box, outside the house of Israel in terms of his outreach. And clearly in this moment, he was NOT OPEN to the request of a Gentile – a Syrophoenician woman - to extend his ministry beyond his comfort zone. Indeed, in this moment Jesus was scarcely open to extending ministry to anyone. After all, he had not wanted anyone to know he was there.

I don’t know about you, but this very human response of Jesus to this Gentile woman shakes me up. This Jesus-with-an-attitude is not the Jesus I’m accustomed to believing or putting my trust in. I didn’t expect this from the Healer of Our Every Ill and the King of Love who My Shepherd Is, and whose goodness faileth never. It’s a very human moment for Jesus. It demonstrates his human exhaustion. It shows us his struggle with the all-too-human issues of race and class and economics. It offers us a glimpse of a very human Jesus who himself struggled with his own theology of ministry: struggled with being open to reaching out beyond his comfort zone: beyond the familiar, beyond his own house of Israel and into “the region of Tyre” – into the world of the Syrophoenician – into the world of the dogs – into ALL the world.

I think this was a major conversion experience for Jesus, the one who was 100% divine and – especially in this situation – 100% human. It took a combination of Jesus’ awareness of his own human resistance to another human being – in other words an up-close-and-personal confrontation with his own cultural prejudice and discrimination – along with the plea of the woman who represented this temptation for him to resist being open to a ministry of greater breadth, width, and depth. Yes, in his humanity Jesus suffered in the ways all of humanity suffers, and here we get a painful glimpse.

And yet, when confronted by the truth of Syrophoenician woman’s words, how quickly Jesus responds with grace-filled repentance for his initial response to her. “Sir,” she says to Jesus respectfully, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Running with Jesus’ canine metaphor, she nails him with his own message of God’s gracious economy: that there is always enough at God’s table of mercy, that 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish can feed a multitude, that there is quite enough grace to go around – even for the dogs. And so Jesus responds, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, Mark writes, found the child laying on the bed, and the demon gone.

I believe Jesus’ own demon was also gone. The demon of discrimination, the demon of racial prejudice, the demon of damning another person’s difference from one’s self. In that moment of healing realization, Jesus opened up to a whole new world of ministry, a whole new world of mission, a whole new world of people who themselves were open or opening up to him. Because of this Syrophoenician outsider, because of this trash from the region of Sidon, because of this damn dog Jesus is radically reoriented in his vision for whom he has been sent to earth to save.

That new openness led Jesus to continue a radically-inclusive ministry of openness: and the very next story in St. Mark’s gospel this morning is rich is irony. For even as Jesus’ ears were opened to the cry of the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus now literally opens the ears of a deaf man with a speech impediment. Placing his fingers in the man’s ears and touching the man’s tongue with a saliva-covered finger, Jesus could not be any more graphic in his commitment to openness. But then, as if to finally acknowledge that he has submitted himself to this radical reorientation, Jesus looks up to heaven, he sighs, and says to the man “Eph-phatha” – that is, “be opened. “

The scene painted by St. Mark is then one of explosive openness: the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was released and his open mouth began to speak, and despite Jesus’ orders that the crowd tell no one about this (for it seems that, deep down, he still struggled with just how open this openness should go!), the mouths of the people could be closed no more, and the more Jesus ordered them to tell no one, “the more zealously they proclaimed it,” saying “He has done everything well.”

Sisters and brothers, if you are feeling somewhat unnerved by such openness, you’re in good company. Jesus needed an attitude adjuster too. He needed the Syrophoenician woman in his face, just when he thought what he really needed was a vacation. Perhaps you’re not entirely convinced absolutely that such open doors to all is such a good idea. Maybe you’re not quite yet able to fully celebrate the ELCA’s decisions in Minneapolis regarding its new policies of openness and inclusion. Perhaps the notion of universal health care causes you to groan. Or better yet, how about universal salvation?

To us today, in all our various states of openness and closedness, Jesus comes and groans — as if in labor — among us, in this place and in this church, and says “Eph–phatha.” With hands open in giving, with arms extended in welcome, at a table with open and available seating to all, he bids us “be opened.”

That openness is described with vivid verbs in this morning’s psalm. The one who calls us to be opened is the one who: made the heaven and the earth, the one who keeps promises forever, the one who gives justice to those who are oppressed, the one who gives food to those who hunger, the one who sets the captive free, who opens the eyes of the blind, who lifts up those bowed down, who loves the righteous, the one who cares for the stranger, the one who sustains the orphan and widow, and who frustrates the way of the wicked, and who shall reign forever throughout all generations!

Hallelujah! Eph–phatha! Amen!