Inking Up the Margins
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 15th Sunday After Pentecost by Holly Huff, Postulant for Holy Orders.
For a few years as a college student, I had a part-time job working in a used bookstore. Since it was a small shop with a small staff, I did a little of everything: opening the store, working the counter, doing that careful evaluative dance as customers came through the door: who wants the full tour and who prefers to be left to browse in solitude. And of course I reshelved books and sorted and priced new inventory. New to us, anyway—it was a used bookstore, and many books bore some record of their previous owners. I came across countless inscriptions and epigraphs, faded photos tucked between pages, the many makeshift bookmarks: receipts and cards, takeout menus and concert programs and the power bill, now 30 years past due. There was evidence left in these books not just of the authors but the readers, too. I particularly enjoyed skimming through notes in the margins—in careful script or scrawling hand—marks of someone really engaged with the text, entering a conversation, not only receiving ideas but replying, commenting, arguing, fitting ideas and stories into one’s own understanding, making the text their own.
I developed a special fondness for people who argued with the author in the margins—as deep calls to deep, stubbornness calls to stubbornness, and so I recognize these people. I still have a particularly hilarious copy of Fascinating Womanhood—a book I would not recommend by the way—where someone has pushed their way through this whole perfectly awful text just to refute point by point in blue ballpoint pen the assertions about women’s special power to manipulate men by feigning childishness and naivete. Objections pepper the margins: “Where is she getting this?” “I don’t know any adult women like this” “Insulting and infantilizing” underlined for emphasis. I didn’t meet the editor with the blue ink, but I got a good sense of her: the imprint of her mind left on that book as much as the author’s. In those notes, that interaction between reader and text, another layer of meaning was created. The book is more than the book; it is also the people who read the book, and how we engage with it.
Though I’ll attempt to leave further excursions into literary theory to the professionals, I will say that this is particularly true of the Bible. We call Holy Scripture the word of God—not because we worship the book but because it draws us to the living Word, a person, God who became flesh to meet us in our human predicament. Scripture, like Jesus, is incarnate: fully divine, fully human, and we can’t pull the two apart. The Bible is the church’s book. It has been both written by and received by a particular community of believing interpreters over time, and the Holy Spirit guides us in that process. So the text is more than the words on the page, and the word of God is heard as we respond to Scripture, too. “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”
Holy Scripture invites us to engage it in this way and provides us with some good models. The Hebrew Bible records a long tradition of arguing with God. Jacob wrestles the unknown angel in darkness, and says “I will not let you go until you bless me!” This is holy stubbornness, born of an enduring faith that God is one who blesses, not curses. Job takes his iron pen to court insisting that God is on his side, despite all the accusations of his fair-weather friends. The psalms cry out in lament, voicing agitation, despair, anger, and fear directly to God.
What is striking to me about these examples is that their questions, their arguments and their objections are an expression of their faith. We usually assume questions and arguments are be born from doubt, and they can be. That too has its place. But Jacob and Job and the Psalmists are motivated by their faith, their faith that God is good, that God is for them. They insist that God is loving, and trustworthy, and merciful, and broader than any of the boxes (like language or gender) that we put “him” into. They trust the loving God who they have met in their experience.
The woman we meet in today’s gospel carries this same tenacious faith that God is loving and trustworthy. Mark recounts that a Gentile woman, a Greek of Syrophoenician origin, comes to Jesus begging for healing for her little daughter. Jesus dismisses her rather rudely: “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” We affirm that Jesus is fully human, fully divine but we don’t always want to deal with the fully human part. Apparently, the transcendent God has become incarnate absolutely in context, in a particular place and time embedded in a particular worldview with its prejudices.
Some might go away or give up here, but she does not. She insists there must be more than this. God’s salvation must be bigger, must be big enough for her and her daughter and the whole world. Her insistence shows us the faith she has in a God who shows no partiality, in whom there is no shadow of turning, a God of love and constancy. She takes what she has heard—a curt dismissal—and argues with it. She pries open the insult and makes a space for herself—well, even the dogs are fed, are they not? Her argument is an expression of faith, a faith that God is good and just and loving, faith that, as the hymn says, “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea,” and “the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind.”
Jacob limps but he gets his blessing. Job sees God in the whirlwind, far more powerful and strange than he had imagined. Jesus responds to this woman’s faith: “For saying that you may go; your daughter has been healed” — and perhaps Jesus has been, too, because the next thing we hear, he is heading again into Gentile regions and healing there, also. “Be opened!” he says to the man who is deaf and mute, and immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.
This woman’s insistence on the expansiveness of grace is a beautiful thing. It leads naturally to openness and healing, to true hearing and right speech: it’s no coincidence these passages follow each other. There is courage and dignity in her argument, humility as well as a defiance formed from faith and playfulness, and, dare I say, doggedness. Like a dog with a bone—“I will not let you go until you bless me.” Like a hound trailing a scent, the sweet smell of mercy poured out extravagantly until the perfume fills the whole house. Having experienced God’s overflowing love, our faithful response is to not be thrown off this scent so easily. If what you have read in the Bible makes God out to be a monster, something has gone wrong, and rather than walk away you can take Scripture’s own invitation to insist that God is in there, the loving God we have met in Jesus Christ crucified and risen. God is in this book. Be opened!
And the bedrock for interpretation is the love embodied in the person of Jesus, who we meet in the stories we read about him but also in our encounter with the living Jesus, toward which this book is always pointing us. The lens through which we read the Bible is a person. Julian of Norwich summed up her mystical visions of the suffering Christ saying: “Love is God’s meaning.” Love is God’s meaning. Love is always God’s meaning. When you have been offered violent interpretations of these texts, when they have been wielded against you—you can insist that you have a right to read, to interpret, and interpret until they read right.
Desmond Tutu, South African Archbishop and leader in the resistance to apartheid retells this anecdote: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened our eyes, we had the Bible, and they had the land”—and—Tutu adds—“and—we got the better deal!”
How’s that for an insistent faith? the Bible was used as the warrant for the violence of colonization of course—and yet Bishop Tutu provocatively claims that the Bible belongs more truly to the people who were subjugated in its name. His is a refusal to let the word of God be used as a tool of oppression. God is for the poor and the dispossessed of the world, the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the Afghan refugee, the teenager kicked out of their home. As the Letter of James asks: “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom?” When we have put up walls leaving people on the outside, we can be sure that Christ is out there, too. He was crucified outside the city walls: God has thrown in his lot with the downtrodden of the world.
As we read and interpret and struggle with God, the Holy Spirit guides us in our weakness and the sacred story ripples out into our own lives, here and now. As Christians we are gathered around a text that doesn’t end with words on the page but points beyond itself to a living Lord. What might happen if we start inking up the margins, insisting on the Love that has first loved us, and trusting that scripture can bear the weight of our questions? There would be no need to play defense for God, for one thing, or to anxiously tidy these stories. After all, all truth is God’s truth, much broader and more comprehending than we can imagine, and God is at work in the mess of our ordinary lives, too, just as they are, loose ends, tangled plots, and all.
Mark’s Gospel originally ended without the appearance of the resurrected Jesus. Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome see the angel and flee from the empty tomb in terror and amazement, and the scene ends there! The curtain drops, the credits roll. Now there’s a cliffhanger ending. The absence in the text is there — not denying resurrection or politely dodging the subject but making space for us the readers to enter the story, inviting us not just to read about resurrection but to experience it, as Christ lives his life through ours. Of course over time disciples have filled in Mark with what they knew of the risen Jesus, but there is something compelling about holding that space open. The text is only complete as we live it. Fill in the margins with your life! It seems to say.
My prayer today is that we will take a page out of the Syrophoenician woman’s book and insist on the liberating love of God. Especially as we read scripture and respond with our lives, in our prayers, in our struggles to love God and love our neighbor, may we grow into a living faith that God is good, that God is for us and for all people, but especially for the poor, the suffering, the outcast. And from this faith may we find that our lives naturally flow over into works of mercy.