Meeting Your Heroes

Reflections on the Lectionary for September 8th

The Woman of Canaan, Michael Angelo Immenraet. 17th century. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia.

“Never meet your heroes.” Have you ever heard that advice?

I have had the chance to meet a few of my heroes, and that old bit of advice makes a certain amount of sense to me. Often when you meet your heroes, you realize that they are people too, with all the same flaws and idiosyncrasies and irritating traits that everyone else has. Sometimes your heroes turn out to be truly heroic, but just as often they turn out to be cranky, short of patience, smaller-than-life, or just plain bad people. Sometimes you leave an encounter with your heroes wishing that you could go back to not knowing them so well, back when they were still up on that pedestal.

Sometimes scholars talk about the “heroic Jesus,” which is a way of describing at least two things. First, it’s a way of describing the Jesus we meet in the gospels, who is almost always the protagonist of the story and the person we are supposed to be rooting for. The gospels are not objective reports about Jesus’ life; they are invested in convincing us, as readers, that Jesus was special and important and good. So they tell the story of Jesus in a heroic way, with most of the things he does and the words he says pointing toward his higher purpose and ultimate good. The second thing scholars mean by the “heroic Jesus” is the way the Christian tradition of interpretation thinks about Jesus. In the Christian tradition, even when Jesus says something strange or weird, we find a way to make it noble or true. The heroic Jesus of the Christian imagination creates a Jesus who always says and does the right thing, who is always an avatar for truth and holiness, and who can always be trusted as a conduit for love and grace.

But sometimes when we meet our heroes we realize that the heroic façade hides a more complicated figure. This can be disheartening and disillusioning; we might realize that the person we idolized wasn’t actually worthy of our affection and admiration. But it can also be heartening and encouraging to meet our heroes and realize that they are human beings too. We might catch a glimpse of what makes them worth paying attention to, for example, or what kinds of struggles they have had to overcome to flourish. Sometimes meeting our heroes leaves us with a more textured and nuanced sense of who they are, in a way that bolsters and does not diminish their standing in our eyes.

In the lectionary for September 8^th, we catch a glimpse of Jesus looking distinctly antiheroic. Mark 7:24-37 is really two stories. The first is the story of Jesus’ encounter with a Syrophoenician woman, and the second is Jesus’ healing of a man with a speech and hearing disability. Both of these stories are told in a way that seems to undermine the “heroic Jesus,” almost in a way that seems intentional to me. If you were setting out to portray Jesus in a more complicated and multi-dimensional way, and to chip away at a heroic image, then you would probably write a gospel passage a lot like this one.

The most obvious dimension of this is that in his conversation with the Syrophoenician woman (who does not get a name in this passage), Jesus is simply kind of a jerk. Not only is Jesus a jerk, but he’s sort of needlessly a jerk, cruel in a way that seems capricious and callous. Many interpreters point out that Jesus might simply have been tired, and that his exhaustion might have caused him to behave that way to the woman. In 7:24, we are told that Jesus did not want anyone to know that he was in Tyre, which sounds like the kind of posture a tired person would take, but that the Syrophoenician woman heard about him anyway and sought him out. So maybe Jesus’ irritation comes from the experience of trying to go unnoticed but being sought out anyway. I’m reminded of a recent controversy that you might have heard about if you follow pop music closely: the singer Chappell Roan’s pushback against fans who feel entitled to intrude into her personal life and feel privy to a piece of her attention. In an Instagram post, Chappell Roan expressed a lot of frustration with fame and managing the expectations of fans, in a way that reminded me of things that other artists have said. Sometimes famous people just want to walk down the street without being bothered for photos or shouted at. Maybe Jesus was simply feeling that way, many people have argued, and his brusque response to the woman was a byproduct of feeling like everyone wanted a piece of him. He just wanted to be left alone, but this woman kept bugging him, and so he called her and her demon-possessed daughter “dogs” in an attempt to get her to go away. (My favorite part of the Immenraet painting above is the inclusion of a noble-looking dog, to underscore the insult).

I don’t know whether Jesus was a hero to this Syrophoenician woman, but if he was, she probably felt conflicted about meeting her hero. His response was certainly not what she was expecting or hoping for. But rather than shrink away from his outburst, the woman took the punch and threw another one back. “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs,” she replied, and something about her response seemed to break Jesus’ mood, and he granted her request to exorcise the demon from her daughter. Jesus, here, ultimately does the right thing for the wrong reason, but not before lobbing an ethnic slur the woman’s direction. I don’t see any way to read this passage that makes Jesus look heroic, even if we grant that he was exhausted and weary of the demands of fame.

But there’s a lot more to this passage that I think is worth paying attention to. For starters, there’s the whole other half of it—the half dealing with the also-unnamed man with the disability. There are some key differences between this man’s story and the woman’s story, and a few similarities. The woman approached Jesus on behalf of her daughter; here the man is “brought” by a nebulous “they” who present him and argue on his behalf. (This is a common motif in healing stories, to have the person brought to the attention of the healer by others, but it strips agency away from the person with the disability and often leaves us wondering whether Jesus’ healing intervention would have been welcomed by the person being “healed” or not). While the girl’s problem was described as a “demon,” the man’s disability is described in more frankly physical terms. And while Jesus ultimately cast out the demon at a distance, not being in the girl’s presence, here Jesus’ healing of the man is an intensely physical and intimate thing: he uses his fingers and his spit and speaks in the man’s presence to heal him. Sometimes we conflate exorcisms (casting out demons) and healings, but here we can see them side by side and appreciate that at least some of the time the gospel writers thought of them as distinct activities.

But there are some other subtleties to pay attention to as well. Notice the use of Aramaic in 7:34; Jesus says “Ephphatha,” we are told, as he touched the man, which means “be opened.” Remember that Mark and all the other books of the New Testament were written in Greek, but that Jesus and his followers all spoke Aramaic in their everyday lives. (Scholars argue over how much Greek they would have known; I think that it’s likely that living in proximity to the Greek-speaking area of the Decapolis, they would have known at least a bit, enough to get around). Why is this bit of Aramaic preserved? This happens a few other times in the gospels (and in Acts), seven times in Mark alone, and while there might be a few reasons for the authors to include quotations in Aramaic, one exciting possibility is that a citation of Aramaic like this one is a remnant of the oral transmission of gospel stories. It might be that Aramaic words worked in oral traditions about healings in a way that’s analogous to the way Latin (or Latin-ish) words work in the world of Harry Potter: as a way to signify a miraculous or magical command. These miracle-working formulas show up when witches and wizards at Hogwarts learn to wield magic (Wingardium Leviosa! Expelliarmus!), and it’s probably the case that Aramaic words lent some authenticity to early hearers of the Jesus story when healings were being described (Talitha cum! Ephphatha!). Their inclusion here is a reminder that not everyone has encountered these stories in a book, but that for many people and especially early on, the gospels were a performance, and the sound of the words mattered.

So too with the references to geography and ethnicity. Most 21^st-century North American English-speaking readers of the Gospel of Mark would have no idea how identify a Syrophoenician person or a “gentile” (a “Greek,” literally in the Greek of 7:7:26), and most of us don’t have much sense of where Tyre is (or Tyre and Sidon, as some ancient variant manuscripts put it in 7:24), and we don’t know where the Decapolis might be. But if we think about these passages as having an oral audience before they were written down, full of the kinds of people who would have known about Syrophoenicians and gentiles and the location of Tyre and the Decapolis, some of that starts to make sense. Notice the directional geography here, and what it presumes about Jesus’ home-base and the location of the audience: Jesus “set out and went away to the region of Tyre” in 7:24, but he “returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis” in 7:31. The audience is being cued to Jesus’ movements from an implied location of Galilee, perhaps with an expectation that, like Jesus, they would understand the going-out toward Tyre as a foray into a foreign territory, and the “return” toward Galilee as a homecoming. Maybe the early audiences shared those geographical orientations. It’s not accidental that the person Jesus encounters in Tyre is labeled with a very specific ethnic description, and the person Jesus encounters near Galilee is not; you only need to describe people who are not already familiar—you really only need labels for outsiders, not insiders. And maybe it’s not accidental that Jesus is a jerk to the stranger and much kinder to the person who’s much closer to home for himself and the audience.

If you start to think about these stories as oral performances, you can even start to see stage directions built into the text. Look for the action verbs: the woman “bowed down at his feet” in 7:25, an action that might well have been pantomimed in the telling of the story. In 7:27 and 28, did the performer act out the throwing of food to dogs, and the woman’s claim of the dogs under the table getting the crumbs? 7:33-34 are full of physical cues about what Jesus was doing with his hands and how he was manipulating the man’s ears and tongue. Was there an audience volunteer standing in for the man? None of these stage directions, action verbs, or physical cues are really necessary to convey the meaning of the story; the author could have said “then they brought Jesus a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech, and Jesus healed him,” and that could have been the end of it. Nothing demands all the details about hands and spit and tongues and ears and Aramaic formulas and a setting near the Decapolis, but it’s all in there anyway, probably as a vestige of a performance of the story before it ever got written down.

There’s one more cue built into this story that might be left over from a period of oral performance—and it circles back to the idea that in this story Jesus is being portrayed as an antihero. Look in 7:36-37 at how “Jesus ordered them to tell no one.” This is very much in keeping with a major theme of the Gospel of Mark, which scholars call the “Messianic Secret.” In Mark, Jesus is forever telling people to stay quiet about his actions and his identity; he seems somewhat uncertain himself, and he seems reluctant to let his fame spread. He wanted to keep it a secret. But the text of Mark 7 continues, “but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.” I think it’s easy to imagine this as a coda to a story like this that’s being told in an oral setting; having the story conclude with Jesus asking folks to not repeat what they saw while watching someone repeat the story is a fantastic bit of dramatic irony. It’s like one of those videos on TikTok or Instagram that begins with something like “this video is for my mom and my mom only; if you’re not my mom, keep scrolling.” Everyone is going to watch the video to see what the person is going to say to her mom, and that’s kind of the joke. Likewise, having Jesus warn against telling the story as someone is telling the story is a compelling bit of drama.

But there’s another layer to Jesus’ command not to share the news of what he had done: everyone ignored it. “The more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it,” says Mark 7:36, and I think this is connected to the way Jesus is portrayed antiheroically in this passage. No one listens to Jesus in this passage, even as he does miraculous and impressive things. They take the miracles and ignore the rest. It’s not like the people were hanging on Jesus’ every word here, even as they were clearly engaged with his actions and invested in following him. They felt free to disregard the parts of his instructions that they didn’t like, which is not the kind of behavior we might expect toward a heroic figure. Maybe Jesus’ antiheroic behavior toward the Syrophoenician woman early in the passage helps to authorize or excuse the audience’s disregard for Jesus’ words later in the passage. Maybe after the way he treated her, people were holding him at arm’s length. Whatever the reason, this passage makes clear that while a lot of people were following Jesus around, they were not necessarily adhering to his every word.

Never meet your heroes, right? You’ll only be disappointed, or so the saying goes. But maybe there’s a certain kind of promise in meeting your heroes; maybe by meeting your heroes in all their humanity, we can learn something about ourselves and the ways imperfection and shortcoming are just part of the deal. Maybe that’s what this passage from Mark is all about: learning to sift the good from the bad, learning to take what we need and leave the rest, and learning to lower the height of the pedestal where we keep our heroes.