Tag: stones

The one with the crumby dog

art, bible, pictures

I finally declared this picture finished…

It’s the story of the Syro-Phonoecian (Canaanite) woman who asks Jesus to heal her daughter (Matthew 15):

22Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ 23But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ 24He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ 25But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ 26He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 27She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ 28Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.

She is a woman. She is foreign. She has a disabled/sick child. And she shouts. She’s a reject in pretty much every way. And she’s awesome.

In the painting I tried to do something different from my previous attempts at this story (which had focused on the ‘meeting of minds’ that Jesus and the woman reach by both stroking the hypothetical dog, but I was challenged to have a go at the moment of confrontation itself, which is much harder. So this is the moment when the woman grasps Jesus’ arm and makes him listen. She’s small, but mighty.

Here are some things I’ve tried to do in the painting:

  • On the left, there’s a small gathering of Jesus’ disciples, but they’re a group of individuals. On the right everyone is presented relationally. The woman, by touching Jesus, draws him into the relationality of her family. This, for me, is a mirror image of the usual pattern in which Jesus draws outcasts into relationality (often by touch).
  • The stones on the floor are a recurring theme in scripture. Here, they stand for stumbling blocks – the stumbling blocks that Jesus warned about (in Mark 9), the stumbling blocks that we must not put in the way of ‘any of these little ones’.  The woman demonstrates to Jesus that her daughter is indeed one of the little ones that come within Jesus’ sphere of protection and love.
  • The woman is dressed in blue because her confrontation with Jesus reminds me of the way that Mary, his mother, showed him that his time had indeed come, and that it was the right moment for him to perform his first miracle (John 2).
  • The older lady on the right is grandma, and she’s looking after her other grandchildren so that the woman is free to go and confront Jesus.
  • I’ve always assumed that there was an actual dog.  Dogs can enable people who wouldn’t otherwise engage with one another to reach a place of understanding and generosity.

What do the stones say?

holy week, poems

This is a reflection / poemy thing based on the Palm Sunday gospel (the one with the stones), and making reference, among other things, to the Temptations of Jesus, the averted stoning of the woman in John 8, and the prophecy about the destruction of the temple.  

We could have been the temple,
if we were bigger, or more beautiful,
but we are the despised and the rejected,
our shape and size are wrong,
or we are broken, not quite strong
enough; the House of God surely demands
that only perfect stones
may be accepted.

We are the downtrodden,
trampled in the dust,
we are the cursed,
the cause of battered feet and stumbles,
the playthings of the poorest children,
and for the beggars as they sit in boredom,
Equally unnoticed, equally humble.

We are still stone, when once,
we might have become bread.
And just before he turned to look the devil in the face,
to us he bent his head, ‘Remember this,’ he said.

We are still unbloodied, still unscathed,
when once we could have been picked up and weighed
in the hand, and flung in cruel contempt.
He saw us then, as he leant
down to mark the dust
and whispered to us, once again, ‘Remember this.’

We remember how he saw us, even though we
were not intricately carved or nobly
combined in stately, sacred architecture.
He saw us as we were, the least, the small,
the unimportant, despised, rejected all.
We remember how he saved us from the shame
of becoming unwitting instruments of blame.
We remember how he wished that we were food,
but would never use us for a selfish good.

We remember.

And now we see him, riding like a king amid the raving crowd,
towards the Temple’s lofty towers, so tall and strong.
And just as we begin to wonder if we’d read him wrong,
he looks deliberately at the stony ground,
then raises his head and looks about
and speaks aloud:
‘If all the crowds were silent,
then the very stones would shout!’

Call us as your witness,
hear this testimony,
about a man who saw us
and gave us this, a story.

We tell that story on every rocky path
and in every wayside cairn,
in every church that’s built from rocks
to be a house of prayer and living sign
of the man who was himself
a stumbling block
to all who could not
love him as the corner stone.

Advent 3: this really is good news…

random thoughts, sermons

Since I wasn’t preaching today, this is just two random thoughts about today’s gospel (Luke 3.7-18).

Here’s the first:

At first glance it’s all rather grim, especially if one postulates that life-long anglicans are the nearest modern equivalent to those that John criticised for treating salvation like a birthright.

But John’s retort, rather than filling me with dread, fills me with hope. “God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones,” he says.

Praise the Lord for that. Because I don’t want my salvation to be dependent on my track record, or my pedigree.  I want it to be dependent on the grace of God.  Because, frankly, I trust the grace of God more than I trust my own past.  And, yes, I trust the grace of God more than I trust the church and the illusion of solid reliability that is increasingly showing signs of wear and tear.

Here’s the second:

Although I don’t much like justification by works either (see above – I prefer grace), I love the fact that John takes seriously the questions posed to him by the tax collectors and the soldiers.

“Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” John tells them. They hear the words, and they want to live them out, they really do. So do I, I really do.  They ask him, “What do your words look like in real life?  What do they look like in my life?”

And the answers John gives are answers that can last a lifetime.  They’re practical answers that honour the situations in which these people find themselves, and show them, gently but firmly, how to make good choices in difficult times.

This gospel reading prompts me to ask my own question: What do the fruits of repentance look like my life?  And how will God help me, a mere stone on the ground, become a child of Abraham?  I give thanks today, because although John’s words are challenging, with God, everything is possible.