Tag: calling

Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (2) Isaiah 49:1-7

Session 2
Isaiah 49:1-7

Yesterday, I said that in each of the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ we had to determine who the particular servant was, because it isn’t always the same each time. So yesterday in chapter 42, the servant was Israel, but as well as thinking what the text meant for Israel, we looked at it as applying to Jesus, who perfectly fulfilled the prophecies, and then what it meant for us.

Today, the Servant is clearly the prophet himself. I am not going to say Isaiah, because chapters 40 onwards clearly come from a time two centuries after Isaiah himself lived – although in many ways they carry on Isaiah’s themes. Isaiah prophesied in the eighth century BC, when the people of Judah were still in their own land under a king. Chapters 40 to 55, however, come from the time of the Babylonian exile – perhaps ten to twenty years before God’s people start to go back home.

So our first lens today is the prophet. We shall keep Jesus and ourselves as the second and third lenses through which we view the text.

Yesterday, we looked at commitment, call, and covenant: the mutual commitment between God and his servant, the call God gives the servant, and the covenant whereby God doesn’t give up on a servant who has failed.

Today’s reading is about a crisis in the calling of the servant. Today, I also have three ‘C’s: call, crisis, and cure. We begin by going back to the servant’s original call (which is not quite the same as yesterday, because this is about the prophet, not the people), then the nature of the crisis that engulfed him, and finally the way God brings a cure for that crisis.

Firstly, the call:
Listen to the call of the prophet in verses 1 to 3:

1 Listen to me, you islands;
    hear this, you distant nations:
before I was born the Lord called me;
    from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.
2 He made my mouth like a sharpened sword,
    in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me into a polished arrow
    and concealed me in his quiver.
3 He said to me, ‘You are my servant,
    Israel, in whom I will display my splendour.’

The prophet’s call was no small, accidental thing, nor was it a coincidence. God had planned it from before his birth, just as he did with Jeremiah. God had prepared the prophet and his words to be effective – ‘like a sharpened sword’ and ‘a polished arrow.’ God had protected the prophet until the right time – ‘in the shadow of his hand he hid me’ and ‘concealed me in his quiver.’ Planned, prepared, protected: three ‘P’s this time! God had gone ahead and done all this before the prophet got to respond to the call with his ‘Yes.’

With his Servant and Son Jesus God also went ahead and prepared him and prepared the way for him to be born ‘when the time was right’, as Paul says in Galatians. There were plans, there were prophecies. People were prepared for their part. All this enabled Jesus to fulfil his call.

And God also goes ahead of us, preparing us and our circumstances for his call upon our lives. As a number of you know, when I thought God was calling me to something but I didn’t know what, I ended up studying Theology at an Anglican theological college. When the calling more clearly became one to pastoral ministry, I didn’t know whether to stay in my native Methodism or go over into the Church of England, for which I was seeing a very good advert.

In the end, I went to see a pastor friend who was neither Methodist nor Anglican. I needed someone neutral! When I explained my predicament, Colin said to me that he was a pastor in his tradition because it was the one in which he had been raised and found faith. And if I believed in the providence of God, then could I see my upbringing as an accident? For this reason and other logical arguments that he added, I offered for the ministry in the tradition in which I too had been raised. And here I am.

How do you look at the way God has prepared and ordered aspects of your life as being ways in which he has laid the foundations for your particular calling to be his servant?

Secondly, the crisis:
Despite all this, the prophet, who knows he has been called to be God’s servant, has a crisis of faith. Or perhaps we should call it a crisis of confidence or a crisis of fruitlessness. It comes in verse 4:

But I said, ‘I have laboured in vain;
    I have spent my strength for nothing at all.
Yet what is due to me is in the Lord’s hand,
    and my reward is with my God.’

It’s all been a waste of time. I’ve achieved nothing. What’s the point? That’s what he’s saying. Never assume that people who hold lofty callings from God just lurch from one triumph to another victory. And if they tell you they do, you have my permission to disbelieve them. A crisis in the calling to serve God is a common thing.

Later this week, we shall doubtless think about Jesus’ own crisis of confidence in his calling. It happened in Gethsemane. Father, if it is possible, please take this cup of suffering away from me. I know what it is going to involve, and I shudder. Yet not my will but yours be done.

I would guess that most or all of us at some point have had a crisis of confidence in God and in what we are meant to be doing for him. It is not just people like me who live with depression who get those feelings that it’s all pointless and we have wasted our lives.

And when we go through those dark seasons, I commend the Psalms. Some people don’t like the rather bleak and harrowing language that some of the Psalmists use. It’s not very nice, neat, and middle class, is it? But the Psalms give us explicit permission to be open and honest with God, red-raw even. As someone once said, ‘Most of the Bible speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us.’

For when we have our crises, God is the safest place we can go. We can batter our fists on his chest, but we only ever do that while he is holding us in his arms. We are about to see in the third point that he does not have words of condemnation for his servant who is facing his crisis of confidence.

So let’s move on and hear that.

Thirdly, the cure:
The prophet has just said that things are not going well, and God’s response is compassionate, just not in the way we might expect. Is it to give him time off to rest, as he did when Elijah was stressed, running for his life from Jezebel? No: it’s very different. Hear again verses 5 and 6:

5 And now the Lord says –
    he who formed me in the womb to be his servant
to bring Jacob back to him
    and gather Israel to himself,
for I am honoured in the eyes of the Lord
    and my God has been my strength –
6 he says:
‘It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
    to restore the tribes of Jacob
    and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
    that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’

God says, don’t put yourself down, because I rate you so highly – ‘honoured in the eyes of the Lord’, even. In fact, although you may not have confidence right now, I have every confidence in you. So much so that I am going to entrust you with even more. I so believe in what you can do with me that no longer is your calling simply to bring my people back to the Promised Land, I’m also commissioning you to reflect my light to all the nations. It’s not so much the adding of a burden as a vote of divine confidence.

Did that happen with Jesus? Well, possibly. Before the Cross his main mission was to God’s people, the Jews. Yes, he commended the faith of the Roman centurion and of the Syrophoenician woman, but he said his main focus was ‘The lost sheep of Israel.’ However, after the Resurrection, he commissions his disciples to take the Gospel of the Kingdom to Jerusalem, Judea, and all the ends of the earth.

Could it be that God might say and do something along those lines with us when we have our crises? Dare we believe that God believes in us more than we believe in ourselves? For he knows better than we do what we can accomplish when he equips us with his Spirit.

I’ll finish with some words of Graham Kendrick that I like. He once said, ‘When the odds get too big, I just remember that me plus God equals an invincible minority.’

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Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (1) Isaiah 42:1-9

Some bonus blogs for you over the next few days, since one of my churches here likes to have some Holy Week meditations. The Lectionary Old Testament readings take the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ of Isaiah, and I’m reflecting on them.

I don’t have time for an accompanying video, but here at least is the text I have written.

Introduction to series[i]
Since 1892, when a German Lutheran scholar named Bernhard Duhm published a commentary on Isaiah, the four ‘Servant Songs’ in Isaiah chapters 42, 49, 50, and 52-53 have been regarded as separate works that belong together in their own right and not in the context where they have been placed in the book.

But this was blown apart in 1983 by a Swedish scholar, Tryggve Mettinger. While Mettinger agreed that there were difficulties interpreting the ‘songs’ in their contexts, that was still less problematic than taking them out of context.

He also said they are not strictly ‘songs.’ Granted, they are poetic – but much of this section of Isaiah is poetic.

Further, they are not the only passages to reference the ‘Servant of the Lord’ in Isaiah. It is a common theme.

Another question to ask is, ‘Who exactly is the Servant?’ Answers vary, and that includes varying from passage to passage. It’s a question we’ll be asking each day in these meditations.

Nevertheless, we can see the influences of the ‘Servant’ passages on Jesus. They inform his identity and his ministry, including his baptism and his healing ministry. Considering the relationship of these readings to Jesus will make them relevant to Holy Week.

And from there we need to make this all relevant to us. So with each reading we shall look at the servant, Jesus, and us.

Session 1
Isaiah 42:1-9

In this case, the servant is almost certainly Israel, following on from references in the previous chapter. So we’ll think here about Israel, Jesus, and us. I’m going to break the themes of these verses down into three ‘C’s: Commitment/Call/Covenant.

Firstly, commitment:
It’s clear from the outset that God is committed to his servant:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
    my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him

Uphold, delight, my Spirit. All signs of God’s commitment to the servant.

But verse 1 ends with the suggestion that in response to that the servant is committed to God:

and he will bring justice to the nations.

God is committed to Israel in love and in empowering her for the reason he called her. In response, Israel is committed to God’s cause.

At least, that’s the ideal, and we know Israel didn’t live up to it. And thus when we see this in the light of Jesus, we remember that in the New Testament Jesus fulfils everything that Israel was meant to do. He is the True Israel.

So it’s not surprising that we see the same mutual commitment between God and Jesus. At his baptism, the voice from heaven says that God is delighted in Jesus, and the Spirit comes down on him there, just before he begins his public ministry.

In the light of the way we have rightly deduced the doctrine of the Trinity from the Bible, then no wonder the mutual commitment between God and Jesus, involving the work of the Spirit seems logical and even more intense than the relationship between God and Israel. Here is the basis on which Jesus set out on his mission that would eventually lead him to Jerusalem: he is dearly beloved of the Father, and he, even as the Son of God, is also a man empowered by the Holy Spirit.

When we consider ourselves, let us too wonder at the mutuality of the commitment between God and ourselves. We as his servants today are also upheld. God also delights in us – yes, really. Some of us find that hard to believe, but it’s true. He delights in us before we have even done anything for him. His commitment to us is shown in the gift of the Spirit.

Our commitment as servants is only in response to these prior commitments of love by God to us. We do not win God over by his goodness, but we respond to his commitment to us – ultimately seen at the end of this week at the Cross – by committing ourselves to him and the cause of his kingdom.

Secondly, call:
Well, the call is there in that description of our response of commitment:

and he will bring justice to the nations.

But what is that call to bring justice? John Goldingay points out that the Hebrew word mishpat that is translated ‘justice’ here has several shades of meaning: justice, judgment, and decisions[ii].

Therefore Israel was called to bring God’s just decisions to the world. This would not merely mean justice in the terms of condemning sin and sinners, this would also be in declaring what is right, and his grace and mercy, because grace is part of what he has decided and mercy is a part of justice, it is not the opposite of justice.

This was Israel’s calling from the beginning. When God called Abram and began to form a people for himself, it was to bless the nations, not simply enjoy blessing themselves. That Israel failed in this is seen in books like Jonah, which is a satire on Israel’s unwillingness to bless the nations.

Jesus, of course did bring God’s just decisions as he inaugurated the kingdom, taught God’s ways, and offered grace and mercy to sinners.

This becomes the church’s call as God’s servants. While bringing justice will involve declaring to the world what God says is right and wrong, it will not stop at that, or we shall be perceived as harsh and judgmental. It will be accompanied by declaring God’s decision to offer grace and mercy to all who will accept it and respond to him in Christ.

And perhaps we see this note of compassion in the proclamation of justice from the next words in the passage:

2 He will not shout or cry out,
    or raise his voice in the streets.
3 A bruised reed he will not break,
    and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.

The tone is quiet and gentle, not loud and strident. Is that something we can aspire to?

Thirdly, covenant:
In verses 1 to 4 God speaks about the servant. In verses 5 to 9 he speaks to the servant. It’s like he’s saying, ‘You’ve heard what the calling is. Now do you know what it is going to involve?’

He tells Israel that even though he is ‘The Creator of the heavens’ (verse 5) he will take them by the hand (verse 6) – that commitment again – as they set out on their task to

to open eyes that are blind,
    to free captives from prison
    and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. (Verse 7)

And in the midst of that, God also says,

I will keep you and will make you
    to be a covenant for the people
    and a light for the Gentiles (verse 6b).

Covenant. Light to the Gentiles. Israel had broken her covenant, and failed to be a light to the Gentiles, choosing instead to mimic them.

But God renews the call here. He does not toss his people aside. They have failed, but his grace and mercy is extended to them, too.

When we consider Jesus as the Servant, then of course we are not talking the language of failure to serve God at all, and the work opening blind eyes and freeing captives can be clearly seen in his public ministry. Of course, doing so wound up the authorities and helped bring him to Holy Week and the Cross. But these things were the work of the Servant, the True Israel.

But when it comes to us, we like Israel have failed. We are to be a blessing to the nations, but we are not always. We are to bring healing into society, but we are not consistent in doing so. Perhaps some of us think that God will have lost his patience with us after repeatedly disappointing him. If so, then look again at the renewal of the covenant and the mission here. Maybe as we dwell on Jesus the Servant we will hear God renewing his commitment and call to us, assuring us that he has not broken covenant with us. We often think of Holy Week as being about endings: could it also be about n

[i] John Goldingay, Isaiah (New International Biblical Commentary); Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 2001, p237,

[ii] Goldingay, p239.

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Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 2, Jesus and John the Baptist (John 1:1-18)

John 1:1-18

Isn’t it strange that just as ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’ is on our screens yet again that John the Baptist comes into focus in the church year? The man whom Matthew tells us wore clothes made of camel’s hair and lived on a diet of locusts and honey[1] sounds perfect for the bush tucker trial.

And speaking personally, I’d rather engage with John the Baptist than Nigel Farage. Which is one major reason I’m not watching this year.

But we think of John at this time due to his connection with Jesus – not simply that they were related through their mothers[2] but that they were related in the purposes of God. We talk about John as the ‘Forerunner’ of Jesus. Their relationship is important for the Advent story.

But it’s not just interesting historical detail. John’s mission of preparing the way for Jesus is also a model for the ways in which God gives us our mission of pointing to Jesus.

I’m going to explore that in two phases today.

Firstly, John was sent.

We are used in the Methodist Church to the idea of ministers being sent. I was sent to this appointment by the authority of the Methodist Conference. The Salvation Army send their officers; the Roman Catholics send their priests. (Other denominations are different and speak less of the church sending and more of God calling.)

But being sent isn’t just a churchy thing. It happens in other areas of life, too. As I mentioned to some around Remembrance Sunday last month, I am the first man in my family for a couple of generations not to go into the Royal Air Force. My Dad only did National Service, but I often thought he might have fancied a longer time in it than that. My uncle served for many years, and so did my three male cousins.

The armed services’ concept of a ‘posting’ is very much a sending, and young families are often in an area only for a short time before the next posting happens, with adverse effects upon socialisation and education. One of my cousins was awarded the MBE for work he and his wife did on RAF bases with lonely families.

John the Baptist’s sending comes not from the church or the armed services, but from God:

6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

And yes, John has a very special calling that we mark at this time of year. And yes, we are used to the idea that certain Christians have particular callings in which they are sent by God.

Sadly, what we forget in all that is that every Christian is called and sent by God in some respect. Being sent by God doesn’t automatically mean being sent to dark jungles to be attacked by ferocious creatures and wild savages. Sometimes, God has already sent us to the place where we are, and this is the place where we are called to be fruitful and faithful for him.

Perhaps we still have that mediaeval Roman Catholic view of being sent that regarded the only vocations worth mentioning as those where someone was called to the church – priests, monks, and nuns. At least the Reformers broadened out that sense of vocation so that Martin Luther, ever provocative in his writing, could say that were the job of village hangman to fall vacant, the devout Christian should apply.

I am not here to recruit any hangmen today! But I am here to invite us all to consider our sense of being sent. Has God sent us to the particular job where we work? The neighbourhood where we live? The social groups in which we mix?

And if we think that’s possible, how does that change our attitude to those workplaces, neighbourhoods, and social groups? Are we on a mission from God in those places? Have we been placed there to live out our faith and bless those we meet with the love of God in our attitudes and actions? Has God sent us there as a sign of his abiding truth to those who may or may not want to know about it?

And for others of us, have we become restless where we are? Is it because we have not embraced the sense that God has sent us here, or is God preparing us to take up another posting and be sent somewhere else? Is this an issue that some of us should be praying about?

Secondly, John was specifically sent as a witness.

One of the things I do when I go to preach at a new church is I always ask for an assurance from the person on the sound desk that they will turn my microphone off during the hymns. Much as I love music, I am not blessed in that area with any personal ability. I was once next to my aunt in a congregation and she said to me afterwards, “I’m glad my bad singing voice has passed down another generation in the family.”

So when my friends in the church youth group formed a band, I was the only one not to be part of it. They became quite popular in local church circles and sold out some concerts.

I talk in the first chapter of my book about some of the socially awkward ways in which I related to them. Yet one Saturday evening in December, and I think it proved to be their biggest concert ever, they involved me by asking me to be the compère.

It stayed with me, because the next morning the Advent theme was John the Baptist, and the preacher spoke about how John was the compère for Jesus. Given my rôle the previous night, that description stuck with me. Just as the compère’s job is not to point to themselves but to the act everyone has paid to see, so the rôle of John the Baptist is not to big himself up but to be ‘a witness to the light’:

7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

This rôle of a witness is seen in some of the other New Testament models for those who speak of Christ. We have the herald, who brought ‘good news’, rather like a town crier. ‘Good news’ was a technical term in the Roman Empire for the announcements heralds made that either the Roman army had won a great battle or that there was a new emperor on the throne. The first Christians translated this to their heralding of a different good news, the good news that God had won a great battle against evil at the Cross and that there was now a new king of the universe, Jesus the Lord.

And we have the ambassador that the Apostle Paul talks about. The purpose of an ambassador is to represent the king and the kingdom that sent them to an alien land. Paul and the first Christians saw themselves as representing Christ and the kingdom of God in an alien land.

All of these images – the witness, the herald, and the ambassador – have one thing in common. These spokespeople are not drawing attention to themselves but to Jesus Christ and the good news of God’s kingdom.

This was John’s purpose in a particularly special way when Jesus came into the world and thirty years later began his public ministry. It is also our calling.

For the New Testament also calls us witnesses. We may not all be evangelists, but we are all witnesses. Every Christian has the ability to witness to Jesus Christ by speaking about what he has done for them and what he has done for the world.

Think of a witness in a court of law. The witness speaks of what he or she has seen or heard, or about what he knows to be true. These are the things we do as witnesses for Christ, too. We speak about our experience of Jesus. We speak about what we know about him. Sure, we are not all what the courts call expert witnesses – perhaps those are the evangelists – but if we think about it, can we not all think of what Jesus has done for us, what he means to us, and what we know for sure about him?

Conclusion

Last week we saw that the Father’s relationship with Jesus said something about our relationship with Jesus, too. This week, John’s relationship with Jesus also has something to say about our relationship with Jesus.

Last week we saw that just as the Father’s relationship with Jesus was characterised by unity, love, and light, so too was Jesus’ mission to the world. This week with John we find that we are sent by God as heralds and ambassadors of King Jesus and his kingdom of unity, love, and light.

May the Holy Spirit show us the place where we are sent. And may we depend on that same Spirit to empower us as witnesses to Jesus and all that he has done.

[1] Matthew 3:4

[2] Luke 1:36

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Following Your Calling (Mark 7:24-37) Ordinary 23 Year B

Mark 7:24-37

There is a meme on the Internet with these words: ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.’

It then claims that the quotation is from Abraham Lincoln – think about it!

One area where we should be very careful not to believe everything we read on the Internet is when all and sundry offer commentary on difficult Bible passages. And boy do we have a difficult passage this week. What does Jesus think he’s doing, speaking to the Syro-Phoenician woman like that?

27 ‘First let the children eat all they want,’ he told her, ‘for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’

Well, the stupid and arrogant brigade are only too quick to tell you. They say that Jesus was a racist and that even he had to learn how to treat people of other races well from the woman.

Of course, what they’re really saying is, you should all be as enlightened as us!

When you get a difficult passage like this and when you come across Jesus saying strange and apparently disturbing things, the first thing you need to do is study the text very carefully. Jumping to conclusions just based on how it reads in English without checking with specialist biblical scholars is dangerous. So is reading it as if it’s a contemporary incident in our culture.

For one thing, racism as we know it didn’t exist in Jesus’ society. There were forms of prejudice, yes, but not in the way that we shamefully discriminate against another race or a person of different skin colour. Therefore, to assume that Jesus was being racist is a fundamental mistake.

In any case, this comes in a series of chapters in Mark where Jesus is criss-crossing Lake Galilee between Jewish and Gentile populations. He has healed a Gentile like the Gerasene demoniac. In the previous episode which we considered last week, he has brought down the barrier of the Jewish food laws. To make Jesus a racist against the Gentiles beggars belief.

For another, we need to look at translation issues. If we think Jesus is referring to the woman as some kind of feral dog, we are wrong. The word is not that for a wild dog but for a pet dog, a lap dog, a house dog. This story (in its form here in Mark and also in Matthew) is the only time that word is used. Everywhere else the word for dog is a street dog – but not here.[1]

What does this mean? Jesus is painting a rather more endearing picture of a family where the children give scraps to the beloved family dog. It’s rather more affectionate than that painted by those who jump in screaming, ‘Racism!’

Now granted, it’s still provocative in a way because it’s not what you expect Jesus to say in response to a request for healing, but that’s because what Jesus is doing here is speaking in the form of a riddle. It’s designed to elicit a response from the woman, and that’s exactly what he gets:

28 ‘Lord,’ she replied, ‘even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’

And by the way – did you notice how she said ‘the dogs under the table’? She had definitely understood Jesus to mean family pets, not wild dogs.

Jesus is saying something like this. My first calling is to take the kingdom of God to Israel, the People of God. I’m not concentrating on the Gentile mission, which comes after that.

Nevertheless, given the woman’s faith, he heals her daughter by expelling the demon. Even Jesus with his focussed calling on bringing the message of the kingdom to Israel recognises that faith exists outside Israel’s boundaries and on occasions like this he can flex his calling to bring the love of God to this woman and her family.

And having got to that point, I think we can now make a couple of applications from the story to our own lives.

Firstly, are you living out your calling?

Jesus was clear: his priority was to go to ‘the lost sheep of Israel.’ That was his focus. The good news of God’s kingdom had to come first to those whom God had made into his people over many centuries. They were the priority in his calling. For he was the Son of God, which means not only that he was divine, but also that he was the True Israel. He was fulfilling the destiny of Israel. So he had to come to them first.

This determined what he did and where he went. He knew this was his Father’s will for him.

Every Christian has a calling. It isn’t always to a ‘religious job’, such as being a minister. It can be to a certain profession or industry. It can be a calling in family life. It can be something we’re called to do in the church or the community. It can be about the use of a particular gift or talent.

If you don’t know what yours is, then pray about it. In the meantime, dedicate the gifts and resources you know you have to the service of God, and consider the maxim offered by the spiritual writer Frederick Buechner when he said that vocation was ‘where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’

Once you do have a sense of calling, then the example of Jesus means that it becomes a significant factor in determining what you do and what you leave aside. It helps you when people ask if you will take on a responsibility, because you can consider whether their request matches your calling. If it does, then fine. If not, then the answer is probably ‘no.’

Actually, I suspect that many of us need to say ‘no’ a lot more in order to be able to fulfil our callings. We get more hooked into a human weakness of wanting to please people and remain popular with them than we do following the call of God on our lives.

A few years ago, a very popular book for businesspeople and leaders in society was a title called ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown. Basically, it’s a book that teaches you to say ‘no’ to everything outside your calling. McKeown says that if you have doubts about whether something is consistent with your calling, then you should say ‘no’ to it. I wonder whether many of us in the church should listen to him.

Secondly, though, are you flexible about your calling?

I say that, because I think that’s what Jesus showed in this story. Yes, his calling was to the people of Israel, but here he was in a place where there was less likelihood of him being able to do that. Tyre was a Gentile town.

So although he’s trying to stay low profile and undercover, when the woman discovers his presence and brings her heart-rending request he certainly has the opportunity to meet her need with his divine compassion without adversely affecting his calling.

Therefore, although following our calling is usually pretty decisive, we need to listen to God for those occasions when we need to be flexible rather than rigid.

Jesus homed in on that here as he told his riddle and the woman showed evident faith in her response. When he sees that faith, he acts.

In other words, he knows that God is at work here. The Spirit of God has surely been working in the woman’s life, preparing her for what will lead to Jesus’ life-saving intervention.

That, then, gives us an idea about when to be flexible about our calling. It’s not simply that we have some down time and a gap in our diary so we can fit in one of the people who is regularly badgering us. Instead, it’s about discerning the work of the Spirit who is doing kingdom things and making kingdom opportunities available.

One good way of discerning whether we’re being called to flex our calling is by consulting trusted friends. If you start to get enquiries and requests from people for your time and what they want are things that go beyond your regular calling as you understand it, then it can be wise to take the details of those approaches to your spouse, or to some wise friends. Let them help you discern an answer to these questions: does this request constitute a reasonable flexing of your calling or will it distract you from your calling?

In conclusion, then, when we dig into this story and get beyond the superficial ways of treating it, what we discover here is that the example of Jesus is very practical for us living out our calling, whether he’s called us to serve him in the church or in the world.

He wants us to follow our calling with a passion, but also to listen carefully for those occasional diversions from the route when something else is required of us.

As we do this, the kingdom of God will advance.

And that’s what we want. Isn’t it?

[1] On this and the general thrust of this sermon, see Ian Paul, Did the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7 teach Jesus not to be racist?

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