“Sticking Labels on People”

Rev Dr John Shepherd 08/09/2024

Reading - Mark 7:24-37

One of the ways we try to cope with life’s twists and turns is to sort things into types.  Put things in categories. I remember my first interview with the Headmaster of my old school in Melbourne.   ‘Son,’ he said, ‘don’t think you can get anything past me.  I’ve seen your type before.’ As time went by, I came to understand his philosophy.

There were 900 boys in the school.  Having to see them all as individuals would have driven him mad. He couldn’t have coped.  So he made it workable.  He narrowed it down to three categories.  There were basically only three types of boy, he said, and he didn’t much care for any of them. But having these types meant he could cope.

On Long Island we had a doctor who sat behind his desk, listened to your ailments, then reached over to where he had four stamp gadgets lined up, each with a different prescription.  He looked at you, picked one, banged it on the ink pad, stamped it on his headed paper, and handed it over for you to take to the pharmacist.  Four prescriptions were all that was needed, he said.  If you had anything more complicated than that, you should have gone to hospital. Four was good.  Having to deal with only four types of patient made his life possible.

And the thing is, this is what we all do, pretty much all the time. Consciously or unconsciously.  We put people into pigeon-holes.

T.H.Huxley wrote over a hundred years ago,   ‘One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for someone to go about unlabelled.  The world regards such a person as an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.’So we stick labels on people as though they were jars of jam, in order, to put them in their place, and shelve them. 

The putting of people in their place by labelling them is the setting of the story of the Gentile woman with a sick daughter – today’s Gospel passage from Mark (7:24-30).

It comes from the culture in which the ‘goodies’ were Jews, and the ‘baddies’ were Gentiles, and the point of the story is to n answer the question: did Jesus, a Jew, accept this religious division, this apartheid between Jew and Gentile, and support traditional Judaism.

At first, it seems as though he did. When the Gentile woman appealed to him on behalf of her daughter, he answered, with impeccable Jewish orthodoxy, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it isn’t fair to take the children’s food  - the food of the children of Israel - and throw it to the dogs,’ who were the Gentiles.  Don’t take what’s due to the Jews and give it to Gentiles.

When we try to unravel this story, we have to deal with two difficulties.

First, the controversy in the early church between Jew and Gentile has coloured many of the Gospel stories, and this is one of them.  Would Jesus actually have been so callous, so confrontational, so rude to a woman pleading for help for her sick daughter?  We’d hope not. 

So this story could well have been doctored by the writer to make the conflict between Jews and Gentiles as stark as possible.

Less obvious, but no less important, is that we don’t know the tone of this conversation.

There are times when we read the gospels that we get the impression that everything depends on the tone of voice, and the facial expressions.

Could this be one of those times, and that the very manner in which Jesus dismissed the Gentile woman actually encouraged her to answer back? Possibly, because she certainly did answer back, in spades. ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’

And this is what did it.  This was the circuit breaker. The encounter was no longer between two types of people – between a Gentile woman and a Jewish religious teacher, but between two individual, particular people – a particular woman in trouble, and a particular man in whom she trusted.  It would have been good to know the woman’s name, because one of the characteristic features of people, as distinct from things, is that each of us has a personal name.

That’s why it’s particularly worrying when we find ourselves lumping people into categories –types of boy, types of patient, types of worshippers, types of personality, types of nationality, types of believers.  Types of anything.  None of us want to be regarded as a type. We want to be ‘me,’ not type D4 or C6, as the old, now discredited Myers-Briggs test used to be, which put you in a box, labelled you, reduced you to a robotic ‘type.’ Are you John?  No, I’m a B3.

But, of course, being ‘accepting of difference’ and not putting people in boxes means being comfortable with ambiguity, and that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.  It’s certainly not the cup of tea of people who make a career out of devising personality charts.

If we’re a feeling a bit insecure, a bit one-dimensional, if we find we can’t operate without everything being in a box, lacquered over with luminous certainty and clarity, then today’s story won’t mean much to us. But if we consider that type-casting actually obscures, rather than enlightens our appreciation of others, we’ll understand what today’s story’s all about.

Type-casting keeps us ignorant of others – ignorant of them as individuals, and as a result our destructive thoughts about them can flourish on this ignorance. 

Lumping people into a faceless category is a terrible thing: foreigners, the rich, the poor, Collingwood supporters, Catholics, Protestants, Christians, Jews, and so on.

But having the courage to do away with categories will require us getting to know the people about whom we’re so suspicious and negative, and discovering that they’re not as bad as we’d thought.  Individuals are far more loveable than classes.  That’s why the teaching of Jesus is so encouraging, because it gives us the assurance that the Holy Spirit works in our thoughts, and can change the way we think.  The Christian hope is that our minds can be renewed.

Our uncharitable actions come from thinking one way.  Our charitable actions will come from thinking another way. And this other way makes it possible to take the risk of getting to know the people I fear, despise and hate, and have coped with so far by lumping them into categories, usually in order to demean and dismiss them.  And all this is possible because there is the Holy Spirit, who will change my ideas, and reveal my neighbour to me as the one whom I can love, despite everything.

Thanks be to this loving and gracious God, this glorious Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to whom we offer all praise, honour, glory and thanksgiving, today and always.

Amen.

John Shepherd.