Video for December 11th, 2025
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
As we draw to the end of our diocesan year of engagement, I wanted to share a few reflections on the year we’ve shared together. A few weeks ago, I was with the people of Bromyard Deanery to celebrate their activities over the past 12 months. Like most of our deaneries, they are a mixture of a small market town and a number of multi-parish benefices. During the service each bought a presentation of what they had been doing. Each benefice had its own charism; each played to their strengths and community relationships. We heard about pilgrimage walks, scratch presentations of Joseph, and new mission initiatives of various kinds. They illustrated what I have always hoped would be the way our diocesan strategy was expressed. There are certain parameters and values which we agreed together at the start of the process, and then all were encouraged to express those in their own local setting. In a time of uncertainty, most strategy experts affirm that such local imagination within a wider framework is the way to chart a new future. The temptation of most institutions is to centralise and try to rule by cen tral dictat. We are all aware that simply doesn’t work in a diocese like ours where we are so dispersed and each of our local churches is so different. One size doesn’t fit all.
Jesus’ engagement with the people he met was similarly diverse. He had a clear sense of his own mission to the people of Israel. However, he wasn’t averse to going outside those boundaries when the opportunity presented itself. I’ve always found Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 rather puzzling. Jesus seems so out of character. She comes to Jesus with news of her daughter’s suffering and begs him to help. His initial response is to ignore her. The disciples ask Jesus to send her away as she’s a nuisance when they are trying to get some R&R. Eventually, Jesus tells her his mission, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” But what on the surface seems even worse, he follows it with. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs”, echoing the words in the Sermon on the Mount not to cast your pearls before swine. Her response, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table”, finally elicits Jesus’ affirmation about her great faith and that her daughter was healed at that very moment. I can’t imagine responding to someone in need in that way myself. But then I read that John the Baptist called the religious leaders a brood of vipers, and Jesus later stuck the boot in by describing them to their face as white-washed tombs! Not how to win friends and influence people.
It remains mysterious to me if I’m honest. However, perhaps it illustrates that responding from the heart to someone’s pain in the moment might not be the wisest pastoral strategy. I have spoken to the families of those suffering addiction who have given in to their children, partners or siblings at the height of withdrawal and given them another fix. Quite understandably, watching the person you love suffering, you want to do something to relieve that suffering. It deals with the pain of the moment but doesn’t address the underlying issue. Its why the most effective addiction treatment doesn’t just deal with the addict but with the whole family system that inadvertently supports the person in their addiction. An addict has to be allowed to get to rock bottom and not bailed out to have a realistic chance of eventually getting clean.
Jesus was sent first to Israel because they had had several thousand years of cultural preparation to help them understand the counter-intuitive nature of the Gospel. The pagan nations around – which is where Jesus encountered the Canaanite woman had no such advantage. The preparatory work would have been very time consuming and Jesus knew he only had limited time. Much better to deploy that time where it was likely to be most effective. He knew he was starting a movement that would do the Canaanite mission later, filled with the Spirit and with the time to love, serve and engage with them. It is this that lay behind Jesus’ response to her. There was a mission, but not ultimately at the expense of compassion, although it looked that way at the beginning.
Jesus engagement with people was always more than just a gut response in the moment. Unfortunately, our Biblical record gives us a bare verbal account. Words alone convey only limited meaning in interpersonal interactions. I’m sure there would have been tone of voice, gesture, eye contact and all the other subtle cues that we use to express ourselves. Jesus’ engagements challenge us to recognise real compassion is not just about pain removal it looks more broadly. The goal of our discipleship is holiness – the capacity to enjoy God forever, not simply happiness which is about pleasure in the moment. May God give us the wisdom to engage with people for their deep good as Jesus did.
+Richard