Holy Communion for the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity: celebrant the Revd Tola Badejo. Junior Church takes place at the same time in the hall.

First reading: James 2. 1 – 17
Gospel: Mark 7. 24 – 37

Today James addresses a central argument in the church: are believers saved by their faith or by their works? His answer returns the question to the enquirer: how can we believe we have a saving faith if that faith is not reflected in our actions? Faith is also a key element in the Gospel, which contains stories of people healed deep in Gentile territory. Jesus's blunt words to the Syrophoenician woman pose a challenge to commentators, who sometimes try to minimise their force, and perhaps we should understand them less as a literal record of what was said than as Mark's way of underlining the universality of the Gospel; in his account, Jesus himself works through a process of opening his message to people who were alien, and sometimes actively hostile, to Jews. This need for acceptance, the opposite of prejudice, is the link between the two readings: just as Jesus made no distinction between Jew and Gentile, James (who might have been his half-brother) urges us to extend a welcome to all, including those who don't seem to be 'our' kind of people.

The Dutch painting above illustrates the key elements of the Gospel story in a symbolic rather than realistic way - the woman begging for help; a man looking doubtful, as if he's not sure she should be doing this; children eating and dropping crumbs; and little dogs (the Greek NT apparently uses the word for pet dogs rather than working dogs). As usual, much of the setting reflects the artist's own world and the way things appeared in the seventeenth century; while on the one hand this approach might seem faintly ridiculous, on the other it makes the point that story relates to everyone's 'now', whenever that may be.