A capable wife

Haiku of exceptional virtue

Celebration of

womanhood. The bar is high,

some find it daunting.

No mere appendage,

this woman is capable,

independent, too.

She is resourceful,

skilful, does ev’rything – more

– that a man might do

This amazing wife

never rests, organises

her house with aplomb.

Filled with charity,

industrious, making warm

clothes for her household.

At the city gates

her husband is found, sitting

among the elders.

This woman is strong.

She is clothed in dignity,

kindness and wisdom.

Blessed by her children

and praised by her husband: You

surpass all women!

Charm is deceitful,

beauty passes; she who fears

God is to be praised.

© Ken Rookes 2024

Incognito

 Haiku of the impudent answer

Jesus is in Tyre,

a coastal city up north

in Gentile country.

He is travelling

incognito, needs a break.

But the word gets out.

A woman finds him.

Her daughter is sick; she wants

Jesus to heal her.

The woman bows down

at his feet. She’s desperate,

begging him to help.

You’re not one of us.

I’ve been sent to feed the kids,

not to feed the dogs.

The woman insists,

impudent. Even the dogs

get to eat the scraps!

Jesus laughs out loud.

Quite right, great answer! Go home,

your daughter is healed.

Holiday over,

Jesus makes his way back home;

brings blessing and hope.

They were astounded.

At his hands the deaf and mute

find healing and life.

© Ken Rookes 2021

Two stories

Haiku of hope

They weave together,

two stories of healing, hope;

twelve years connect them.

Twelve years of bleeding,

Twelve years of shame. If only

she could touch his hem.

Twelve years and dying,

her parents are distraught. Come,

Jesus, heal our child!

A girl, a woman

both needing their lives restored.

Bring healing, give hope.

The girl sleeps, he says.

They laugh, knowing she is dead.

He sees beyond death

Ah, Jesus, my friend.

My own suffering is small,

yet speak life to me!

© Ken Rookes 2021

 

Breaking Rules

 

Breaking Rules

Haiku for getting sorted

.

He is dismissive

of ritual cleanliness

and its importance.

Consider your mouth:

What goes in does not defile,

rather, what comes out!

The Pharisees fume!

This teacher has no respect

for our traditions!

Forget traditions!

If they do not lead to life,

they are not from God.

Blind guides surround us;

servants of irrelevant

and failed religion.

The heart is the source

of evil acts; violence,

theft, abuse and greed.

Another story.

A Canaanite woman comes

pleading: Heal my girl.

Sorry, I can’t help.

Came for Israel’s lost sheep,

wasn’t sent for you.

But even the dogs

may eat of the scraps that fall

from the table’s edge.

Top answer! He said.

Great is your faith. It shall be

as you requested.

© Ken Rookes 2020

When you are thirsty

Haiku for parched souls

When you are thirsty

and someone gives you water,

you take it gladly.

A surprise meeting;

the Samaritan woman

and the Jewish man.

The well: this image

of life splashed with hope, purpose,

and filled with spirit.

Life, not limited

by all the negative stuff;

full and unconstrained.

Drink this life, woman,

man, child; all of you who yearn

for truth and fullness.

The hour is coming

for all the true worshippers

to reveal themselves.

What will be the sign,

how will we recognise them?

One thing; by their love.

I know that he comes,

the Messiah sent from God.

He is with you now.

Go, tell the city,

don’t keep this news to yourself;

others also thirst.

© Ken Rookes 2020

Not on the Sabbath

Haiku of freedom

Jesus was teaching

in one of the synagogues,

it was the Sabbath.

She came to see him,

the woman; she hadn’t stood

straight for eighteen years.

As we might expect

Jesus spoke words of freedom;

touched and made her whole.

Standing straight, praising,

and giving glory to God,

the woman rejoiced.

The law is broken!

They protest: Six days for work,

don’t use the Sabbath!

You are hypocrites!

he answers. On the Sabbath

we do what we must.

It’s not the Sabbath

that stops you rejoicing, but

your hatred for me.

Get hung up on law,

ignore what God is doing;

how sad you all are!

© Ken Rookes 2019

Incognito

Haiku for staying uninvolved

Jesus headed north

to foreign parts, seeking rest.

Tell no one I’m here.

The word got around.

A woman came to see him;

her daughter was ill.

She was a Gentile

with no claim on this Hebrew,

except that of love.

Come and heal my child,

cast the demon out of her,

give her back to me.

No, it is not right.

My food is for the children,

it’s not for the dogs.

Not fair! She replied.

The dogs under the table

get the scraps that fall.

He must think again,

enlarge his understandings

and respond with love.

That’s a great answer!

Quite right, you can go home now,

your daughter is freed.

© Ken Rookes 2018

Healing and hope

Haiku for desperate people

On the other side

of the lake, a crowd gathered;,

eager for his word.

A desperate dad,

synagogue leader Jairus,

fell at Jesus’ feet.

Begs for his daughter,

She’s dying, come and touch her

with your healing hands.

A woman is there,

bleeding, unclean for twelve years;

doctors have not helped.

She comes quietly,

feeling shame at her illness;

touches his clothing.

Immediately

her flow of blood ends. What joy!

she knows she is healed.

He somehow feels it,

asks who it was who touched him

as the crowd presses.

In fear and trembling

she falls before him. Daughter,

be healed, go in peace.

He has been delayed;

reports are brought of the girl.

No point in coming.

She’s not dead, he says,

just sleeping. They scoff and laugh.

He goes to the house.

He takes the girls hand,

(She was all of twelve years old),

Little girl, get up!

What wonder is this?

He speaks and his words bring life;

this is the gospel!

© Ken Rookes 2018

the lesson of the syrophoenician woman

This, I think, is the great lesson of the Syrophoenician woman. It teaches us the dynamics of racism, of how even the best of humanity — the Incarnation himself — can get caught up in systems of oppression, in a culture of supremacy. As a good Jew, Jesus would have been reared to give thanks daily that he was born a Jew, not a Gentile, a man and not a woman. Jesus could not help but become entangled by such a sexist and racist snare.
Jesus, given his embedded culture, could not be colorblind. And neither can we.

But being caught in such evil, however, does not make one an overt racist. It is what happens in the moments afterwards that makes that determination. How we respond, when confronted with the narratives of the oppressed, reveal who we truly are. Do we continue to ignore or deny these realities of oppression? Mock them? Continue to brush them aside as dogs?

Or do we, like Jesus, do the miraculous and listen to them, be changed by the power of the truth of they are speaking?

When this woman, in boldness, confronts Jesus and his racist, sexist slur, Jesus listens, and hears. It is the only time recorded in the gospels in which Jesus changes his mind.

“But even the dogs get table scraps,” she replies, a complex response often required of the member of the “lesser race” who stands up to dismissive racism even while accepting its instituted, ugly, dehumanizing order.

Jesus is astounded, the holy wind knocked out of him. A moment before, she was but a dog to him. In the next, the scales fall from his eyes as he listens to her and sees her for what she truly is, a woman of great faith, a moral exemplar, his teacher.

Jesus does the most difficult thing for those of us born into the unfortunate privilege of dominance or prejudice.

He listens. And allows himself to be fundamentally changed.


Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidhenson/2012/09/jesus-was-not-colorblind-racial-slurs-and-the-syrophoenician-woman-lectionary/#mUebgzFlobv8Hzgx.99

Nothing I can do

Haiku of learning

Wrong race and wrong creed.

The man puts the woman off

when she asks for help.

Nothing I can do;

the food is for the children,

it’s not for the dogs.

That is so, she says,

but even dogs may consume

table scraps that fall.

Good point, says Jesus,

You got me! Your faith is strong;

your daughter is healed.

© Ken Rookes 2017

At Jacob's Well

Haiku for an opening dialogue

Did Jesus say Please,

when he asked her for a drink?

Let's assume he did.

Having slaked his thirst,

he smiled, offered the woman

water that's lasting.

She could play his game,

this Samaritan woman:

You need a bucket!

Not for this water;

You will never thirst again!

Yes, that would be cool.

Go get your husband.

Haven't got one, she replied.

Mostly true, he said.

They talk religion,

where best to worship God.

Your church, or mine?

He's coming, she said,

the Messiah, called the Christ.

You're talking to him.

Epilogue.

Much excitement!

A prophet, perhaps the Christ;

come see for yourselves!

© Ken Rookes 2017

On the sabbath

Haiku for the religiously observant.

On the sabbath day

the afflicted woman came.

She asked no favours.

Eighteen years of pain,

with body bent and twisted;

Jesus called to her.

Freed by Jesus' words,

standing upright, rejoicing;

giving praise to God.

Religious leaders

speak to defend the sabbath

from such outrages.

Six days for working!

The seventh's not for healing;

come another day!

Get real, says Jesus.

Common sense and compassion

must rule ev'ry day.

Living is empty

if love no longer shapes us;

Embrace its freedom.

The crowd rejoices;

opponents are put to shame.

Don't mess with Jesus.

© Ken Rookes 2016

An alabaster jar

As is their wont, the Pharisees grumble

at the wastefulness of a woman;

who, in this story of beauty and grace,

spills her precious ointment upon Jesus' feet.

They also grumble

at the wastefulness of the anointed one,

who, in his larger story of grace and beauty

pours love upon the undeserving.

Forgiveness and love, spilled with abandon;

this is the message of his living.

Consider this;

you who are wont to grumble.

© Ken Rookes 2016

A woman and a girl

A woman and a girl

For the woman,

twelve years of suffering,
the physical distress of her bleeding
matched only by its consequent social exclusion.
(She is ritually unclean, and will remain so
while ever her haemorrhage goes unchecked).
For the girl, according to the fears of her father,
twelve years of living are about to be concluded,
just when her life should be beginning.


Except that the girl doesn’t die;
the woman, too, is healed by the teacher..
Connected only by a narrative
and the same span of years,
each is restored, in her own way,
to life, family and community.
This, according to gospel writer, Mark,
is what Jesus, the one sent from above,
does.

© Ken Rookes 2015

Prejudice

The Bible,

that most ancient collection of writings,

esteemed by some and held sacred by others,

includes traces of racism and religious prejudice.

More than a few fragments,

if we’re able to admit it.

Its stories include a powerful foundational myth

asserting a nation’s superiority

as God’s chosen people;

making the avoidance of such prejudiced conclusions

somewhat problematic.

Occasionally a reckless prophet- type person

came along to question that myth;

they were generally pointed

in the direction of the door.

It is still so.

Even Jesus, the travelling teacher from the north,

seems to have been comfortable enough

with established opinion on this matter.

It took some time,

together with the insistent and intrusive pleadings

of a desperate foreign woman;

but at last, we are pleased to say,

his metaphorical copper coin loosened,

and finally dropped.

© Ken Rookes 2014

At Sychar

 

At Sychar the ancient well,
said to have been dug by Jacob himself,
continues its unfailing work;
storing the generosity of the even older spring
in its cool, dark pool.
Deep below the sun-bleached rocks,
it holds enough water
to deliver its aqueous life
to inhabitants of the Samaritan village,
and to all who come looking;
provided they have a bucket
and sufficient length of rope.
Lacking such basics,
the travelling man from the north,
thirsty from his journey,
makes his famous request
of a woman who came to fill her empty jar.
A spirited conversation bubbles up.
From earnest banter it spills out
into life’s exponential invitation;
to fashion a bucket,
to twist a rope,
and to delve deeply within.

© Ken Rookes 2014

Put them to shame

Put them to shame, Jesus:
those pompous guardians of Sabbath law
whose self-enforced enslavement
causes them to overlook things of wonder,
grace and beauty.

Put them to shame, Jesus:
the offence-takers who kill hope
and close their eyes to love’s possibilities.
The law has not saved the woman,
bent and broken for eighteen years;
she is also a child of God.

Teach them, Jesus,
that liberation and truth will not be denied,
and that grace abounds and extends,
unconfined by our fears
or the hardness of our hearts.

Put them to shame,
Jesus; put them to shame.

© Ken Rookes

forgiveness to the max

There is an old legend about Judas that Madeleine L'Engle tells. The legend is that after his death Judas found himself at the bottom of a deep and slimy pit. For thousands of years he wept his repentance, and when the tears were finally spent, he looked up and saw way, way up a tiny glimmer of light. After he had contemplated it for another thousand years or so, he began to try to climb up towards the light. The walls of the pit were dark and slimy, and he kept slipping back down. Finally, after great effort, he neared the top and then he slipped and fell all the way back down to the bottom. It took him many years to recover, all the time weeping bitter tears of grief and repentance, and then he started to climb up again. After many more falls and efforts and failures, he reached the top and dragged himself into an upper room with twelve people seated around the table. "We've been waiting for you, Judas," Jesus said. "We couldn't begin till you came." 
https://www.stphilipscathedral.org/sermons/newsView.asp?NewsId=40968880&CategoryID=3

Tepid hospitality

Turning away from the righteous Pharisee
he looked with love
upon the subject of his host’s derision.
The unnamed woman knew her place,
and had knowingly disregarded all the conventions,
upsetting more than a jar of ointment.
The consensus was clear: this woman
did not fit in with polite company.
She belonged out there,
in the shadowed places,
where ambiguities abound
and sinners lead their anxious lives.
Not in here, where the well-mannered Simon
extends his tepid hospitality
to this latest sensation,
the wandering teacher from the provinces;
he, at least, had an invitation.
With his feet still wet from ointment and tears,
the man speaks softly of warm forgiveness,
of welcome, gratitude, love and peace.
He does not care for the cold and calculating rules
by which respectable society is ordered;
and outrageously says so.


© Ken Rookes 2013

One who loves much

The righteous ones,
offended by her
very presence;
call her sinner,
whore, temptress,
seducer,
promiscuous,
unmarried mother,
unemployed,
dole bludger,
drunkard,
irresponsible,
druggie.
Unoffended
by her intimate
caress;
Jesus calls her
woman,
friend,
forgiven,
one who
loves much.
And God smiles.



© Ken Rookes