© 1979 India Margaret Sperry
© 1979 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
The Norana episode is a gem of a story and could be compared to a dramatic one-act play. Norana and Jesus are the stars with the others as supporting players.
Norana’s great love for her afflicted daughter could be compared to Jesus’ great love for mankind. Nor were the apostles without love. They loved Jesus and were trying to protect him from intrusion, but they did not yet share his love for mankind.
Norana upset them, She was as determined to see Jesus as they were to protect him. She did not show proper respect for the ecclesiastical authority, their racial superiority or even their masculine superiority. I wonder if they would have been as rude to a Gentile man? At any rate, she irked them. Yet she herself was not discouraged by their rudeness.
If one were to rewrite the story, how could the apostles behavior be improved? Would they deal more kindly with mother and child, perhaps pray for the child, or even go and tell Jesus about the problem? But they were confused about many of Jesus’ teachings, and he was able to use this happening as an object lesson.
There must be something we can learn from this, whether we find ourselves in the position of the apostles or the mother. Can we refrain from taking ourselves too seriously even while taking the gospel seriously?
Norana’s sense of humor appealed to Jesus for he too had a sense of humor and he was sorry that his apostles had so little of it, though they could be of good cheer when things were going well.
When an apostle referred to her as a Gentile “dog,” Norana retorted that she was at least “a believing dog.” (UB 156:1.5)
Jesus was listening, unseen, to all this interchange. Surely we, too, have unseen listeners as we play our parts in the play that has been running since free will appeared on our earth.
Though Norana played a sympathetic part, she was not without fault. She had been informed that Jesus needed rest. And he asked her to tell no one about her daughter’s healing. But she heeded none of this. Both Norana and her daughter proclaimed the news of the healing throughout the area. So great became the commotion that Jesus and his associates were forced to change plans and move elsewhere.
This brings to mind the life plans our Thought Adjusters have made for each of us and how our not listening to them may cause them to change their plans for us, always with the same goal in mind, Surely, changing plans has long been the story on this “world of the cross.”
— India Margaret Sperry
Honaunau, Hawaii