Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Faith Works”
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (James 2:1-17/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Mark 7:24-37/NRSVUE)
Have you ever wondered whether Jesus, having said or done something, later wished that he’d said or done something different? I mean, I can’t imagine that Jesus felt too good after comparing that Syrophonecian woman and her young daughter to “dogs.” And, knowing what we know about Jesus from what the rest of the gospels tell us, I bet he wished he could’ve reeled that one back in. But he couldn’t.
And we, having read what Jesus said, probably wish we hadn’t read it because it seems so unlike Jesus to do something like that. But we did and he did. Perhaps we figure we can rationalize it somehow: “Oh, Jesus didn’t really mean it,” but he did. Or “He intended it as a term of endearment — you know like he was comparing them to cute little puppies or something.” But he wasn’t.
Maybe we’d even go so far as to say that the gospel writers had it wrong — that Matthew and Mark mistakenly included this incident in their respective versions of Jesus’s story because he didn’t actually say any of this. But he said it. Biblical scholars, who disagree about a lot of stuff, actually tend to agree about this — and their reasoning is pretty simple.
Matthew and Mark (as well as Luke and John, for that matter) really love Jesus (why would they go through the trouble of writing their gospels if they didn’t love Jesus?), and they’re trying to give their readers a sense of what an incredible human being Jesus was (as well as demonstrating that he was way more than an incredible human being). Because no one with such a goal would make up an unflattering incident like this and include it Jesus’s life story, it’s reasonably safe to say that it actually happened. And so we’re left to figure out what to make of it.
As our passage from Mark’s Gospel begins, Jesus has just finished telling the scribes and Pharisees what hypocrites they are, and reminding them that the way they act (which has not been so great) matters to God, that the way they treat people (which also has not been so great) matters to God —and I’m sure they were really happy to hear all of this).
Weary from all of his recent arguments with the religious authorities, worn out by all of these people who have been following him around demanding free food and miracles, and likely fearing for both his own safety and that of his disciples, Jesus decides that it’s time to get away.
He heads for the region of Tyre, the land of the Gentiles, which lies well to the northwest of Galilee from where Jesus is traveling (forty miles, give or take, which might not sound very far to us but would have been quite a hike for these folks— I mean, it’s not like they could have taken the train or called an Uber back then).
Jesus must have figured, “They’ll never find me there, no one will want anything from me there.” But, as Mark, tells us, Jesus was wrong about that: When he got to Tyre, “He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. But he could not escape notice.”
A local woman, a Gentile of Syrophonecian origin (meaning that she was from the Roman province of Syria, which included the region of Tyre), shows up at the house in which Jesus is staying, with her daughter in tow, seeking healing for her child, who is apparently burdened by some sort of demon. And this is when the whole scene gets pretty cringy.
As Mark tells it, Jesus responds to the woman’s request by saying, “let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” And while you probably don’t need to understand exactly what Jesus means by this in order to conclude that it’s mean-spirited, it’s important to understand what Jesus means by this for other reasons.
To our twenty-first century ears, it might not sound all that bad to call someone a “dog: but, in those days, it was an awful thing to do. While I might sit on the couch at home with my dog, Olive, curled up next to me as I watch TV, this was not something that really happened back then. The ancients thought of dogs as dirty scavengers, as the lowest of the low — and, let’s be honest, that’s exactly how Jesus meant it here.
The people of Israel, of which Jesus was one, called the Gentiles names like this because they looked down on them, because they saw them as being unworthy others (and, in fairness, the Gentiles probably had similarly choice names for the Israelites too).
So when Jesus tells the Syrophoenician woman asking for his help that the children are to be fed, not the dogs, what he’s really saying is that his mission, at least as he understands it at this point, is to care exclusively for the Israelites (God’s beloved children, God’s chosen people), not the Gentiles (who the Israelites believed were neither God’s beloved children, nor God’s chosen people). I know it’s uncomfortable to think about Jesus behaving like this, but he did.
You see, Jesus, being human, exhibited the same kinds of tendencies that we all do. He got frustrated and said things he probably shouldn’t have said. He just wanted to get away from everybody once in a while. And he also seems to have thought of the world in terms of who’s in and who’s out, who’s one of us and who’s other.
Since Jesus was a dedicated and observant Jew it’s not farfetched to think that he would have seen this woman and her daughter as people who were beneath him because of who they were and where they were from — as people who were neither worthy of his attention nor part of his mission. But, thankfully, this story doesn’t end there.
After Jesus refers to her (and hers) as dogs, the Syrophoenician woman doesn’t bow her head in shame and walk away; she stands her ground and advocates for herself and for her daughter. She doesn’t get down on bended knee and profess her faith; she challenges Jesus for saying what he said. “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” In other words, “You’re wrong Jesus — even those people you see as dogs are recipients of God’s grace.”
And how does Jesus choose to respond to her boldness and her honesty? Basically, by conceding that she was right and giving her what she had asked for. “Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go — the demon has left your daughter,” is what Mark says happened. Jesus, having done wrong, decides to do better.
Presented with the all other more typical and obvious miracles that happen throughout the gospels, we might overlook the incredibly important one that happens right here: Jesus, the Son of God, the Alpha and the Omega, the greatest teacher of them all actually learns something from this Syrophoenician woman and chooses to act differently as a result of what he’s learned. Jesus is opened up to a new way of seeing things; Emmanuel — God with us — experiences a change of heart and mind.
The mission that God has chosen for Jesus (and chosen Jesus for) is so much greater than Jesus had previously thought it was. He realizes here that all of the distinctions we draw between ourselves — Jew and Gentile, insider and outsider, self and other — are irrelevant in God’s reign. Jesus comes to understand that his mission is to share God’s grace with the whole world.
If the Pharisees were behaving like hypocrites for clinging to human law instead of God’s law, then perhaps Jesus, in being so quick to dismiss the Syrophoenician and her daughter as unworthy recipients of God’s mysterious and boundless grace, was behaving like a hypocrite too. But that behavior is not the end of this. The fact that Jesus repents (in the true biblical sense of that word) — the fact that he changes his entire way of looking at the world and his actions towards the people living in it — is the perhaps the greater miracle to be found in this story.
Christians look to Jesus to understand the kind of life that God is calling us to live — and it’s hard to imagine a better example for us to follow than this one. We humans constantly undermine our relationships with our neighbor by clinging to all sorts of prejudices and preconceived notions; I don’t really know why this is true, but it is. And Jesus, because he is fully human, is apparently susceptible to doing the very same thing.
But Jesus was open to other ways of seeing and being, and so was able to be opened by them. And, having experienced this for himself, Jesus chooses to share the experience with others. It’s no coincidence that the next miracle Jesus performs in Mark’s Gospel after being opened by his interaction with the Syrophoenician woman involves doing this for someone else; indeed, as he heals the the man who is brought to him, enabling him to speak and to hear, the very first words that Jesus speaks to him are, “Be opened.’”
This is perhaps the greatest blessing bestowed upon us by our strange and mysterious God, this God who, for some reason, chose to take on human form and become one of us: through Jesus’s experience of repentance, of being opened to the possibility of living in a world where everyone matters, where everyone is God’s beloved child, where everyone is our neighbor, God calls upon us to be opened to the possibility of living in such a world too.
So, how will we respond to that call?