“From there [Jesus] set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet.26 Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.” (Mark 7:24-26)
So begins today’s Gospel story, taken from Mark chapter seven. Our passage today deals with two healings in fact – the healing of the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman (Syrophoenicia being in modern-day Lebanon) and the healing of a deaf and dumb man that takes place in the region of the Decapolis (which was somewhat closer to home for Jesus), and if you haven’t heard the rest of the story you might be forgiven for assuming that both miracles followed the same pattern with which we readers of the New Testament quickly become familiar:
- Someone comes to Jesus with a problem, imploring Him for help.
- Jesus touches them and says ‘your faith has made you well’ (or similar)
- The person goes home healed and happy!
Neither of these two miracles fit that familiar pattern. They are each rather unique and are markedly different from each other. One involves a deaf and dumb man, the other involves a woman and her daughter. The man comes across as poor and helpless. The woman may well have been wealthy and well-educated. Certainly she comes across as confident and articulate. But the main point of contrast in these two encounters lies with Jesus!
In the case of the deaf and dumb man, Jesus is physical and intimate and seems to be oozing compassion. Jesus takes the man aside privately, He puts His fingers in the man’s ears, he spits and touches the man’s tongue, and He speaks to the man tenderly. In the case of the woman, he calls her a dog, or at least that’s certainly what He appears to be doing!
“Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” (Mark7:26-27)
This sounds so unlike Jesus that if this is the first time you’ve read this passage you may feel you need go back and read it a few times more to make sure you didn’t miss something! Did Jesus really call that woman (or, worse still, the woman’s little daughter) a dog? Could there be a mistranslation here, or was He perhaps kidding?
As Christian people we abhor racism. Unlike any number of Christians in generations past, I suspect that all Christian people today really do abhor racism (or at least profess to do so) and so our immediate reaction here is to go on the defensive. Surely Jesus didn’t say that, or at least didn’t mean that!
We assume that Jesus was colour-blind as we think that’s how we are supposed to be. We see Jesus as one who breaks down the division between us and them and sees only us. Surely Jesus wouldn’t even notice whether this woman was Jewish or Lebanese or Syrophoenician or Sierra Leonean?
Of course it is not always a virtue – not to be able to distinguish between us and them. I’ve been in Syria twice this year, and I can tell you that if you see a guy over there with a machine-gun in one hand and a black flag in the other, he’s one of them! Don’t make friends with him!
It’s not always a virtue to be colour-blind either. I used to think it was. I figured that the right approach with our Indigenous sisters and brothers was to pretend I didn’t notice that they were Aboriginal and so treat them the same as everyone else. That was fine to an extent, but I worked out over time that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are generally very conscious of who they are and that we aren’t necessarily doing them any favors by not recognizing their identity and the unique challenges that they face.
Being colour-blind is not always a virtue, nor should we always fail to make a distinction between us and them. Even so, this in no way makes it ok to refer to someone of another race as a dog, does it? Did Jesus really say that, and if He did really say that were there mitigating circumstances of some kind that can help us make sense of all this?
Certainly Jesus was tired. That could explain something. Indeed, He was not only suffering the effect of long hours of intense interaction with an enormous number of people. He appears to have also been dealing with the fact that his cousin, John the Baptist, had just been executed by King Herod!
It was when Jesus heard about John‘s death that He said to His disciples, “Come away by yourselves, to a lonely place, and rest a while” (6:31). Evidently John’s death affected Jesus deeply and he wanted time alone to think things through, and yet if you follow the story through Mark’s Gospel you see that Jesus’ attempts to get some space are repeatedly frustrated by large crowds that manage to work out where he is going and beat him to His destinations! This excursion all the way to modern-day Lebanon is in fact Jesus’ third attempt to disappear, and yet this woman manages to find Him and upset His plans once again! We can understand the frustration. Even so, that hardly justifies abuse, any more than does the fact that she is Lebanese!
Yes, there had been a history of difficulty between the ancient Jews and the people of Syrophoenicia, just as there has been between their modern counterparts. Even so, this is Jesus we are talking about here – the man who taught us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us!
Perhaps the issue is with the translation? Perhaps when Jesus said ‘dogs’ he actually meant something less derogatory, or perhaps calling someone a dog was a compliment in dialogues between Jews and Syrophoenicians in the first century? It wasn’t, though this strategy for dealing with the text has certainly been a prominent one taken by Christian commentators over the centuries.
The suggestion made by numerous commentators is that the word for dogs Jesus uses could be better translated as ‘puppies’ – it being a reference to friendly domestic canines rather than to ravenous attack dogs. Even if this were the case though, as I understand it, it’s still an offensive things to say!
This is a difficult text, and while it doesn’t make the process easier, I pause to note that Christians are not the only ones who struggle with their Scriptures like this. I was in a lengthy car journey recently with a good Muslim friend and I asked him ‘how do you deal with that passage in the Qur’an that says “if your wife is disobedient, beat her”?’ He replied immediately “Oh, that means you have to get a feather to hit her with or the smallest stick you can find.” I said “God bless you, brother” and thought to myself ‘this sounds strangely familiar’.
Of course there are fundamentalist Muslims who respond to questions like mine by saying ‘if you’ve got a problem with beating your wife then your issue is with God and not with me. Take it up with him when you meet him! In the meantime just do what the Holy book commands you to do!’ There are plenty of Christians who take a similar approach to controversial texts in the Bible as well, of course, though I’m happy to say that I’ve never heard any Christian commentator take that approach with this text – ‘Jesus said the woman is a dog! If you have a problem with that you can take it up with Him. Obviously the woman didn’t deserve to be treated as a human being!’ No, we don’t take that line because we know Jesus better than that.
Could it be that Jesus was being playful with the woman? Was He testing her to see whether she was a person of real faith? Was there a mischievous twinkle in Jesus’ eye when he asked her the question about the dogs? Were they both aware of the fact that Jesus was in no way disrespecting her?
This is by far, I think, the most promising way of avoiding the obvious scandal of the text. We know that Jesus regularly spoke in riddles. He used parables and metaphor and language that was designed to shock and provoke people to look at things in a different way. Is that what was going on here?
Certainly if Jesus had wanted to simply dismiss the woman He could have turned His back and walked away. Instead He engages her in conversation, using words that seem blatantly offensive (though she shows no sign of taking offense). Could it be that Jesus was really trying to engage with the woman in a way that would take their conversation to a deeper level? If that was the design then it certainly worked.
“[Jesus] said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 28She answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.”” (Mark 7:27-29)
However we understand Jesus’ intentions, the woman’s response reflects not only determination and confidence but theological insight and humility. And if it is a game that Jesus is playing with the woman then it’s one that she wins! The woman’s response seems to checkmate Jesus! It seems that He has no alternative but to concede to the woman’s request!
In truth, this is a difficult passage and I’m not going to probe any further into how we bring this story into line with the greater depiction of Jesus found in the Gospels since, personally, I believe that any attempt to pontificate on the inner workings of the mind of Jesus is doomed to failure anyway! We can’t get inside the mind of Jesus and so we can’t always be sure what Jesus meant. What we can be more confident about though, I think, is what the Gospel-writer had in mind when he recorded this story.
If we take a step back and ask not ‘what was Jesus thinking?’ but ‘what was the Gospel-writer Mark thinking?’ I believe the answer is clear enough! We have two healing miracles, side-by-side: the Syrophoenician woman and the deaf and dumb man. One wants to hear, the other wants her daughter well. One is very articulate, the other can’t say anything. One is an outsider, the other we know nothing about. One is dealt with very intimately and gently, the other very professionally and even harshly. The question is ‘which of these two had their prayers heard and answered by Jesus?’ and the answer is ‘both of them’! We have two very different people encountering Jesus in two very different ways but everybody is healed, everybody wins – men and women, rich and poor, young and old, insiders and outsiders!
Take another step further back in the Gospel of Mark – Jesus just declared all foods ‘clean’ (as recorded in Mark chapter 6), paving the way for Jews and non-Jews to eat together. Now He seems to be declaring all people clean too! This woman – she’s a person that many of Jesus’ peers would loathe by virtue of her race. By referring to her in derogatory terms the narrative echoes the view that so many of Jesus contemporaries would have had of her. He uses their language. This woman is a dog. She is less than human! And yet, through her encounter with Jesus she demonstrates very clearly that she is nobody’s dog and nobody’s fool! She engages with Jesus in a game of verbal chess and she checkmates Him! If we started the story thinking of this woman as an inferior, by the end of the story it is clear that this woman in fact stands on at least an equal footing with every one of us!
The story rolls on with the healing of the deaf and dumb man, who we are told was from the region of Decapolis which was also a predominantly non-Jewish area. Was this man Jewish or not? The text doesn’t say, and maybe that in itself is significant. Maybe it no longer matters, so far as the Gospel narrative is concerned, whether you are Jewish or Syrophoenician, Greek or Roman or an Indigenous Australian! This outsider made her way into the inner-circle of Jesus. Does it even make sense to speak of outsiders anymore?
The bottom line is that after reading Mark 7 I have no idea as to exactly what Jesus was thinking, but that’s pretty much par for the course for me! I find myself asking the same question all the time “Lord, what were you thinking?”
I rarely have much of a grasp as to what is going on! I don’t understand God’s greater plan for our world. I can’t even work out exactly where He is leading me. Even so, if I take a step back I do start to see a pattern and all the pieces do seem to be fitting together somehow. And so I find myself standing with the rest of the astounded crowd, saying, “He has done all things well! He even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.” (Mark 7:37)
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 6th of September, 2015.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
Father Dave,
Having been Deputy Mayor up here in Forster, I have always been conscious of greeting visitors to our town. Muslims come here in November, regularly. They do seem to avoid eye contact. I heard Kayser Trad trying to reach out from the Muslim Friendship Association yesterday. Knowing of the work you have been doing to reach across to the Muslims in our community, I wonder if you would be interested in developing a campaign to encourage both groups to look and smile at each other.
John
That sounds like a brilliant idea, brother!
Am happy to contribute in any way I can. 🙂