Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost: September 8, 2024
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 | Psalm 125 | James 2:1-10, 14-17 | Mark 7:24-37
Today’s Gospel reading is a challenging one. A nameless woman accosts Jesus and pleads with him to heal her daughter and Jesus responds with a harsh refusal capped with a derogatory slur. Christians throughout the centuries have done quite a bit of theological gymnastics to make this story more palatable, to round out the rough edges and justify Jesus’ response. Suggestions have ranged from Jesus calling the woman and her daughter “little puppies” as a kind of term of endearment to Jesus using the slur as a kind of tongue-in-cheek test of her faith. But the text doesn’t support any of these attempts to soften the blow of Jesus’ words. Dogs were not cute, domesticated pets in first century Palestine, and any insistence that Jesus uses that descriptor as a kind of test to prove the woman’s faith simply makes God out to be a cruel jokester.
So how do we engage this story? What sense are we to make of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman? What is the good news and what is our invitation?
Just before our story today, Mark tells us about a confrontation between Jesus and some Pharisees and scribes who criticize Jesus’ disciples for eating without ritually washing their hands. Jesus responds by challenging their notions of purity and piety, their sense of what’s clean and what’s not, their ideas of what makes a person worthy to be called righteous. As he explains it to his disciples later, it is not what goes into a person that defiles them but what comes out, for it is from the human heart that evil flows. After this encounter, Mark tells us that Jesus crosses into Gentile territory. Strangely, he tells us that Jesus does this to seek solitude. Perhaps Jesus was exhausted from the grueling work of ministry and the constant need to spar with religious leaders. Whatever the reason, Jesus ends up in someone’s home hoping no one discovers he is there.
But somehow, a woman whose daughter suffered from a demonic affliction discovers his presence and seeks him out. She throws herself at his feet and pleads with him to liberate and restore her child. Mark tells us nothing of how the woman knew about Jesus, nothing explicit about her faith, nothing about her circumstances, except that she is not a Jew. And, not only is she not a Jew but she is a descendent from peoples who were historic and perpetual enemies of Israel. “Let the children be fed first,” Jesus tells her, “for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Once again, there is no way to soften Jesus’ words here. To justify Jesus’ words in this story “makes room to justify comments and behaviors toward certain people groups today that are misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist.”[i]
Mark’s text gives us no other option than to see Jesus’ words as profoundly disturbing. They should make us uncomfortable. Is it possible that the Jesus we encounter in this story is simply exhausted? Bone-tired from a relentless pace in his ministry of healing and exorcising and his confrontations with and rejection from those in power? Is Jesus just irritable because he needs a break and isn’t finding one? Perhaps. But these excuses seem to rob the story of its subversive power. Mark gives us an encounter with a Jesus who is fully human – the writer is not concerned with the debates about Jesus’ divinity as they played out in subsequent centuries. Instead, we see a Jesus who is a “product of his time and place, who is shaped by the conscious and unconscious biases, prejudices, and entitlements of his culture.”[ii] We encounter a Jesus who is growing in his understanding of the vocation God has given him, the implications of being the beloved Son of God, and the scope and reach of the good news he’s meant to share.
The woman refuses to accept Jesus’ answer. She will not leave without her blessing, without an answer to her prayer. She is persistent and quick-witted. “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” The woman recognizes an inconsistency between Jesus’ words and the gospel he proclaims. She challenges his understanding, presses him to see beyond the limits of his own prejudice and bias. She uses both Jesus’ metaphor of the table and his racial slur to stretch the reach of his compassion. Debi Thomas describes the woman’s response as brilliant: “not least because it cuts to the very heart of Jesus’s boundary-breaking, taboo-busting, division-destroying ministry of table fellowship. After all, he’s the Messiah who eats with tax collectors and [sex-workers]. He’s the rabbi who breaks bread with sinners. His disciples are the ones who earn the Pharisees’ contempt for eating with unwashed hands. The table is where Jesus shows the world who God is.”[iii]
What is perhaps even more shocking than Jesus’ rudeness is his response to the woman’s retort. Jesus changes. His encounter with this nameless, pleading woman transforms him. He accepts her teaching, allows her words to break open the boundaries of his ministry and the reach of his good news. Her words deconstruct his prejudices, dissolve his biases, and teach him compassion. Jesus is changed through this real encounter with one who is marginalized and excluded. And so, on account of her words, Jesus tells her to go home and find her daughter liberated from the demon that afflicted her.
By including this story in his Gospel, Mark bears witness to how transformation happens – it is not through intellectual debate, not through acquiescing to doctrinal propositions, not through self-actualization. Rather, transformation occurs through encounter, and particularly through encounter with those on the margins.[iv] For those of us with privilege, we must be cautious here and safeguard against the various forms of saviorism and benevolence that simply perpetuate the boundaries of difference. It is not our place to decide who is marginalized and somehow provide a voice for them. It is our task to seek out those who are speaking truth to power, to listen to their voice, to allow their teaching to challenge our own prejudices and biases so that we might be transformed, that we might expand the reach of our compassion and broaden our vision of God’s reigns.
Mark’s inclusion of this story also challenges us to reconsider our notion of faith. In Matthew’s version of this story, Jesus tells the woman that it’s her faith to which he responds, but Mark says Jesus responds to her words, to her teaching. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the woman’s faith is absent in Mark’s telling. She seeks him out, demands his assistance, and challenges him to see that the abundant feast he offers to the children of Israel is more than enough for even outsiders like her to be nourished by the crumbs. Her faith is demonstrated in her persistent effort to seek liberation for her daughter, in her refusal to walk away at Jesus’ initial response, and in her acceptance of Jesus’ word of healing when she returns home to find her child restored.
For Mark, faith is not about ritual or doctrinal purity or even pious action. Instead, faith is “about clinging to Jesus and expecting him to heal, to restore, to save. It’s about demanding him to do what he came to do.”[v] Friends, each of us come here today in need of healing, restoration, and salvation. Each of us carry with us wounds of heart and soul. Each of us have limits to our vision of God’s reign and the reach of God’s compassion that needs transformation. Each of us needs liberation from our conscious and unconscious biases that shape us. Jesus shows us in the flesh what it means to be human, to be a child of God who grows in understanding and stature, what it means to endure the process of becoming who and what God has called us to become. And the woman teaches us to expect and recognize the impossible abundance of God’s good news.
Today, let us embrace this teaching and allow it to soften our hearts and ready us for the transformation God offers us. Amen.
[i] Courtney V. Buggs, “Commentary on Mark 7:24-37,” Workingpreacher.org, 2024.
[ii] Debi Thomas, “Be Opened,” JourneywithJesus.net, 2018.
[iii] Thomas, “Be Opened.”
[iv] Micah D. Kiel, “Commentary on Mark 7:24-37,” Workingpreacher.org, 2015.
[v] Matt Skinner, “Commentary on Mark 7:24-37,” Workingpreacher.org, 2012.