Mark 7:24-37
So Jesus is on his way to Tyre, but he is coming from Galilee where he has been trolled, you might say, by Pharisees. They have been following him around, apparently looking for opportunities to criticize him. Of course, they found one: uncouth table habits. Apparently, they didn’t wash their hands before eating. No doubt, they ate with their hands, so it is a little bit gross. But it was not so much hygiene that the Pharisees are worried about, it’s protocol. Their chief complaint is that Jesus and his disciples don’t follow the tradition of the elders, a ritual hand washing.
I don’t know if Jesus had a beef with this particular tradition. But what bugs him is their hypocrisy. The way they abandon the commandment of God andhold on to human tradition. God did not say, “wash your hands.” That was your mother.
So, while washing your hands is a nice thing, Jesus feels that it is being used as a stand-in for the more important, more challenging things that God actually does command. It’s easy to wash your hands; it’s a lot harder, say, to love your enemies, forgive those who harm you, heal broken spirits, welcome the sinner. If all it took to be a Christian was to wash your hands, sermons would be a lot shorter.
I suspect that Jesus neglected to wash his hands on-purpose, just so he could have this conversation.
He takes the opportunity to tell the Pharisees, and everyone else listening in, nothing outside of you can defile you. It doesn’t matter how you eat or what you eat. It is what comes out of you that defiles you. Particularly, what comes from your heart.
So, just like that, he declares all foods kosher. No problem. Eat whatever you want. God doesn’t care what goes in your mouth; it is what is in your heart that really matters.
Then he takes off, leaving them with this new idea to chew on. And he goes to the region of Tyre. Tyre is in Syria. This is a non-Jewish area, so the people Jesus will encounter here are gentiles.
Right away, a gentile woman approaches him. She is Syrophoenician, meaning she is Greek culturally, of Syrian ethnicity. She is not at all Jewish.
And she approaches him because her daughter is suffering. She has an unclean spirit, a demon. This child is possessed by evil.
Now, we don’t usually talk about being possessed by spirits, or demons, or evil. But even though we don’t use these terms, we ought to be able to understand these problems. When you hear that she was possessed by an unclean spirit you may suppose she is suffering from a severe mental or physical illness. It doesn’t really matter what it is. A sickness that has no known cure or treatment, that causes nothing but unrelenting suffering, can certainly seem evil.
And the suffering is equally intense for Jews and gentiles alike.
But this is a gentile woman. In a gentile land. Jesus is out of his area code. Why he went there, I don’t know. Mark offers no explanation. But he does, and word about him and the amazing things he does has spread this far. And this mother doesn’t let tradition or custom stop her from approaching him because her daughter’s life is at stake. She bowed before him – stopping him in his tracks – and she begged him to heal her daughter.
She has cast off her dignity, she has put her body on the line, taking the chance that she will be brutally thrown aside. And she begs him for mercy.
And the Jesus we know and love – what do we think he would do? He would look at her with kindness. He would go down on one knee to get at eye level with her and tell her she matters, her daughter matters. And he would follow her back to her house, lay hands on this girl and bring peace to her body and soul. This is the Jesus we know and worship and love.
But that is not what he did.
He looked at her and said, “I’m not gonna throw the children’s food to the dogs.”
There is so much packed in that response. It says I am here for the children of Israel, God’s chosen ones. I am not here for you. It says they are special and you are the opposite of special. It says you are lower than a human being – you are a dog, and I don’t mean a pet chihuahua. I mean a dirty dog.
And we just can’t believe he said it. We can’t believe he would be so cruel.
Everything about this exchange says that he just wants her to go away. You would expect her to skulk off quietly, begging forgiveness for the trouble.
Yet, she surprises us – about as much as Jesus surprised us with his words – when she says –
Yes, but even the dogs get to eat the children’s crumbs.
This woman knows what she needs. She musters up the courage to push for it. She bets that even though she won’t be first in line, she might be second. She takes a chance that there is more than enough mercy for even the dogs that sit under the table waiting for crumbs to fall.
She is amazing in her boldness, her persistence in asking for what she needs. And Jesus is amazing in his response.
When we say about Jesus that he was human in every way, we should believe that he was human in this way too – that he might make a mistake. And when we say that he was without sin, we might mean that he was willing and able to correct his mistakes. That alone is quite enough, and it is much more than you could say about many of us much of the time. Jesus, holding at the same time both human and divine natures, was on a learning curve.
Having just schooled the Pharisees about God’s law versus human tradition on the matter of food, he now gets schooled by a Syrophoenician woman about God’s law versus human tradition on the matter of people. Yes, Jesus was sent to the children of Israel, but God’s grace doesn’t end there. And confronted with this truth, Jesus says Yes.
After leaving Tyre, he journeys in the region of the Decapolis, another gentile area, and he is presented with a man who is deaf and unable to speak. Again, a gentile. This time, he says nothing about dogs, nothing about who is worth his time, but he simply takes this man in hand and heals him.
Later on, in the next chapter, Jesus is teaching great crowds of people, still in the gentile regions. And he turns to his disciples and says to them, I have compassion for them. All of them.
Compassion is something that we have to learn. Even Jesus learned it, and quite possibly he learned it from a Syrophoenician woman who wasn’t wiser than he was – she just needed her daughter to be made well.
We learn by experience, through our encounters with others, if we allow ourselves to learn, just as Jesus did.
We learn that our shared humanity makes us one family, even if our languages and customs and religious practices are different.
We learn that loving others in the manner God loves us involves giving much more than demanding. And in giving, we become the model of Christlike love. In giving, the way Jesus gave, we show the world the love God has for them.
Compassion is the good news. Compassion is the mission. And here is the message for you and me:
Be like the Syrophoenician woman and stand up courageously for what is good and right. Stand up for yourself and stand up for others who need you to.
Be like Jesus who changes course when he sees that his initial response was wrong. Believe me, if Jesus is not too proud to correct himself, neither should you and I be.
Be compassionate, as Jesus is compassionate. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Asking yourself how you would want to be treated in that same situation. Pushing aside preconceptions about “these kind of people” for the sake of better understanding the flesh and blood person before you.
Learn compassion. Now is a good day to begin.
