Mark 7:24-37
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, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenecian origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
He 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.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hands on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and he put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.
Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
I want to talk more about the first episode in this Gospel reading today than the second. The fingers in the ears and the spitting and the tongue-touching are very fascinating and little bit gross, but I learned recently a new way to think about that moment between Jesus and the woman who comes looking for help for her daughter. That one has always been a difficult one to square for me – and maybe for you, too – this story where Jesus treats this desperate mother with a sick child so coldly, so callously, so harshly in her time of deep deed.
She approaches Jesus, asks for his help, and he basically calls her a dog. Since she’s not a Jew – one of the chosen ones for whom Jesus was sent, it seems – he says 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.” In other words, “Let the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – God’s chosen ones – get what’s theirs. I came, first, for the Jews, not the Gentiles. Wait your turn.”
“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Now, bear with me if this is as hard for you to imagine as it used to be for me, but I think Jesus might have been saying something like, “Hebrew Lives Matter.”
“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Again, I get it, this can be a hard word to hear from and about Jesus. It’s a difficult thing to imagine he would think or say or do. But, like I said, I recently learned to wonder differently about this woman who suffers this harshness at the hands of Jesus this morning – and the circumstances that brought them together.
First, it’s meaningful to know that Jesus is in the region of Tyre, which was a port city on the Mediterranean coast. Tyre was a place of wealth and prestige that’s mentioned several times throughout Scripture – all the way back in the Old Testament. It’s a place that’s repeatedly being called out for wickedness, for excess, for idolatory, and the like. And Jesus is there, looking very specifically NOT to be bothered. “He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there,” so the story goes. But in walks… in strolls… in waltzes… in barges, perhaps, this woman, interrupting whatever else Jesus may have been up to.
So, she wasn’t just any woman – she was local to that region of Tyre – a Greek-speaking, Syrophoenician-flavored woman – maybe of the wealthy, upper-class, more highly-esteemed sort who had heard about this Jesus and pushed her way into his presence with all of her privilege and presumption, because she wanted his help. She needed his help for her sick daughter. (Mark’s Gospel never gives her a name. But, with all due respect to my Aunt Karen and the other Karens I know and love, had he written his Gospel in the 21st Century, this woman might have fit the stereotype.)
And with all of that history and context (if the story said that this “Karen” from Beverly Hills had interrupted Jesus) it’s easier to see and to understand where Jesus might be coming from and why he responds the way that he does. And I love him for it. See, my bias and inclination is to err on the side of sympathy for the way women are portrayed in Scripture, because their status in the first century was pretty grim, generally speaking. But, relatively speaking, that wasn’t always necessarily the case.
What if the woman in this morning’s story was more like this lady who takes the foul ball from a kid at a major league baseball game?
Or what if she was like those rich folks who, in the earlier days of this pandemic, made “vaccine tourism” a thing, using their wealth to charter planes and fly wherever they wanted to get their hands on the vaccine long before it was their turn as far as the age requirements and guidelines had been laid out by the CDC.
Or like one of those Hollywood moms who committed all of that fraud in the college admissions scandal a couple of years ago?
What if she was just like any one of the too many people in a 21st Century viral video who have so naively, ignorantly, arrogantly asserted their privilege – racial privilege, economic privilege, social capital, whatever – to get their way at the expense of somebody else?
When we consider this story in that kind of light, Jesus is just doing what he always does – standing up for the last and the least; standing up TO the powers that be; questioning authority; challenging the status quo; lifting up the lowly; scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; sending the rich away empty, and all the rest. All the things the prophets promised and all the things his own mother sung about and hoped for the first time she learned about him.
And he was doing all the things we’re called to do and to be if we want to follow him more closely.
And I think we’re called, too, to recognize if, when, and how, we might be more like that woman than we can always, see. And that’s hard to admit. In all of this, I think God is calling us to humility, to recognize, like that woman from Tyre, that each of us requires the grace and mercy that comes from Jesus; that none of us is any more or less deserving of the loving forgiveness we receive at the hands of our savior.
And it seems to me that Jesus acknowledges her humanity by knocking her down a peg or two and helping her to see it for herself. Once she sees her own humble, hungry need for the grace that comes from Jesus, she’s able to fully receive it – and then she is blessed and better because of it – and so is her daughter.
See, it’s true that “Hebrew Lives Mattered” for Jesus – as one of those Hebrews himself – those who were always the ones being persecuted, displaced, disenfranchised, and more. It’s true, too, that Jesus showed up for the sake of the world.
But Jesus knew that, in order to save the real-time suffering of the poor and the persecuted, the displaced and the disenfranchised in his midst, he needed to change the real-time hearts and lives of those in power, those with privilege, and certainly those who were doing the persecuting. He spent his days calling them to humility, calling them to generosity, calling them to repentance, calling them to change and to be changed, and calling them to do their part – to do differently – to transform the world and bring the Kingdom, to earth here and now, as it is in heaven.
And he’s calling each of us to do the same.
Amen
