Dr. Joel Marcus
St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church
Durham, North Carolina
September 9, 2012
CHILDREN AND DOGS
Mark 7:24-37
Our Gospel passage is one of the hardest readings in the lectionary. Thanks, Karen. Sometimes I wonder if you look through the Gospel readings for the next several months, come on a passage that’s really hard to preach on, and then say to Martha, “Maybe I should get Marcus to preach that Sunday.”
As a matter of fact, when I was preparing this sermon yesterday, I had a vague memory of having preached on the passage within recent years, perhaps at St. Joseph’s. So I checked my “Sermons” file, and sure enough, there I found a sermon I had preached on it here three years ago, the last time that the lectionary readings were from Mark. This confirmed my suspicions, even though Rhonda rather than Karen was the vicar here three years ago. But the point is, these priests see the doggy passage coming up, and they think, “Hey, maybe we should ask Joel to preach.”
But why am I kvetching about this passage, as my mom used to say? The reason is that the Jesus who is portrayed here seems so far from the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, whom we have come to know and love. So different from the Jesus who wants to heal people, whose compassion extends to all, who ignores distinctions of class, gender, or ethnic identity.
Instead of this, what do we see here? A non-Jewish woman approaches Jesus, begging for healing for her demon-possessed daughter. And it does seem to make a difference to Jesus that the woman is a Gentile. He at first refuses to heal her child, who is sick through no fault of her own. Not only that, but he implies that he’s making this refusal only because the woman and her daughter don’t happen to belong to the chosen people. “Let the children first be fed,” he says, implying that, since they’re not Jews, they’re not children of God.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, he goes on to use an image for the woman and her daughter that may conjure up positive associations for us, who cherish our well-pampered pets, but didn’t have the same effect on ancient Jews. For the Jews, as for most ancient Mediterranean people, members of the species canis lupus were not highly esteemed. Most of the dogs people knew in ancient Israel weren’t domestic animals but scavengers who lived outside of town and who you didn’t want to mess with if you encountered them.
Yet this is the image that Jesus uses for these people in great need, the Syrophoenician woman and her daughter, just because they don’t happen to be Jews: “It is not right to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.” This is such a harsh statement that the Israeli scholar Joseph Klausner, in a famous biography of Jesus written in 1925, responded to the prevalent anti-Semitism of his time by saying, “If any other Jewish teacher of the time had said such a thing, Christians would never have forgiven Judaism for it.”
And it makes it worse to think about what demonic possession meant to the people of Jesus’ time. Because what is called possession in the New Testament often looks a lot like what we would call schizophrenia or some other extreme version of mental illness. And I probably don’t need to tell you how stigmatizing such illnesses can be—not only in ancient rural Mediterranean cultures, but also in our own. If you’ve ever had a family member who has suffered from such an illness, or if you have yourself, you know what I’m talking about. To the heartbreak and pain caused by the extreme behavior of the sufferer is added the stigma of being treated like a non-person—and this stigma usually extends to the family, not just the sufferer.
I’ve seen the wall that can come up when you’re talking to somebody, and you say something, maybe about yourself, maybe about a loved one, and all of a sudden you can see that other person thinking, “This person, or this family, is cuckoo. I’d better not let myself get too close. It might be contagious.” And I’d like to confess something terrible to you: sometimes, when I’ve seen that wall coming up, when I’ve seen that look of fear and rejection coming over a person’s face, I’ve secretly prayed that the person who was transmitting that look might one day become the recipient of it. I’m not proud of that thought, but I have had it.
So some of us know what it’s like to have ourselves or someone we love treated like a dog. The only slight problem is—this is something like what Jesus, our Lord and our Savior, and the author of our salvation, seems to be doing in this Gospel story. Which necessarily poses the question, and it is a good question: What is this story doing in the lectionary? Did the compilers of the lectionary, did the Gospel authors, did Jesus himself think we needed to be told we are dogs?
Okay, maybe I’ll think of a good answer to this question by the next time I’m asked to preach on this text. Meanwhile, Karen and Martha are available for pastoral counseling.
Well, if we don’t want to leave it at that…Maybe the place to start is here. Jesus was a human being. Yes, I know that he was the Son of God, but he was also human. And could he really have been human without having prejudices? He basically lived in a Jewish world, did Jewish things, ate with and encouraged andenraged his fellow Jews. He was sent, as he says in another Gospel, only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Perhaps, when the event described in our Gospel lesson took place, he’d never before encountered a Gentile in this sort of personal, one-on-one way. He’d never been confronted with a non-Jew face-to-face asking him to help her. And if he was a human being, that sort of first encounter of the ethnic kind must have been awkward.
And when you don’t know people, when you can’t identify with them, when you see them as the Other, it’s easy to treat them in a dehumanizing way. Perhaps you do so inadvertently, without malice aforethought. You’re not conscious of being prejudiced. It has just never occurred to you to think of them as “one of us.”
Now of course people are reluctant, and for good reason, to ascribe a similar sort of blindness to Jesus. We don’t want Jesus to be a party to prejudices that our age finds abhorrent. And so the commentaries are filled with explanations for his seemingly cruel words. One points out that the Greek term used for “dogs” here is a diminutive, and so suggests that it should be translated as “puppies,” and that Jesus was actually saying something affectionate about the woman and her daughter. Another suggests that maybe Jesus was talking to himself, not to the woman: “Hmm…It’s not right to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs, but…” A third speculates that maybe there was something in his facial expression or tone of voice that tipped the woman off that he wasn’t really serious about what he was saying. And a fourth goes so far as to suggest that, as Jesus was uttering these seemingly harsh words, he also winked. (Wait until Dan Brown gets a hold of that!)
Well, as I often tell my students: a lot of things are possible, but we have to ask, what seems probable? A lot of things might have happened in the moments during which Jesus was speaking with this woman. But none of the things that are suggested by these scholars are at all indicated in the text. So I prefer to take the narrative at face value, without reading in winks or internal monologues or unlikely Greek grammar. I prefer, instead, to see this as an illustration of what Luke says at the end of his description of Jesus’ childhood: “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and grace with God and his fellow human beings.” And part of this sort of growth in wisdom, like all growing up, is putting away childish things. And one of the childish things Jesus was enabled to shed, by the grace of God, was his preconceptions about exactly who was and who wasn’t a child of God. And a plucky Gentile woman helped him do that.
But how exactly does such a change happen? It’s a vital question for us too, because all of us have our preconceptions and biases; that’s part of being human. But we aren’t all able to move out of them. And if we are able to do so, to vacate those musty but familiar apartments of prejudice in which we’ve resided so long, that’s no credit to ourselves. It is, rather, a movement of the Spirit. I’ve lived through one such movement in my life, with regard to relations between the races. Perhaps we’re living through another one now.
And so, if we’re lucky, we change, or we are changed, and we shed the fear and hatred in which we grew up. Suddenly one day, somebody breaks through to us, confronts us with their humanity, and we’re faced with a choice: am I going to go on thinking of this Other as Other, or am I going to admit that he or she is “one of us”? And often, it seems, what breaks this logjam is a joke. The other guy person something funny, and you realize that the other person can’t be a monster, because he or she has made you laugh.
And that’s what in happens in our story. Jesus has compared the Syrophoenician woman and her daughter to dogs, thinking of the sort of semi-wild animals that lived on the outskirts of the community. But this woman, this marvelous woman, takes up the word “dogs” and uses it to slyly remind Jesus that there’s also another sort of dog—the kind that lives inside the house and eats the crumbs that fall from the table. This is the most effective sort of repartee—the kind that takes one’s interlocutor’s words and uses them against him. Jesus has called her a dog. But instead of getting mad and stomping off in a huff, she takes up his words and uses them against him. And all of a sudden, he sees that he’s been defeated in argument and even bested in faith by this feisty woman, who has been granted an insight into the wondrous breadth of God’s purposes that was unknown even to him up to that moment. And when he sees this, it takes his breath away. As he says to the woman in Matthew’s version of this story, “O woman, great is your faith!” Or, as he exclaims in another story, in another expression of wonder at the depth of a non-Jewish person’s faith, “I have not found such faith even in Israel.”
And so, on one level, this story is about Jesus himself being gently nudged out of his ethnocentrism, and I think that, as such, it’s a great help and encouragement to us. Because all of us grow up with some of this “us-and-them” mentality I was describing. This includes even those of us who were lucky enough to be raised in progressive households, where we were taught to love all human beings, regardless of their skin color, nationality, religion, or sexual orientation; where we were exhorted not to despise or look down on anyone—except rednecks. Well, apparently even we may have grown up with some prejudices, some blindness that has prevented us from seeing what certain groups of people are really like. And so it should be an encouragement, and relieve us of some of our anxiety, to realize that Jesus himself had blind spots. And there’s no sin in being the possessor of a blind spot. But there is a sin in not trying to compensate for it once you’re discovered that it’s there.
So far we’ve considered our Gospel lesson as a story about the historical Jesus, and how he was enabled to break through the ethnic preconceptions he was born with, with the help of a Syrian woman. Like all such historical reconstruction, this is, admittedly, speculative (though it's as good as anybody else's speculation). But now, to conclude, I’d like to add that the story also works on another level. Because we don’t just, in the church, read these Gospel stories as providing antiquarian information about a human being named Jesus who walked the earth, two thousand years ago in dusty Palestine. We also read them as stories about the Risen Jesus, whom we know in our souls still to be alive, still talking with us, still interacting with women and men all over the broad face of this earth. And on this level, some of those explanations I was ridiculing a few minutes ago begin to make sense. God sometimes does seem to be deaf to our prayers—but he isn’t really. There may be a yes hidden under his apparent no. He may seem to be saying no, he may seem to be rejecting us—but was that a wink we just saw flashing in the corner of his eye?
So we should never believe those voices—and they are all around us—that try to persuade us that we’re freaks, subhuman, unworthy of divine and human love, whether those voices seem to come from the mouth of the devil or the mouth of God himself. Those voices are telling lies, though they can seem very persuasive. But Our Lord has refuted them, even by refuting himself, when he praised the faith of the woman who had refused to accept his negative verdict on her. “O woman, great is thy faith! Be it unto thee according to thy word.” Sometimes there is no substitute for the King James Version.
And sometimes there is no substitute for holding on with all one’s might to the naked word of God, against all evidence, against the apparent silence or opposition of God himself, until the dawn breaks and the struggling angel begs for mercy and we receive the promised blessing. And we will receive it, if we endure—and we will endure, by God’s grace. Amen.
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