Jesus was tired. Weary.
Worn out. Done in. He was weary
to the bone, and what he did when it got
to him was what a lot of us do, and
that’s get away from it all. He went up
on a mountain, or got into a boat on the ocean . . . just like we do, he
escaped from his responsibilities as teacher and went away for awhile. This
time, he goes into the region of Tyre and enters a house, and he doesn’t want
anyone to know he’s there.
Why was this a getaway, you ask? Well, although today we don’t generally know
the geography well enough, Mark’s audience would’ve been keenly aware of this
point: Tyre was Gentile territory. So
was Sidon, for that matter, where he goes in the second half to heal the deaf
man. Tyre and Sidon were in Gentile
territory, and so Jesus was retreating from his own people—remember,
Jesus was a not a Gentile but a Jew. And
that he should do that was entirely understandable: he’d not been making much headway with them
at all . . . he’d fed a bunch of them—Mark says it was 5,000 men, which meant
upwards of 15,000 people total—and he’d
taught the crowds about the kingdom of God.
He’d healed the sick with such compassion that wherever he went, people
brought them and laid them at his feet.
And then came the Jewish leaders, and it was
like cold water on it all: here he was, feeding and healing and teaching and
leading, and religious folk were concerned that his disciples were eating
without washing up. As we saw last week,
it was a little more serious than that: their tradition—not the Torah itself,
mind you, but their interpretation of
it—their tradition made it mandatory that everyone washed up before supper, and
truth be told, it derived from the purity laws in the Torah, about what was
clean and unclean, but it was picky,
you know? It’s like what can happen in a
church that’s been around for awhile, and after a great celebration, a great
evidence of God’s acting in and around it, and people come up and complain
about the little, picky stuff, like, oh,
the bulletin had a mistake, or somebody forgot to pick up something or
clean up after themselves . . . and what it means is that they’re not happy,
usually about the way things are going, but they dare not say it, so their
irritation comes out in the picky stuff.
And because Jesus knew what was what, he knew
what was going on: the synagogue leaders couldn’t complain about healing and
feeding and teaching, so they went to the little stuff, but he knew they
weren’t buying into the program, the leaders of his own religion: he’d been out
ministering, and seeing the power of God working in mighty ways, and they come
up to him and say: “uh, the disciples didn’t wash their hands . . . and they doubtless didn’t clean up the communion
bread, either, or put the kitchen back into order.” And you’ll remember that right before our
passage, right before he retreats to the land of the Gentiles, where there were
no pesky Pharisees, Jesus gets into a long, argument with them—and to fully appreciate
our passage, it’s important to note
that the argument is all about purity, about holiness, about what makes a
person that way and what makes her not, or—more subversively—what makes a people pure and what makes them
not. And Jesus does something shocking
in that conversation with the synagogue leaders, he tells them that it isn’t
what goes into people that makes them unclean . . . and the implications of
this are so shattering to the ancient worldview that Mark says it outright: by
doing this, by saying it wasn’t what goes into
people that makes them unclean, he declared all food clean. Oy vey.
So anyway: this wrangling with his own people,
with the very people he came to free,
was very tiring, and Jesus was heartsick and in need of a respite from it all,
so he goes on a retreat to the land where his people weren’t, to Tyre and Sidon, the land of the Gentiles, and in Tyre
he tries to hole up in a house, but—as do many of his attempts to get away—it
doesn’t work. Even in the land of the
unclean, the land where people wouldn’t know a messiah from a hole in the
ground, he couldn’t get away. A woman
whose little daughter was dying came and bowed down at his feet.
And in telling this story, all of a sudden Mark
shifts our attention away from Jesus onto the woman, as if he wants his
readers—back there in the first century and us here in the twenty first—to be
very clear who she is. And the first
thing we notice is what she does: she falls down at his feet. She gives him deference, she recognizes him for
a man of power. Does she know he’s the
messiah? No. She’s a Gentile. Does she care
that he’s the messiah? Nope. But she has hope, she’s heard of this man,
even in Tyre, and she has hope that Jesus can save her little girl. Would any of us do any less? I don’t think so . . . and the Syrophoenician
woman must have been desperate, at the end of her rope to even approach this
bumpkin Jewish preacher. For that was
how he appeared to her: the Jews, with their insistence on only one God, were
viewed as quaint by many of the more sophisticated Gentiles.
And she was
probably sophisticated, or at least wealthy: when she goes home, after Jesus
has healed her daughter, we see that her child is in a bed, and only the most
well-off could afford one of those. But
for Jesus’ part, from the perspective of his faith, she had more than one
strike against her: first of all, she was Syrophoenician, a Gentile, and it was
greatly frowned upon for him to have any truck whatsoever with her because of
that, a teacher was not even expected to be in the same room with an outsider like her, but the second strike was that she
was a woman, and that by itself would have gotten him in trouble, being in the
same room with a woman, alone. . . and you remember those Pharisee scolds? The ones who got mad just because Jesus and
his disciples hadn’t washed their hands?
Well, they would’ve gone off the deep
end over this. The fact that Jesus even
had spoke with her was, like, the worst.
And the brazenness of it all, the unclean,
foreign woman, having the temerity, the chutz-pah, the gall to approach a teacher like Jesus. Women didn’t approach teachers, they weren’t
even allowed to sit at their feet. Good Jewish women knew their place . . . no
wonder Ezra and Nehemiah were so gosh-awful insistent
that good Jewish boys marry only good
Jewish girls. And here this Syrophoenician hussy was, begging the master, the Teacher to
heal her daughter.
So you get the picture: right after wrangling
with his own people about what’s clean and unclean, and declaring all food clean, he goes off for a rest and
he’s accosted by somebody who is the walking embodiment of unclean. So maybe he can be forgiven if his response
is a little snippy.
But is it?
Is it really snippy? He answers
this woman with a theological point that is entirely correct, from a Jewish
standpoint: “Let the children”—that’s the Jewish people, the children of
God—“be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it
to the dogs.” It was common theology
that Jesus came first for the Jews, and then the Gentiles. Jesus even says something along those lines over in Matthew. And unlike these days, when we’re
uncomfortable at the thought that Jesus would call anyone a dog, Mark’s
audience would have thought “Quite right.
Quite right.” The analogy—for that’s
all it is—the analogy is very apt: the Jews are the children of God, and they
come first, and everybody else is inferior.
And over the years, everybody—including yours
truly, I know it’s hard to believe—has gotten hung up on this . . . how could
Jesus gave called this poor woman a dog? Well, we say, times were different, which is
true, and only we in today’s world would get upset about this, and that’s true
as well, but all of this misses a huge point:
that Jesus answers her at all! She’s a woman, remember? Not eligible to be taught like males at all,
much less engaged in rabbinic argument.
Regardless of the analogy Jesus uses—and granted, it’s one that doesn’t
sound too good to our ears—isn’t the point surely that he answers her at
all? It’s this that would have shocked Mark’s audience, the congregation to
which he wrote his Gospel, not the dog remark.
Jesus—a teacher, whom Mark’s people believed to be The teacher, you understand, the anointed Son of God—in a
theological debate with a gentile and
a woman. He engages her in theological debate, just like he did the Pharisees, just
like he does men, he engages with her
in rabbinic badinage. In other words, he
treats her like an equal!
And while we say “Quite right, why shouldn’t
he?” Mark’s first-century auditors’ heads would have exploded, it was so
outside the pale, it so overturned the rules of the world. And because she answered him well, with an
answer that showed she understood her real
place, that she understood her place in the Kingdom of God, her child was
healed. Far from punishing her, far from
cursing her as in “how dare you say anything argumentative to the master”—as
doubtless his disciples would have said—he says “because you have said this,
your child has been healed.” The
Syrophoenician woman’s child was healed because her mother was already participating in the Kingdom of God.
I’ve made a lot of the timeline in this sermon,
of where this fits into the overall scheme of things, the overall flow of Jesus
ministry, because I think it is absolutely pivotal. This story—and the one after it, also about a
healing in Gentile territory—comes as part of a discussion of purity, of what
is clean and what is not, what is common
and what is not, and it’s bookended by stories of great feeding and healing . .
. the timeline goes like this: Jesus feeds the 5,000, he heals and teaches all
over Galilee, he engages in theological argument with the Pharisees over who’s
pure in which he implicitly declares all food pure, then he engages in theological
argument with the avatar of impute,
the ultimate outsider, an unclean
woman with an unclean, demon-possessed daughter, then he declares them pure, and after healing another
Gentile, he feeds another crowd—in the next chapter—only this time they’re Gentiles, and this time there are 6,000,
there being after all more Gentiles in the world than Jews.
And it’s clear to me what has happened: Jesus
first declares all food pure, then he declares all people pure, women and foreigners and outsiders, people not like
the male, ruling class of religious people of the day. Jesus declared all people pure, all people
wanted, all people clean, in that
little scene with the Syrophoenician woman and her sick child.
Jesus declared all food clean, and we modern
Christians have no trouble following that . . . most of us love our bacon,
after all. But why do we have so much
trouble following the other? Go into any protestant church, any Catholic
church, for that matter, and look around.
Who is not there? Who are not in
positions of power, in position of authority, and who just flat-out isn’t
there? Jesus Christ has declared all
peoples pure, but the church came along not too many years later and begun
shutting folks back out once again. The
most obvious example are women: Jesus engaged a woman as an equal, as a rabbi,
as a leader of the synagogue, and yet most Christians in the world belong to
churches that exclude them from ordained leadership. That’s just the most obvious example, I’m
sure you can think of others . . . who are the Syrophoenician women of the
modern Christian church?
But as an old preaching professor of mine used
to say, always leave ‘em with the gospel, and there is good news in this
passage, and it’s the same as that which convicts us, to use a good old Baptist
phrase. Jesus declared all people pure,
the Syrophoenicians and the Greeks, Jews and Gentiles. Good, church-going community pillars and
murderers on death row. Jesus declared
everybody pure and therefore welcome in the Kingdom of God, welcome to
participate in the life-giving nature of his reign on Earth. And the good news, of course, is that that
also includes us. Amen.
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