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Mark 7:24-30
The Faith of a Syrophoenician Woman
24 Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. 25 In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet. 26 The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
27 “First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
28 “Yes, Lord,” she replied, “but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
29 Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”
30 She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
I have to admit that when I was younger, I tended to shy away from disturbing passages – not so much ones that place high demands on us, but ones in which Jesus does or says things that I can’t understand and explain. But as I’ve dug into some of them over time, I’ve come to think that the disturbing passages sometimes get us to stop and think a little more deeply than we might otherwise.
This passage is one of those disturbing stories. Jesus surprises us and makes us uncomfortable in his interaction with this woman with a sick child.
In the story, Jesus has traveled north and west from his home area, to the vicinity of Tyre, a Phoenician city on the Mediterranean coast. Mark doesn’t tell us why Jesus went there, but it doesn’t seem to have been to do ministry – he seems to have been trying to avoid public attention. We don’t usually think about Jesus being ‘on vacation,’ but it really seems like he might have gone to this seaside community to rest and relax. If you look back a chapter, there’s a story in which Jesus tried to go off with his disciples to get some rest, but the crowds followed them and kept them working.
Whatever he had in mind, Jesus’ reputation as a preacher and healer has spread so widely that even in the area of Tyre, he can’t keep a low profile. A woman finds out he’s there, and comes to him to beg healing for her child, who is said to be possessed by an evil spirit. We’re told that the woman is “a Greek,” which in the New Testament sometimes just means she’s a gentile. She’s also said to have been born in Syrian Phoenicia.
It’s the answer Jesus gives to the woman’s plea for healing that makes us so uncomfortable with the story. He tells her, “First let the children eat all they want, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
There’s no easy way to get rid of the harshness of Jesus’ answer and make us perfectly comfortable with this story. But the New Testament scholars give us some clues about how we’re meant to take it.
For one thing, Jesus mentions in other places that the plan for his earthly ministry was to be to the Jews first, and then to the gentiles. So maybe that’s what he was saying in this case – maybe he just wasn’t meant to be doing ministry beyond the covenant people yet.
The scholars also say that in the Aramaic language Jesus spoke, the word for ‘bread’ was used to indicate intellectual and spiritual ‘nourishment’ as well as physical food. So Jesus might have been thinking of teaching and ministry intended for the Hebrew people as “the children’s bread.”
It’s also been suggested that what Jesus said to the woman about giving the children’s bread to the dogs might have been a common figure of speech in that time, and not meant as insultingly as we hear it.
This story seems related to a couple of other conversations.
One was with his mother. You might remember that when he turned water into wine Jesus first told his mother it wasn’t yet time for him to be doing things like that. But then, of course, when Mary ignored his protest and told servants to do whatever he said, Jesus wound up providing a whole bunch of great wine for the couple’s wedding.
The other conversation was with the Samaritan woman at the well outside Sychar. As their conversation unfolded, Jesus told the woman that salvation was “from the Jews.” But when the woman hurried off to spread the word about Jesus and brought back her neighbors, Jesus wound up staying among the Samaritans for a couple of extra days.
So in this story about the Syro-Phoenician woman – as well as at the wedding in Cana and the conversation with the Samaritan woman – it seems to me that Jesus actually ‘changed the plan,’ a little for the sake of showing God’s love.
Jesus seems to have had such compassion for the suffering people around him that he was sometimes willing to bend the plan a little to accommodate acts of mercy and healing. Because in each of these cases, no matter what he might have said when he encountered people in need, what Jesus did was perform an act of miraculous intervention.
Of course, in this particular story, it’s hard not to be struck by the persistence and the humility of the Syro-Phoenician woman. She didn’t express any sense of entitlement, but she also didn’t give up on her mission to get healing for her child. She just took the words of Jesus and extended his logic to claim for her child a healing that Jesus was able to perform. And, as it turns out, a healing he was willing to perform, as well.
Those of us who claim the name of Jesus sometimes get too fixed on our own sense of what it means to do things “decently and in order.” We sometimes fail to help those in need because their needs don’t fit neatly into our policies and procedures. Maybe we’re meant to take away from this story the idea that if Jesus himself was willing to bend the great cosmic plan for the sake of helping those who were in need, then maybe we’re called to do likewise. Helping others should take precedence over doing things “decently and in order” – which is often code for “the way we’ve always done it.”
Just a thought.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the example of this woman’s humble persistence in claiming your Son’s healing for her child, and we thank you also that although he understood himself to be unfolding a great plan for the salvation of the world, Jesus did not turn away from the suffering and the needy that came to him for help. Let us not turn away from them, either, when we act in his name. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
(The listed readings for today are Psalms 12 and 146; Isaiah 52:1-12; Galatians 4:12-20; and Mark 8:1-10. Our readings come from the NIV Bible, as posted on Biblica.com, the website of the International Bible Society.)
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