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 and hold 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.
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