Given our country’s spotty record on race relations, on exploitation of others, it is far too easy for us to ignore our place in the mess.

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a call to reconciliation
Proper 18B  |  Mark 7:24-37

Feeding the dog

We don’t know the original question the woman asks Jesus. Only its subject and that she begs. Will you, Lord, heal my daughter? Perhaps. But the exchange that follows is one of the most famous, and most studied, exchanges in the gospels.

“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
“For saying that, you may go– the demon has left your daughter.”

And it all seems pretty simple, normal really. Another healing. As if any of Jesus’s healings are normal.

'Given the location, it is quite reasonable to see Jesus’s response as insulting.' Share on X

But, as we know, context is important, so let’s dig into that for a minute. Jesus has come to Tyre, is looking for a place to be, and this woman comes to him alone. He’s alone. She has him cornered. The writer identifies her as Syrophoenician, which means she’s Syrian from the Phoenician region. It is ruled by Rome.

This was also the region where Pontius Pilate is, for this is a more profitable place to be. So it is probably from here that Pilate will descend toward Jerusalem for the Passover, to oversee the great festivals and make sure no rebellious Jews decide to start anything.

So this woman, who comes from this culture comes to Jesus for help. And she bows down on the floor, perhaps on all fours, and subjects herself to Jesus, to beg. And Jesus’s response is…difficult. It is here that scholars start to really question what Jesus is getting at. Like, why doesn’t he just say “OK.” Or why not ask simply “Why should I?” But his response is, at the very best, disturbing and offensive.

“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Given the location, it is quite reasonable to see Jesus’s response as insulting. It is harsh. And it is clearly a rejection. It sounds like Jesus is calling her a dog. And given the racial and regional prejudices, it is not unlikely that a human Palestinian Jew would struggle with his own prejudice.

I’m taken with this reading, myself. It certainly makes for a rich telling of Jesus; of who he is and who he becomes. And it makes this exchange, in which this foreign beggar, coming to Jesus for help and is instead scorned, into a profound moment of revelation about Jesus: that even he, the Son of Humanity, falls prey to his familial prejudice. Wow! Then, her rejoinder, “even the dogs…eat…crumbs” seems to compel Jesus to change his mind.

For those of us who see GOD in all of its persons as attached to humanity, feeling, and wanting for us to thrive, as a willing participant in a wrestling match with Jacob or to be persuaded by Lot or even to have a change of heart, as GOD does after the great flood, we see these moments of Jesus, revealing a true humanity to be a sign of more profound power and grace, that even GOD the almighty! is willing to be so moved by humanity that GOD would take such a human form, a truly human form, with racial prejudice and snippy attitudes and all.

Or a pack of dogs?

Poling Sun, president of the Baptist Theological Seminary of Singapore has a different idea about this exchange. He argues in his article “Naming the Dog: Another Asian Reading of Mark 7:24–30” that the interaction isn’t of a high Jesus speaking to a low woman, that it isn’t a story about Jesus acting like a racist to a foreigner. He argues that her identity as Syrophoenician actually makes her among the elite (those working with Rome) and that her request of Jesus is coming from a higher place in society than Jesus’s.

His response becomes different when we think about a Galilee that is a breadbasket for the Syrian region, but a breadbasket that is conscripted to feed the ruling government, like something out of The Hunger Games.

“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Poling Sun argues that the Jews would feed their children first before handing over the food to their rulers. So if we hear this idea, that the very real practice of feeding the children first would be endangered if we let the rulers eat first means we are very literally speaking of food taken away from the helpless.

In this way, Jesus may not be condescending to this woman in particular, but saying to her Your government, your country, your people steal our food, why give you anything?

Sun names his article “Naming the Dog” because we must name the oppression before we can begin to ask for forgiveness and reconciliation.

Our legacy of racism

Given our country’s spotty record on race relations, on exploitation of others, it is far too easy for us to ignore our place in the mess. I’m pretty sure that no one in this room has owned another human being or purchased one. Now, I’m not sure what all of you do in your spare time, but I feel pretty confident that selling human beings is not anyone’s hobby here. And I’m also guessing that none of us dons a white hood on the weekends and burns crosses on other people’s lawns. I feel pretty good about saying that. Now, I can’t be so sure about our ancestors. I can’t be so sure that we don’t have some slaveholders in our great big family trees. And I do know for sure that most of us benefit from a culture that allowed our parents and their parents and their parents to benefit from racial prejudice. These are historic truths.

And it is far too easy for us to say that this is in our past and that these are our parents’ mistakes or our grandparents or great grandparents’ mistakes. Which is true. Many of us can cite our black friends or our support for persons of color. This is true. But racism isn’t just about individual interactions. It isn’t personal bias where racists are easily identified by their hoods and their targets by their hoodies.

Racism is this equation: prejudice + power = racism

The evil in a person’s heart isn’t racism. It’s prejudice. It becomes racism when that prejudice is acted upon by a person or system with power over another person. That’s racism. It is how prejudice turns into injustice. It is how prejudice goes beyond hurt feelings and the need for thick skin and into the realm where people are beaten, abused, fired, jailed, imprisoned, killed, not just because they are of a certain race, but because a power above them actualizes that prejudice to them.

So if Jesus is calling this Syrophoenician woman a dog, and she is of a lower status, then it is a little racist. If Jesus is calling the system this woman represents a pack of dogs, a system that hungrily devours the food Jesus’s people produce with the sweat off their backs, then Jesus is actually calling that system racist.

How all becomes all

This past summer, at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, we voted to join our friends in the AME, Lutheran, and other churches to this expression of “confession, repentance, and commitment to end racism”.

We are called to confess to the particular sin of racism. Racism that isn’t simply the evil that lives in all of our hearts, and occasionally expresses itself in off-color jokes, but as a sin of systemic oppression. Confession to sin that we have inherited, did not create, but from which we individually and as the church still benefit.

We have been called to repentance. To not only confess that we’ve sinned or benefited from sin, but that we truly want to repent for that sin, to turn away from our sin and toward GOD; to seek mercy and forgiveness; to not only name, but atone for our sin.

And lastly, we’ve been asked to act: to bring about a reversal of this systemic sin and toward a reconciled creation. We are called to make this our work, to wage reconciliation in our communities, across racial lines, and to break up the systems of oppression in our society. This means dealing with incarceration, voting rights, and economic systems that prevent minorities from thriving in our culture: to not only worry about those things that protect people who look like we do. Reversing systems that make it easier for a white man with a criminal record to get a job than a black man without one. Systems like those in Ferguson which turn minor offenses into a pattern of criminal behavior and a source of direct income for the police department, making money off of making people into criminals.

This week, the vision of the sin of racism grew when pictures of immigrant children surfaced. Refugees from Syria, coincidentally. As if once again, the lectionary points us to reflect, again, at our sin. Like the 10th anniversary of September 11th, falling on a Sunday, and the lectionary gave us a gospel about loving our enemies. A little too on the nose for comfort.

These Syrian children drowned, lost at sea, only to be found on the shore. These pictures convict us as they haunt us; in much the same way Michael Brown’s body should haunt us. Senseless death, needless death, preventable death. Death that can always be reasoned away from a place of distance or circumstance. Always excused. We can say that we weren’t directly related to the incidents: we didn’t do it. My family didn’t cause this.

But our rejection of the neighbor, stranger, immigrant, the refugee seeking asylum did lead to this. We didn’t make room. Our neighbors didn’t make room. Our European friends didn’t make room. Even though it is the law: international law dictates we make room! We didn’t protect them from violence or their desperate escape from violence. And we ignored the constant refrain, the demand of GOD to make that room, because we are an immigrant people. It is how GOD sees us and moves us. All Christians are immigrants.

We confess to a sin of indifference each week: for the things we do and the things we’ve left undone: the things we know we’re doing and the things done on our behalf. Because we, all of us, are responsible for how we, as a whole, behave.

I’m not going to end this sermon with a great pronouncement of GOD’s grace. I’m supposed to, I know. But not this time. We confessed, we’ve received our blessing. We know GOD forgives us. I want us to avoid running to our redemption and away from our work of reconciliation. Our work of building and rebuilding relationship. I want us to own that responsibility. Own that we have something to confess. Own that we don’t always share our safety across racial lines, or extend it to the refugee and the asylum seeker. Own that we won’t fix this broken system if we aren’t able to speak about its brokenness. Too political we say. Tell that to Jesus. To the dead, the suffering, the hopeless. Not too political. More like we are being called to see the humanity beyond the politics. And we commit to what we say we believe. That we love our GOD and our neighbors as ourselves. All of them.

Like Dr. Sharon Watkins, General Minister and President of the Christian Church said recently at their General Assembly:

“We know that if we can’t say Black Lives Matter, we don’t mean All Lives Matter.”

May we speak our values loud and with our call to reconciliation in our hearts. Amen.

If you are feeling called to help with the refugee crisis, visit Episcopal Migration Ministries at episcopalmigrationministries.org for more information.