What Jesus’s interaction with the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-37 tells us about what God is really up to with Jesus the Christ.
How the gospel of Mark flips the Christ Project on Jesus.
Proper 18B | Mark 7:24-37
It was only a chapter ago in the gospel we call Mark when Jesus was trying to give his disciples a rest—trying to get away for some prayer time. And he couldn’t. The crowds were so numerous. But more importantly, these people were pathetic and lost. He had sympathy for them. So he gave of himself miraculously.
Now we have a completely different experience of Jesus. He’s sneaking away, maintaining secrecy and solitude.
And into that silence breaks a loud voice he can’t ignore.
Trading Spaces
Let us recall that last week ended with the controversial reimagining of Jewish dietary laws. We were in this explicitly Jewish moment with Jesus being confronted by Temple leaders. People who came all the way out to the boondocks from Jerusalem.
Now Jesus has gone far from Jewish territory, up north into Gentile space. The juxtaposition must be intentional. Now he’s the one far from home, bringing authority and power.
He tries to keep a low profile, but it isn’t going to work. It never does. Which makes these attempts at secrecy seem ridiculous or humorous. Perhaps we should take them more seriously than that. Not as some premeditation or naiveté on Jesus’ part. But because this truth pushes itself out from the text. There is no real way to hide the Christ from humanity.
All of humanity.
The Syrophoenician Woman
So the Syrophoenician woman puts that “all” to the test. Her daughter is possessed by a demon. And she throws her body on the feet of Jesus, begging.
And Jesus calls her a dog.
She pushes back and Jesus relents, freeing her daughter.
It’s a strange, alarming moment. One Christians have spent 2000 years excusing and explaining. Most of them stretch the text or our theology where we don’t really want it to go.
Maybe it’s a test. But God doesn’t do that.
Maybe it’s not the time, as Matthew’s version describes. But Jesus is still rude.
Maybe he’s not actually calling her a dog. That splits the hairs far too fine when the point is that Jesus is being rude. There is no real way around that.
The excuses and explanations for Jesus abound but fail to truly comfort us. Nor do they honestly explain why any of this matters.
This Gentile woman came to this Jewish healer, so far from home, and begged him to save her daughter’s life. She knew he could.
But there’s something far more important. Something we’re far more likely to skip over with all our defending of Jesus’s behavior.
That the point of the story isn’t Jesus’s words. It’s hers.
She didn’t just know he could save her daughter. She knew that unlike any other Jewish healer, he might actually choose to.
For Saying That
There are two versions of this story in the Bible. This one from Mark and the other is in Matthew. Matthew’s version is softer, though the rudeness remains.
There it says that the woman’s faith saves her daughter. But Mark’s has a more delicate beauty to it. A beauty which challenges our blunt theology of an ever-loving, perfectly divine Jesus.
Here he says to her
“For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”
For saying that. It was her words, her challenge, her speaking up which saved her daughter.
Not just faith, her speaking that faith. So what exactly did she say?
What he said
What Jesus said
“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
is an indelicate closed statement of Jewish exclusion. Like the purity laws the Pharisees confront Jesus over; now Jesus is closing the door. It is as if he says the children of Israel go first, then the leftovers can come to the Gentiles.
What she said
But the unnamed woman replies
“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Which is to say that Jews and Gentiles eat from the glory of the same God.
Jesus draws a line around the Jewish household and the unnamed woman draws the line so they are all in the same household.
This isn’t just faith. Or boldness. Or proof-texting from Scripture. This unnamed woman of Syrophoenician origin expands the Kin-dom like Jesus. She out-Christs Jesus.
On Foreign Soil
It took this displacement, this being hosted for us to see what this project, the Christ Event is really doing.
And not to get too philosophical, but it took Jesus getting a chance to witness the Christ to bring the point home. For us to witness Jesus on the receiving end of the Christ message to remember that Jesus isn’t sum, but the form. Christ isn’t Jesus’s last name, it’s his mantle.
For us to truly understand that; to understand the Christ project for what it truly is, Mark lets us see it beyond Jesus. Mark lets Jesus be flipped by his own script. To receive the message of inclusion and participation in the great human family. That Jesus can receive that invitation. Come, open the table by seeing me for who I am.
Jesus had to leave the comfort of home and set foot on unfamiliar territory. He had to be hosted.
Like God countlessly reminded the Children of Israel to honor the immigrant and refugee because they were immigrants and refugees. [We are immigrants and refugees.] Open the doors to everyone, set the table bigger, because this blessing is not for our tribe. It isn’t about creating power, but releasing it.
More Than Healing
What both of these stories reveal to us, and what was finally beginning to dawn on those around Jesus, is that Jesus isn’t just about healing. Jesus isn’t about healing brokenness or making people feel better. He isn’t a nice guy inviting everyone to just get along.
Jesus restores and brings in. This is God’s Christ Project.
Neither of these stories is a true “healing story.” This girl has a demon — she isn’t sick. She didn’t come down with a cold. She didn’t get cancer.
We often try to explain or rationalize the problem and turn it into a disease because we don’t want it to be supernatural. But that is precisely what we are being invited to see — that Jesus can restore us, beyond the simple human maladies.
When Jesus can exorcise a demon from a distance or give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and speech to the impeded, he isn’t healing. These aren’t sicknesses. He is restoring, including, and widening. He is offering newness and compassion. And he invites the same “spiritual purity” to those the system would easily set off to the curb for waste management to collect.
This is the gall of the Christ Project. That we would confront all the ways we make other people trash and be told by the Christ nah, this is God’s treasure!
This is radical inclusion.
More than Perfect
The message Jesus offers his followers is a challenge to grow, expand, and experience all the hard stuff in life. And stuff is going to happen. They aren’t perfect. But to keep on it anyway.
Even when, no especially when, someone outside the tribe helps us see we’re thinking in tribes again.
Thank God we don’t have to be perfect. But we get the chance to be more than perfect. We get to be open. To change. Even transcending the tribes we are born into and the lives we’ve cultivated. We can change and be changed. We can throw off the shackles of perfection and purity and rationalizing and justifying and healing and factionalizing and fighting and assuming and hating and lying and fearing and ritualizing and hope-destroying and sentimentalizing.
And maybe, just maybe we can start death-defying and unifying. Hoping and following and loving like the Christ in front of us. And within us.
Because the truth is that the children aren’t just the children. Our children aren’t “the children”. All of God’s children are the children. Which includes the ones who aren’t with us this morning and those with us but not really “with us” because they don’t really feel “with us” right now.
You are loved.
That’s what God is telling us in the Christ Project.
You are loved.
You are loved. And while these words might heal you, they aren’t words meant to just heal you. They are much more than that. They are Christ words. They are about restoring you. Opening the door to you. Including you.
And not just you. But all the people. Every single one of them.