Mark 7:24-37

   After a confrontation with some Pharisees, Jesus needs some alone time.  He sets off for Tyre on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, north of Galilee, in present-day Lebanon.  It was a region inhabited by Gentiles – pagans, non-Jews – so Jesus has left the land and people who are “clean” to enter a land that is “unclean.”  He tries to remain incognito but almost as soon as he arrives in Tyre, a Gentile woman kneels at his feet, begging him to heal her daughter. 

   Unlike Jesus, this woman is in the land of her ancestors; the Israelites and their Jewish descendants are the more recent arrivals.  But the Jews see her as foreign, maybe in the same way some people see Mexicans in Texas and California as foreign even though they arrived generations before the white settlers.  In response to the woman’s plea, Jesus brushes her off, quoting an old proverb: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  I wish I could tell you that in the original Greek or in the context of first century Middle Eastern culture Jesus is not insulting this woman.  But then as now, comparing someone to a dog is rude.  Ancient Israelites and Jews in the first century despised dogs.  Dogs were unclean scavengers. 

   It’s not what we expect from Jesus, but then again, maybe this is a glimpse at the humanity of Jesus.  Like humans in our own culture, he looked at the woman and put labels on her: Gentile, pagan.  Those labels came complete with a whole story that had nothing to do with the woman, because he knew nothing about her.  The story had everything to do with the very human first century culture in which Jesus was immersed.  The story that Jesus and everyone else he knew were told and believed was that his group, his people, were more deserving, more worthy of attention, benefits, privilege, healing, holiness.  Her group, in contrast, was less than worthy in all those ways. 

   For centuries, commentators have tried to soften this story by saying Jesus doesn’t really have such an ugly prejudice; he’s just testing her.  She passes the test, and so her daughter is healed.  But that interpretation would make the woman the only person who has to pass the test of putting up with a racial slur before receiving Jesus’ mercy.  That just doesn’t work for me.  I am convinced that this woman changed Jesus’ mind.  I’m convinced Jesus learned something. 

      If the woman is offended by Jesus’ remarks, she doesn’t let it show, but her response also contains a challenge – a lesson. She says, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” In essence: “We all eat the same food.  Why shouldn’t we be at the same table?” Her response cuts to the very heart of Jesus’ own boundary-breaking, taboo-busting ministry of table fellowship.  After all, he’s the one who eats with tax collectors and prostitutes.  He’s the rabbi who breaks bread with sinners.  The table is where Jesus shows the world who God is, and so the table is where the woman calls him out. 

   Jesus hears her.  The ethnic and religious Other teaches him that Syrophoenician lives matter, reminds him of his very own Good News, and then shows him how he might push that Good News beyond the narrow confines of one people, one culture.  The Jesus who never loses a verbal contest with anyone else in Scripture concedes to an audacious, female “foreigner”: “Because of your teaching, the demon has left your daughter.” 

   In other words, Jesus changes.  He allows himself to be humbled, rearranged, and remade.  Barbara Brown Taylor describes the moment this way: “You can almost hear the huge wheel of history turning as Jesus comes to a new understanding of who he is and what he has been called to do.”  The Syrophoenician woman’s faith and persistence teach him that God’s purpose for him “is bigger than he had imagined, that there is enough of him to go around.”

   Right after this encounter, Jesus heals a deaf man – another Gentile – in the region of the Decapolis.  Placing his fingers in the man’s ears, Mark tells us that Jesus looks up to heaven, sighs, and says, “Be opened.”  Jesus sighs.  What kind of a sigh is that? Is it something like chuckling to himself when he realizes the words, “Be opened,” are about to come from his own mouth?  Or – from God’s mouth?  Be opened.  Get it, Jesus? 

   Be opened.  Be opened to the truth that being human isn’t so bad because like Jesus, we can learn, grow, and change.  Be opened to the disruptive wisdom of people who are nothing like us.  Be opened to the widening of the table.  Be opened to Good News that stretches our capacity to love.  Be opened.

Resources:

Herman C. Waetjen, A Reordering of Power (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989).

Debie Thomas, September 2, 2018, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1907-be-opened

Wil Gafney, “The Woman Who Changed Jesus,” http://www.wilgafney.com/2017/08/20/the-woman-who-changed-jesus/