Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146; James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37
I feel like our Gospel reading is burying the lead this morning. We’ve got this great set of stories telling us about how Jesus heals a woman’s daughter from afar, and then heals a man who is deaf and mute so that he can hear and speak again. These are wondrous things, that evoke feelings of awe at the power of God working in Jesus. But they bury the lead.
“Jesus said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’”
I need to let that stand for a minute, because this is the lead: Jesus just called this woman and her daughter dogs.
Last week, Jesus said that the prophet Isaiah condemns the Pharisees and scribes for their hypocrisy because they say they worship God but don’t take care of people in need. This week he tells this woman that it’s not her daughter’s turn to be healed. Last week, Jesus told his disciples that it’s what’s in our hearts that make us good or evil. Today, he insults the non-Jewish, non-Israelite, non-male (that’s what it means when the Gospel of Mark identifies her as a Gentile, Syrophoenician woman) by reducing her to the position of a non-human. After proclaiming from the beginning of his ministry that the kingdom of heaven has come near, after sharing the good news that God’s kingdom is one of healing and new life, after healing everyone who comes to him, Jesus shuts this woman out.
I wonder what the author of our second reading, the Letter of James, would have said about that. “My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” If you say “to the one who is poor, ‘Stand there,’ or ‘sit at my feet,’ have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?” “What good is it ... if you say you have faith but do not have works? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” I mean, I know that we Lutherans are not huge fans of James, and that Luther himself wished it wasn’t even in the Bible, but at the same time, James has a point. As people of faith, we can’t say that we believe God loves everyone but then act to keep some people out. The religious hypocrisy is too much.
Which brings us back to Jesus. I think that what bothers us so much about this story about Jesus is the hypocrisy. It’s really hard to take. We’re bothered by the hypocrisy of Jesus––the incarnation of God’s love, the prophet who reminds his listeners that God is on the side of the marginalized––calling this worried-out-of-her-mind mother a dog.
Now some scholars have said that Jesus is actually using a diminutive that was common at the time, calling her daughter a puppy, and that it’s not as bad as it seems. Puppies are pretty cute. But a puppy is still not the same as a child, and Jesus would still be using a metaphor that makes the children of Israel more important in God’s eyes than the non-Jew, non-Israelite.
Other scholars say that this is evidence that Jesus was truly human. That he was shaped by his upbringing, which was negative towards Gentiles and Syrophoenicians, and that he did actually change his mind after she challenged him. And I like this argument, I’ve used it myself, but I’m not sure we can excuse Jesus so quickly, since he himself just earlier points out and condemns the ingrained hatred of others. Jesus is pretty woke.
So what’s going on? I don’t think we who are appalled by Jesus’ response are crazy or over-reacting or blowing things out of proportion. And yet I also don’t think Jesus is capable of degrading someone so horribly. I simply don’t believe that Jesus can say one thing and do another. I don’t believe that his faith and his works are at such odds with one another.
So here’s a question: what if Jesus’ words are not meant to tell us something about Jesus, but are meant to tell us something about ourselves? Jesus is no dummy. He spent the last however-many days telling everyone around him, including the disciples, that God cares passionately for the sick and marginalized and those in need, and that God gets upset when we don’t do the same. Jesus knows his Scripture, he knows his prophets, he knows this to be true about God. He deeply believes it. He stakes his life on it.
But does his audience? Do his disciples? Do all the people who have been listening to him and following him around for the past however-many days believe it? Do they stake their life on it? The Gentile, Syrophoenician woman does. She believes what Jesus has said, so deeply, that when he says something that contradicts that, when he says something that implies that God does not care about the sick and the marginalized, she challenges him. “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” In other words, God’s love and God’s healing and God’s mercy are so abundant that there is more than enough for everyone, there is so much of it that it spills off the table so that everyone gets what they need. There are no restrictions to God’s love. Nobody has to wait for their turn because there might not be enough. There’s more than enough. And because this woman believes what Jesus has said earlier about God, she calls out the dissonance––the hypocrisy––of Jesus’ words.
But she’s the only one who does. His disciples, who’ve been hearing Jesus from day one, say nothing, and indeed, in the Gospel of Matthew where this story is also found, they try to get Jesus to send her away. Those whose house Jesus is in say nothing. We, the twenty-first century audience, say nothing.
You see, I think, as do a small number of biblical scholars, that what Jesus says to the woman is a test: Jesus wants to know if people are really listening to what he’s saying. He wants to know if people really believe the radical nature of what he’s saying about God, what the prophets like Isaiah have been saying for centuries––that God is on the side of the oppressed, and that God calls us to look out for the marginalized and include them, that God’s kingdom is made of up those who are sick and poor and unworthy and on the outside. Jesus wants to know if people are paying attention to what he’s actually doing––which is healing and feeding and welcoming and including everyone. And so he slips in this test. He wants to see if people are going to object to what he says. He wants to know if they themselves can see the hypocrisy of saying God welcomes everyone and then turning someone away.
And I’m sorry to say that I think the disciples failed the test. At least on this occasion. But the woman passed. And so did the writer of the Gospel of Mark, who includes this story. (The writer of Luke failed, this story doesn’t appear at all in the Gospel of Luke.) And I think we pass. At least, I hope we do.
If we do pass, though, it’s because God has opened our eyes and our ears to be sensitive to religious hypocrisy and because God has strengthened us to believe that God is who Jesus and the prophets and the psalmists say––that God executes justice for the oppressed, sets the prisoners free, watches over the strangers, upholds the orphan and the widow. And God strengthens us to stand up in defense of that. You see this isn’t a sermon about judging those who don’t see the hypocrisy and it’s not about looking down on those who say one thing and do another. This is about proclaiming that God is indeed who we proclaim God to be, and that therefore God is the one who points out hypocrisy to us, and that God is the one who strengthens us to say, as James does, that faith without works is dead, and as James says later in a verse that for some reason we don’t read, “I by my works will show you my faith.” God is the one who puts that little voice inside of us that makes us uncomfortable when religious people say one thing and do another. God is the one who strengthens us to speak out when we see hypocrisy and who empowers us to engage in the hard work of making our works align with our faith. God strengthened and empowered the Gentile Syrophoenician woman to approach Jesus and then to challenge his words, and God does the same for us. God opens the ears of those of us who are deaf to hear the words of injustice and God frees the voices of those of us who are mute to speak out about God’s love. God frees us from our hesitations, from holding back, and helps us to stand boldly in defense of God’s love.
I’m still uncomfortable with this Gospel reading, because I don’t know for sure if my interpretation is right. We never know these things for sure. But I do know that our discomfort in the face of hypocrisy is right. That agitation that we feel––either just in the back of our minds or roaring out of our hearts––when we see people being denied God’s love, in the name of God, is right. Because it is God’s agitation. It is God moving in our hearts, propelling us forward as people of faith to follow with integrity in the way of Christ. It is God empowering us to do what Jesus does, which is to offer words and actions of love and healing in the name of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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