(Mark 7:24-30, Matthew 15:21-28)
As some of you know, I have a personal project going on the Sermon on the Mount which I’ve been developing off and on for the last twelve years or so. It first saw life as a sermon series, but I had quite a bit more I wanted to do with it; the manuscript has been on pause for some time now near the end of Matthew 5, but if God is merciful, I’ll get it finished at some point and perhaps it will find its audience. Even with the writing on hiatus, though, it continues to shape how I interact with Scripture on a daily and weekly basis.
That’s why I bring it up this morning. As you know if you’ve been here the last few weeks, last Sunday we began a season focusing on discipleship, and I greatly appreciated where Emily began this journey; she’s teased me once or twice for my focus on defining our terms, but last Sunday she did that where I might not have thought to, and wisely so. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that the word “discipleship” might be loaded with negative connotations for a lot of people, as it’s far too near and dear to my heart; but I can see it, and it’s clearly important to deal with that issue before spending any time on the subject.
For my part, I don’t think I had much of a definition for the word “discipleship” at all beyond “following Jesus” until I started digging into the Sermon on the Mount. I noticed something at that time which had never really registered with me before—something not from the Sermon itself, but from the verses immediately before it. Matthew 4 clearly shows us two different groups following Jesus, both with energy and determination. There are the crowds, who are following Jesus for their sake—for the miracles, the entertainment value, and the like; and then there are the disciples, who are following Jesus for Jesus’ sake. Then you also have the Jewish authorities, who aren’t exactly following Jesus but are keeping a close eye on him, with growing suspicion and concern. I came to believe one of the purposes of the Sermon on the Mount was to encourage the crowds to pick a lane: follow Jesus for Jesus, or go home.
You see, on my read, the Sermon on the Mount is a carefully-constructed exposition of the way of the disciple—what it looks like and feels like and means to follow Jesus for the sake of being with Jesus, learning from him, and being shaped by him. One of the things Jesus makes clear in the Sermon is that if you’re his disciple, you are not in control of the ride. It’s not going to follow your plot, you’re not going to see the twists coming—or the challenges—and it’s not going to defer to your comfort zone. I won’t say Jesus didn’t care about creating safe spaces, because he did—but for the broken, the hurting, the repentant, and the shamed. Protecting you from the things you don’t want to hear, or don’t want to face? Not on the agenda.
Our story this morning is a prime example of that. To draw that out, though we’re moving through Mark in the lectionary, I’m also going to lean on Matthew’s parallel account, because he gives us some additional details which are helpful for our purposes. As Emily noted last week, Mark is the Young Gospel Writer in a Hurry. Our standing joke when I took Greek in college was that everything in Mark happens kai euthus—“And immediately.” Jesus can hardly sneeze without Mark saying it happened kai euthus. This morning I want to back down the “immediately” just a little and take advantage of Matthew’s eyewitness testimony. If you have Mark 7 open in your Bibles, you might want to keep that open while I read from Matthew 15, to give you a sense of the differences. This is Matthew 15:21-28, from the ISV:
As you can see, we’re not quite done talking about Tyre yet, though at least this passage doesn’t involve any construction projects. Instead, Mark tells us, Jesus and his disciples were on retreat, looking for a little quiet and a little breathing room. Jesus had been well-known around Tyre and Sidon since early in his ministry—Mark tells us that, too, in chapter 3—and what they got was something rather different from a quiet retreat. It was an encounter which, as Kenneth Bailey notes, “is often viewed as a troubling embarrassment.” Those of you who are familiar with me were doubtless expecting to hear Dr. Bailey’s name, and indeed this is one of the stories on which I most treasure his work. In this case, though, it’s not because of anything fancy, it’s because of the relentless application of one core insight: in any of the stories of Jesus, the community is critically important, even when they’re never explicitly mentioned.
That’s an easy thing for us to miss; as three psychology professors at the University of British Columbia pointed out in a seminal paper fourteen years ago, Americans are WEIRD—which is to say, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. As part of that, the authors could just as well have used a different I: individualistic. Jesus’ society, like most in human history, was not WEIRD at all. I was introduced to Dr. Bailey’s work at Regent, where I studied alongside students from Korea and Israel, China and India, Malaysia and Kenya, and other cultures in which—as in first-century Israel—the community was paramount; I saw it through their eyes, which is one of the reasons his books have influenced me so profoundly.
So if this story takes place outside Israel, who is the community here? It’s the disciples. They are the community in this story, not as actors in one of Jesus’ parables but as the audience for an acted parable. That clues us in to what Jesus is doing here, telling us it is in part for their benefit. This is reinforced when we realize this acted parable echoes 1 Kings 17:7-24, in which the prophet Elijah is sent during a great famine to this same region, to the town of Zarephath, to a widow and her son who are in great need.
To be clear, I’m not saying this story is not about this unnamed Gentile woman or her suffering daughter. Rather, I’m saying she is neither the victim nor the student here—she’s the hero, and just as much the teacher as Jesus is. Follow me in, and I’ll show you why.
This encounter takes place in several movements. Mark, characteristically, compresses them so he can get to the point, but Matthew tells us more. The woman cries out to Jesus, and her cry is startling in two ways. One, she is transgressing an interlocking pair of high social barriers. She is a woman speaking to a strange man—in public, no less. This was not done; in fact, it was the sort of thing which could blacken her reputation. Yet she does it, because for her daughter’s sake, whatever price she might pay will be worth it. What’s more, she is a Gentile addressing a Jew—and a rabbi, at that. Not only would this Jewish man be likely to regard her with contempt, but the fact that he was a rabbi made the gender barrier worse. Rabbis didn’t even talk to their own wives in public, nevermind strange women.
So that’s surprising enough, but the way the woman addresses Jesus is just as unexpected. First, she comes to him with the traditional cry of the beggar: “Have mercy on me!” Second, she addresses him as “Kyrie, Son of David!” Kyrie is the word we translate “Lord,” but it could also just mean “Sir” as a form of polite address; but “Son of David” redefines everything. This is startling indeed, for this is a messianic title (and therefore Jewish, of course), and not one in common usage. If this woman is not a Gentile convert to Judaism, she clearly knows enough to be; and her use of such a title means kyrie must be given its full weight. In combination, she is calling out to Jesus as Lord and Messiah, nothing less—which is more than anyone has done to this point. Peter’s great confession doesn’t come until the next chapter.
Jesus does not respond. He’s working in two directions at once here. On one hand, he’s testing the woman, just as Elijah tested the widow at Zarephath, and just as he himself has tested people like the crippled man at the pool of Bethsaida in John 5. This is not a negative in any way; the purpose of a test is not to embarrass students (whatever some of them might think) but to reveal the truth of those being tested. In John 5, it shows the shallowness and pettiness of the crippled man, though Jesus heals him anyway. Here, it reveals the woman’s great and stubborn faith and puts it on display. This is not news to Jesus, who is the world’s greatest teacher as well as its greatest healer; he knows her heart and her faith. But until she is tested, she cannot know. Jesus wants her to see it, and he wants his disciples to see it.
Jesus wants his disciples to see the full depth and power of her faith because he is teaching them a hard lesson. The mainstream of Jewish thought at that time was not positive toward women. About two hundred years before, a man by the name of Jesus ben Sirach compiled a book of proverbs which, if your Bible happens to contain the Apocrypha, you will find there under the title “Sirach.” In that book, he wrote this—it’s 42:14: “A man’s spite is preferable to a woman’s kindness; women give rise to shame and reproach.” Add in the fact that this particular woman was behaving in a highly inappropriate manner according to the standards of their culture, and the disciples’ judgment of her was unequivocal and harsh. With his silence, Jesus is allowing them to think he agrees with them. But does he? No—he’s setting them up.
The disciples initiate the second movement. The woman doesn’t stop crying out for mercy, and they figure Jesus is on their side, so they come to him begging him to get rid of her. Jesus seems to agree with them, declaring, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” He’s giving the woman her next test question: she didn’t give up when her plea was met with silence; will she now take “no” for an answer? Will she believe he means it, or is her faith in him great enough and clear enough to know he doesn’t? At the same time, he’s also drawing the disciples out by bringing their prejudices into the conversation. This involves them in the outcome, and it also puts their prejudices out in the open, front and center, where they can be clearly seen.
The third movement sees the woman double down, coming and kneeling at Jesus’ feet as she continues crying out for help. To this point, the disciples have kept her at arm’s length, emotionally speaking; they’ve been able to treat her as an abstraction, just another “Gentile dog.” Now, however, there she is with her love and her pain right in front of them, and pushing her away is a lot harder. They’ve seen Jesus’ compassion for the wounded and broken over and over and over again. What’s more, they’re good Jews—they know their Bible. They know how Elijah saved the lives of the widow and her son not far from where they now stand, and then raised her son from the dead; they knew that story well before they ever took up with Jesus, and they’ve heard him use it to describe and explain his own ministry. They know the prophets, and how fiercely men like Isaiah and Jeremiah denounced Israel for neglecting and even exploiting the fatherless and the widow. And they are not hard-hearted people who can ignore suffering. But all these things are in direct conflict with their prejudices, and Jesus has spoken the quiet part out loud; their hearts are at war with themselves. Will Jesus let them off the hook?
As Matthew and Mark both make clear, he does no such thing. Instead, he ratchets everything up, giving their prejudices full expression in vivid, ugly language. Dogs were generally despised in the ancient Near East and Middle East; one might keep guard dogs, big, half-wild brutes which could only be counted on not to maul their owners, but the idea of a pet dog would have been unfathomable. To the Jews, they were even worse because unclean—not quite as bad as pigs, but pretty close. If you’ve ever had an outside dog with the room to run around and find nasty stuff to roll in, you understand. As such, it was perfectly natural to call Gentiles “dogs.” But it’s one thing to do that when the Gentiles in question are off somewhere else—it’s something else again to do it to their face. But this is what Jesus does.
Now, it’s worth noting that there is a note of gentleness here. The regular Greek word for “dog” is kuon, but Jesus doesn’t use that form, he uses the diminuitive, kunarion. That’s why the ISV translates this “puppies,” and it’s one of the reasons I used the ISV this morning—it’s the only translation I checked that caught this nuance. That removes some of the malignancy from the image, I think, since we’re talking about animals that would lick your fingers, not bite them off. That said, this is still highly insulting language, and I can only imagine the disciples squirming in embarrassment. As Dr. Bailey observes,
Jesus here gives concrete expression to the theology of his narrow-minded disciples, who want the Canaanite woman dismissed. The verbalization is authentic to their attitudes and feelings, but shocking when put into words and thrown in the face of a desperate, kneeling woman pleading for the sanity of her daughter. It is acutely embarrassing to hear and see one’s deepest prejudices verbalized and demonstrated. As that happens one is obliged to face those biases, often for the first time. Contemporary history is punctuated with many examples of this dynamic from Gandhi to Martin Luther King and beyond.
This is also, of course, the final and hardest part of the woman’s test. How will she respond to the insult? Will pride and pain win? Will she lash out in kind, turn on her heel, and walk away? It would be hard to blame her if she did; indeed, many would praise her for standing up for herself. Or will love, faith, and trust win? She has been driven by her love for her daughter and guided by faith and trust in Jesus—faith that he can free her daughter (when no one else can) and trust that he will because of his compassion. As well, by her own statement, she has put her faith and trust in Jesus as Lord and Messiah. Will that be enough?
It is, and more than enough. Indeed, the woman’s faith shines brilliantly off the page, as she does nothing we might have predicted, good or bad. She does not leave in a furious rage; she does not swallow her anger, ignore the insult, and continue her pleas; she does not rebuke Jesus and try to guilt-trip him into doing what she wants. Instead, in the midst of her pain and emotional turmoil, she has the heart to respond playfully, and the wit to turn the insult around and use it to advance her request. She is willing to bear anything for the sake of her daughter, because of her love for her child, but also because of her faith in Jesus.
Jesus is clearly delighted. “What an answer!” he exclaims. “O woman, great is your faith! What you desire—is done!” He could well have said of her as he did of the centurion in Matthew 8, “I have not seen faith this great in all of Israel.” He could have praised her love for her daughter just as highly, if she had stayed to listen; but as soon as she heard the word “done,” no doubt she was running home as fast as she could go—or even faster. Though we don’t know her name, the church will honor and celebrate her for as long as time endures.
And Jesus’ disciples? Her love and her faith have put the disciples’ prejudices to shame. If we want to use language as harsh as Jesus used, we could say they have been exposed as Jewish bigots and male chauvinist—well, dogs. Jesus set them up for exactly that purpose. Was that nice of him? No, not in the slightest; but as Steven Sondheim observed in the musical Into the Woods, “nice is different than good.” Nice is Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938 asking the bad man to pretty please stop eating Europe for breakfast; the point is not to deal with evil but to avoid having to do so. Good is David the psalmist asking God to deal finally with his enemies—if possible, by converting them into friends.
God’s desire is to destroy evil by redeeming it; and as Dr. Bailey observes, “evil cannot be redeemed until it is exposed.” If, then, God is on about redeeming us—and he is—then inevitably, exposure is part of the process. Following Jesus can be a lot of fun, if you do it like the crowds; you see a lot of cool stuff, and you get to pick and choose what you want and what you don’t. It’s like the difference between bacon and eggs: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. Following Jesus as a disciple is being committed, even when he’s at work turning your ego into bacon—which he will, from time to time.
A few months ago, I quoted David Powlison’s observation that God has contra-conditional love for us—he loves us as we are in Jesus. On the positive side, that means his love for us cannot be changed by anything we do or say or think because none of it will change Jesus in the slightest. The uncomfortable side is that this also means he has no interest in leaving us unchanged. Each of us have aspects and areas of our lives which we claim as ours, in which we are deeply invested. Jesus isn’t. He is relentlessly, tirelessly committed to bringing us into the light, and he makes no promise to respect our comfort zones in doing so, or to allow us to keep certain things in the dark. As my Nana often said, in her own way of expressing Powlison’s insight, “God loves you just the way you are, and too much to let you stay that way.”
If we are Jesus’ disciples, if we are following him because being with him is our highest priority, we may expect to find ourselves exposed just as the disciples were here—exposed to those around us, which is hard, and to ourselves, which is usually harder. Jesus doesn’t give us tests announced long in advance with study guides printed out and old copies available on the Internet, and he doesn’t grade us on a curve. Instead, he gives us surprise tests, with questions we’ve never considered, on subjects we might not have even known we were studying, and often when we thought we were doing something else entirely. And if the only thing we can do in response is to fall to our knees at his feet beside the woman from Syrian Phoenicia and cry out for mercy—well, that’s just where he wants us. After all, it’s only then—it’s only when we hit rock bottom, crying out for mercy and healing, knowing we have no right even to ask—it’s only then we can see that no matter how low we go, he is already lower still.
Photo © 2009 flickr user Dennis D; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.o Generic