No Dogs Allowed
Mark 7:24-37
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Writer Rachel Held Evans once shared the story about how she became, in her own words, an accidental feminist. It didn’t happen, she said, the way most people who view feminism as a dirty word might imagine. She didn’t leave her conservative, Bible-believing background and go off to a secular university to major in women’s studies so that she could come back and impose those ideas on her church. No, it began the day she understood that the idea of being equal could not be separated from the practice of equality. It began the day she delivered a testimony to her youth group, and was complimented on her speaking skills afterward by one of the boys who said, “You would be a great preacher, Rachel. Too bad you’re a girl.”
It’s a terrible thing to say, of course. “Too bad you’re a girl.” As in, isn’t it a shame that God would waste all that talent on someone that no none will take seriously. As in, too bad you can’t possibly use those gifts because everyone knows that only boys can preach. As in, too bad the difference between being a boy and being a girl is such an unbridgeable chasm that you could never hope to offer anything close to the kind of depth and spiritual insight that a boy could. Too bad you’re a girl. It’s just a terrible thing to say.
Kind of like the thing that we hear come out of Jesus’ mouth in this morning’s gospel reading. We just read it, so you probably remember what he said. Please don’t make me repeat it. It was hard enough the first time. Now I could attempt all kind of preacherly gymnastics up here in an effort to convince you that Jesus didn’t say the thing that we all just heard him say; that we somehow misunderstood what he meant, or that he was just being playful. But I think we’ve all had just about enough of that sort of nonsense these days. I think we’ve all had enough of being told someone we’re supposed to be able to look up to didn’t say what we clearly heard them say, or didn’t mean it, or was making a poor joke.
Believe me, all kinds of people have tried to explain away these words of Jesus, spin them like a press secretary in an effort to get us to look the other way and ignore what we heard and how it makes us feel.
I can remember talking to a friend of mine about this passage. He had a very distinct memory about the first time he heard this exchange between Jesus and the Gentile woman. Matthew calls her a Canaanite in his version of the story, but here in Mark she’s referred to as Syrophoenician, which sounds like something very exotic. Basically, what it means is that she’s an outsider, a gentile. Otherwise known as, ‘not one of us.’ Anyway, this friend of mine said that he had decided that he wanted to get more serious about his faith and figured that he should start by reading the Bible.
That is a great idea, by the way. If you are the kind of person who feels like faith is something that you aren’t quite connected to, if it feels like something that other people seem to have that you don’t- picking up the bible to find out what’s in there is a really good way to get started.
Of course, you may end up like my friend, who got as far as this story and had to put the bible down. He put it down because Jesus sounds like a jerk here. And he didn’t want to think of Jesus in that way.
That is where faith begins. Faith begins the moment we start to struggle with Jesus as we meet him in the gospels, and stop trying to make him into somebody else, somebody he’s not. Faith begins when we really get to know Jesus. Chances are good that you won’t be able to do that on your own. Plenty of people have tried. It’s a little like going to the gym. It helps if you’ve got a workout buddy; someone to keep you honest, someone who might know something that you don’t, someone who can spot you so that you don’t end up stuck under too much weight. The same goes for faith and the bible. It helps to have someone else to talk to about these kinds of things. It’s even more helpful to have several someones. We call that church, and it’s where we’re supposed to go when something in scripture doesn’t make sense to us. It’s where we can check with one another about what we’ve read and try to understand together just what it is that God might be trying to say to us. Because not everything in the bible is going to make perfect sense.
Like Jesus calling someone a dog. And not just anyone- a desperate mother asking Jesus to heal her daughter. It’s just a terrible thing to say. So what do we make of it? Some scholars have tried to soften Jesus’ words by suggesting that the Greek here is really the diminutive form of the word, so he’s just being playful. He doesn’t say ‘dogs’, they contend. He says ‘puppies.’ I’m really not sure how that’s supposed to make it any better. If anything, it sounds just as pejorative, if not worse. Something is not right with this woman’s child and she’s put herself in an extremely vulnerable position by approaching this Jewish man on the desperate hope that he can do something about it- and he’s playing word games with her? Try again.
Other say that this is meant to be some kind of test, to gauge the sincerity of the woman’s faith. Just how badly does she want Jesus’ help? Did I mention that she throws herself at Jesus’ feet first? I mean, how high is the bar here, and how does insulting here accomplish anything? Maybe he really is a jerk.
Or could it be that he’s simply human. You know, he’d been trying to get away from this sort of thing.
Just prior to this, he was questioned about the fact that his disciples weren’t following all the right religious traditions. So he took his followers up to Tyre, where there weren’t as many of these religious types to hound them. No one knew him in Tyre, or so he thought. Only it turns out that his reputation had spread farther and wider than anyone had imagined. He didn’t want anyone to know he was there, but as Mark tells us, “he couldn’t escape notice.” It’s enough to make anyone a little cranky. Isn’t Jesus allowed to get cranky? He is human, isn’t he?
But what if this really is a test after all, just not for the woman. You see, she had already shown her determination. She had already made it clear that she was not above groveling if it meant relief for her child. Nevertheless, she persisted. If there was ever a test for her, she had already passed it simply by seeking out Jesus. No, if anyone is being tested here, it’s the people who are following Jesus, the people who would be his disciples, who find themselves in foreign territory here. That is what Tyre is. It’s a gentile city. Jesus had just finished telling them that it isn’t what goes into a person that defiles them, it’s what comes out. That is, it isn’t contact with non-believing gentiles and all those folks who aren’t like us that make a person unclean.
It’s the ugly things that come out of our mouths and our hearts. It’s the evil we intend when we single someone out and decide they’re somehow our enemy because they look different, or think different, or dress different, or even believe different. It’s the evil that comes from branding another as the problem, or too much trouble. It’s the attitude that causes us to regard someone as less-than-human because of where they come from; those people, no better than dogs. Of course when we do, it becomes easier to overlook them, easier to deny them the things that we consider essential; things like dignity, or respect, or simply enough food to eat. I suspect that this isn’t the first time this group of disciples has heard a woman like this referred to as a dog. “Too bad you’re a girl.’
In fact, it may be that Jesus says the thing that he knows they are already thinking. Jesus says it so that they can hear for themselves just how ugly those words sound coming out of someone else’s mouth. But that may be letting Jesus off the hook for his words. It could be that he say the thing that everyone around him had taught him the think. It could be that Jesus is wrong to say this. As T. Denise Anderson, former co-Moderator of our General Assembly, has observed it isn’t a sin to be wrong, it isn’t a sin to be mistaken. What is a sin is when we are wrong to fail to take the correction. What Jesus shows us is a willingness to be open the correction when it comes, to be surprised himself by just how expansive God’s Kingdom is.
What’s clear is that the people who are supposed to be following Jesus, and leaning what this kingdom of God is all about, have a hard time seeing it through their fear and prejudice, and the habit that so many religiously minded folks have of thinking they’ve got this whole God thing wrapped up. Instead, it’s the people who are supposed to be outcasts- the unclean, the ones who are thought to be no better than dogs- who are far better at recognizing Jesus for who he truly is. Because to people like that, the news of what God is up to in Jesus, offering release to those held captive, a new way of seeing to those who are otherwise blind, and the kind of bread that feeds a deeper kind of hunger, well that’s too good to escape notice.
It turns out that the people who really don’t know any better aren’t expecting Jesus to be who they think he should be. So they don’t need him to reinforce all the views and values that they already hold.
They’ll take whatever crumbs of that kingdom that they can get. It’s the people that the rest of us may regard as ‘dogs’ who know the meaning of true hunger. And if we want to see what they see, if we truly desire to experience the fullness of life that Jesus has to offer, then there can be no ‘dogs’ allowed in our worldview. Because what God has offered us in Jesus is for everyone, regardless of what we might think; often in spite of what we might think.
There are no second-class citizens in the kingdom of God. There are no ‘dogs’ allowed. There are only children- and in Jesus, God will feed them all. Alleluia, amen.