Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to Exeter Congregational United Church of Christ on the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 10, 2000, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Isaiah 35:4-8; James 2:1-6, 8-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.
-Mark 7:27

     Can you believe that Jesus said that? And said it to the mother of a sick child, a mother who was pleading for his help to save her little girl? Can you imagine him saying it to you, if it were your little girl who was afflicted?

     I guess we should call this the dark side of Jesus. This dark Jesus bears no resemblance to the one to whom we pray and sing hymns and about whom we read in most of the Scriptures. And I don't like him much. I suppose you don't either. Where does he get off, calling this poor desperate woman and her sick child and all their kind dogs? It's not Christian!

     That's my reaction, straight from the gut, and I make no apologies for it. Our faith doesn't require us to show respect for behavior that shows no respect toward one of us. And she is one of us, this Syrophoenician woman. She was a Gentile. We are Gentiles. We are not Jews. If she's a dog, so are we. And we're not talking cute little pooches here, either. This is the word "dog" being used in its most pejorative sense: as in the mangy cur, the flea-bitten mutt, the sonofa you-know-what. So we don't have to like Jesus for saying this, and we don't have to try to explain it away. We can just say it stinks, because it does.

     In fact, we're obliged as Biblical people to take the text seriously enough to voice our objections to it, if it is objectionable. But we can't stop there. We are also obliged to take it seriously enough to be puzzled, and ask what is going on here. And that is an interesting and instructive exercise.

     For example: Ask yourself who is really the leading figure in this little story. You could say it's Jesus. He is the leader, the healer, the teacher, the caster-out of demons. He is the one with the power. The Gospel of Mark is about him! But look at this one story and ask yourself who is the dominant personality, and there's no question: It's this woman, this persistent, sharp, fast-on-her-feet Mom who is going to get her daughter saved, by golly, and is not going to take No for an answer.

     So I suspect that the story is meat to teach us more about the character of faith than about the character of Jesus. I think we're to understand from this woman that faith is persistence in prayer and hope - obsessional, indomitable persistence in the face of all discouragement, doggedness if you will.

     She brings no claim of entitlement; when he calls her a dog she agrees with him. But she has an answer anyway: Yes, sir, I'm a dog, but even the dog gets the scraps that fall from the children's table! A dog is a beggar. A dog is a very good beggar, as anyone knows who has ever lived with one. She's a beggar, and she's good at it too. She brings no argument, she brings only her anxious love for her child, and she brings that with all the forwardness and force and eloquence that God gave her. And Mark is saying to all of us who wonder what true faith looks like, Here: this is what it looks like! Faith is being a very good beggar.

     That ought to give you something to chew on with your Sunday dinner, but there's more here. There's still that unpleasant, unwelcoming, ungenerous, un-Christian Jesus. We aren't supposed to be nice and docile and wimp out over that. We're supposed to go after him the same way the woman went after him, the same way Job went after God, the same way Bette Davis went after Cary Grant in whatever that movie was where she backed him up to the wall and grabbed him by the lapels and shook him and wouldn't back off.

     And if we do, what do we see? We see a Jesus who changed his mind. So say goodbye to your image of a godlike, all-knowing, all-seeing, always-right-and-never-wrong Jesus, at least while you're reading Mark's Gospel instead of John's. And say hello to a Jesus who is a good and righteous Jew and a lover of the Torah, a Jesus who is still trying to figure out what it means to be whoever and whatever he is.

     There is some seriously overlooked Biblical theology here. The Hebrew Bible, the Bible of Jesus and Paul and all of those folks, is full of examples of God Almighty having a change of heart, a change of mind. Happens all the time. And the Jews remember that, but we've forgotten it, we Christians, and in the process we've lost the aptitude and the appetite for arguing with God - arguing, bargaining, tussling, wrestling, questioning, struggling with God. And taking joy in it - pretty grim joy sometimes, but joy nonetheless, because God takes joy in that process, it is an integral aspect of the process of Creation.

     One of the ongoing projects of Biblical scholarship is to try to figure out which of the sayings of Jesus reported in the Gospels are things that Jesus actually said, and which were things that good and faithful early followers put in his mouth years afterwards because they thought that was the kind of thing he might have said or ought to have said, in which case the saying which appears to be by Jesus is really by someone else about Jesus. And this project has produced some fascinating analysis.

     For instance, the scholars have reasoned that if a particular saying of Jesus is inconsistent with what the Gospel as a whole seems to be trying to tell us about Jesus, or even contradictory to the Gospel's overall image of Jesus, then that is probably an authentic saying that Jesus actually uttered, because his early followers wouldn't have had any other possible motive to remember it and write it down. You can see one of them saying to the others, well, yeah, I don't like it either, but what can we do? He said it!

     By that criterion, this crack about dogs is an authentic saying of Jesus. It's nice that the woman persuaded him to change his mind about it, but we have to ask what it means that he said it at all. Some interpreters have tried to make excuses for him: He was tired, they say. He needed a break. Or else he wasn't really saying no and wasn't really calling her a dog, he was just testing her faith sort of like God tested Job's faith. And to all that I say: Hogwash.

     But to be fair, we have to see this from where Jesus and all his hearers stood, which was inside first-century Judaism: a faith-community that believed it was called by God to be a special people, a covenant people, a people with a special calling, a nation of priests, set apart for God. And also a people whose experience with Gentiles was overwhelmingly negative: Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, all had mistreated them. They all knew these things.

     So they had good reason to think of Gentiles as dogs. But they also had reason to wonder if maybe the whole point of their own special calling was for the benefit of all those dogs, because they were God's dogs. The nagging suspicion is there throughout the Hebrew Bible, and more than a suspicion, that it was too small a thing for all this revelation and all this deliverance and all this redemption to be for their benefit alone. The idea that they might be stewards, not owners, of the mysteries of God.

     And all this wonderment is behind Jesus' conversation with the Syrophoenician woman. And Jesus places himself squarely in company with those in his own community who believe that the chosen people were chosen to serve a purpose larger than themselves, as large as all humanity and all creation. He changes his mind to go there. He changes his mind because the first Gentile who asks him for help is asking not for herself but for someone else, for a child, and the deaf man in the second part of the lesson doesn't ask for himself either: his friends are beggars on his behalf. In the face of their examples, how can he possibly deny that he is connected with them, dogs though they are?

     So faith is persistent and insistent and energetic and dedicated and determined, as we observed before, yes, but it's also connected. Connected to others. Connected to Gentiles, dogs, children, neighbors, strangers, what have you. Aware of what a gift and a blessing it is that I should be able to pray for you and you should be able to pray for me, and eager to take advantage of the opportunity, and to make the most of the grand and rich and holy fellowship implicit in it. This is the fellowship which we too have now inherited and of which we too are now stewards. And I say, let us also go to the dogs. Amen.