Crumbs Under the Table?
Sermon by Jamie Howison on James 2:1-17 and Mark 7:24-37
That’s a heck of a gospel text, isn’t it? With Jesus refusing to help the daughter of a Gentile woman, essentially calling her a dog in the process. It is an unsettling story, and one that any preacher worth his or her salt needs to face head on.
One of the common ways this has been read is to say that Jesus is simply testing this Gentile woman, maybe even with a twinkle in his eye and the hint of a smile teasing the corners of his mouth. He wants to engage her in a little bit of irenic debate which he knows will arc toward her being able to express her strong trust in his ministry. But I want to suggest that there is another way of reading the story, and one that takes seriously the human side of Jesus.
“From there Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre”; “there” being Galilee, where he has been exercising a very active ministry of healing and teaching amongst its Jewish population. Now he is in the region of Tyre—clearly Gentile country—where “He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” What’s that about? Well, he’s probably tired and in need of time alone, away from the crowds. He needs to rest and pray, which is something we see him do at various other points in the gospel stories. But he’s not so lucky, as “he could not escape notice, and a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet.”
Have you ever been so tired and depleted that you just can’t bear to respond to anything? You let the phone just ring, leave the knock at the door unanswered, shut down email and text messages, and opt for a solid nap, a long shower, an evening of Netflix, or whatever. Or maybe you do pick up the phone or answer the door, only to realize that your tiredness has left you impatient or even a bit short-tempered, particularly if the phone call is from a telemarketer or the knock at the door is someone trying to sell you on something.
I think Jesus is tired like that, and more. I believe he’s beginning to really feel the weight of the ministry—the cross—that he is bearing, and at that moment more than anything else he needs some time and space alone to recharge and discern and centre himself after some very demanding time in Galilee. I think the comments made by the writer Adrian Plass in his reflections on this passage are extremely helpful here, when he says,
As we read the gospels we learn that Jesus was shocked, he was amazed, he wept, he was tempted, he grew angry. These are the spontaneous reactions of a man to events that presented themselves as unexpected experiences. How, in all seriousness, could it have been otherwise if his life as a vulnerable human being was to mean anything?
And yes, he is a vulnerable human being, because he is fully human. That’s one of the mysteries that our tradition proclaims: Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine. Sometimes, though, we neglect the human side in favour of the divine and imagine him as being so godly that he walks about two inches above the earth, always compassionate to those who need him, always ready to brilliantly debate those who oppose him, always fully in control. Problem is, I don’t know any human person who comes even vaguely close to that, do you?
And so the tired, vulnerable human Jesus has his longed-for solitude interrupted by this woman whose child is in need of his help… and she’s a Syrophoenician, a Gentile. At first he turns her away, with a common slur used by the Jews of his day for Gentiles: dogs. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” “The children,” by which he means Israel, and it is true that his ministry was directed to the children of Israel, and only later expanded to include the people of all nations. But still… a dog? She, however, is undaunted, and quickly responds, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Here Adrian Plass comments, “In the end the combination of love, passionate need and wit was irresistible. As a man who specialised in words and witty retorts himself, Jesus must have been delighted with the answer she gave him.”
I think that “delighted” is indeed the right word, and you see that shining through in what Jesus next says to her: “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” And indeed it was, for when this fiercely loving mother got home, her daughter was resting in bed, no longer afflicted by any spirits.
The interesting question, though, is this just a “one-off” event along the way, or does it impact Jesus in an ongoing way? It is probably notable that the very next episode Mark records is the healing of a man who is deaf and has a speech impediment, which takes place “in the region of the Decapolis,” which is also Gentile territory. That’s followed by the feeding of a crowd of 4000 people—the second feeding of the multitudes story told by Mark—and it appears that this also takes place in that same region, as Mark has noted no movement of Jesus and the disciples from that area. This leads Matt Skinner to offer the following reflection:
Immediately after leaving Tyre, Jesus’ work goes a new way. He cures a man who cannot hear and can barely speak, then feeds 4000 people. Those events occur, apparently, in the Decapolis (Mark 7:31-8:10), a region populated chiefly by gentiles. Although Mark doesn’t call attention to the ethnic identity of these people, it seems Jesus takes the Syrophoenician mother’s wisdom to heart. The timeline has been accelerated; gentiles receive blessings, too, even now. The woman’s persistence benefits more than just one little girl.
It is Skinner’s view, in other words, that seeds have been planted for the coming time in which the old dividing lines between Jew and Gentile will decisively fall, and the Jesus way will be proclaimed freely and openly to all peoples.
Is it claiming too much to say that the tenacity of this woman led to a change of Jesus’ heart? No, I don’t think it is too much, particularly not if we take seriously the fullness of his humanity. He was a Jewish man of his time, after all, and would have absorbed the social and cultural norms into his bones. Yes, again and again he transcends those norms, as we watch him treat women and children, lepers and outcasts, the blind and deaf and broken-down differently from what the standards of his day would dictate, but a tired and vulnerable Jesus could still ever so easily slip into the default settings of his time and culture. I find it comforting that the stubborn love of a woman for her daughter—characterized by C. Clifton Black as being “executed as some comedic jujitsu, twisting Jesus’ maxim to deliver the retort best suiting her situation”—opens his heart, a heart both human and divine. It draws me closer to him to know he could be curt when he was tired, and at the same time oh-so-responsive to this woman’s quick-witted plea for help.
And I believe that what we see in the reading from the Epistle of James is what a community should look like when it follows this Jesus portrayed in Mark’s account. No acts of favouritism, James insists, no priority given to the rich and powerful. Don’t dishonour the poor, he insists, and don’t give priority to those who have made them poor. Love your neighbour as yourself, with no partiality folks. If you want mercy rather than judgement, render mercy, one to another. And don’t bless one another with peace unless you really mean it… and meaning it requires action. A hungry brother or sister? Share a meal. A desperate mother agonizing over the plight of her daughter? Don’t just wish her all the best, and then forget about her. See what you can do, and do it.
That’s the message of James, after all: “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” And it is something Jesus himself had to confront that tired day when the woman said to him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” On account of that challenge, he gave her a lot more than crumbs. He gave her daughter back to her, alive, free, and restored; in faith, utterly alive.
And so may he do for each of us.
