Mark 7:24-37
"For saying that, you may go - the demon has left your daughter." (29)
This is a quite remarkable incident - at many levels.
Jesus is in foreign territory, Gentile territory. He is seeking peace and quiet away from the crowds. He is inside a house.
A Syrophoenician woman enters the house and bows at his feet.
She breaks many cultural taboos by her actions. She crosses the ethnic barriers, and tramples over the gender wall to beg Jesus to heal her daughter. An unaccompanied woman should not have approached a man; she should not have entered the house alone. This woman did. And then she got the better of Jesus in a verbal joust - or at least that is what it seems like.
This passage challenges the scholars and every thinking believer. Our view of a gentle and magnanimous Jesus is under threat. An insensitive and exclusive recluse apparently replaces the Jesus, who is always perceptive, seeing below the surface and knowing what is happening behind the scenes.
What are we to make of references to giving food to dogs? Was Jesus calling the woman and her kind dogs? Surely not! Yet the implication is there in the text. Scholars try to get around the issue by examining the words - and maybe 'dogs' should be translated 'puppies'. A little better perhaps, but the woman and her kind are still nowhere near being members of the family, and equality with the people of Israel is a long way off.
Such words would have been enough to dent the confidence of most, but not this feisty and desperate woman.
She pleads for a crumb - that will be enough. Jesus gives it to her. Her daughter is healed.
Other readings:
Prov 22:1-2,8-9, 22-23
James 2:1-10
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