The Syrophoenician Woman

A Sunday talk based on the Gospel set for tomorrow :-

One of the Powys County Councillors was in the news the other week because, in the course of making a very passionate point about health care provision and the sense people from this side of the border can have, Welsh speakers in particular among them, of being treated as second class citizens, a word was used that on reflection shouldn’t have been. It may be that more was made of the issue than needed to be, or maybe not, but the Councillor felt it necessary to resign from the cabinet following something of a storm of criticism.

The reason why I mention that case this morning is that it returned unbidden to my mind when I read the Gospel reading provided for today in the Common Lectionary, which includes the story of the woman of foreign extraction who came to Jesus to seek help for her daughter. For we find that even Jesus, on occasion, was prepared to use language that was grossly insulting. This could even be rather more serious than the case in our local papers. There a member of the council used an insulting word while making a debating point. Jesus on the other hand used a bad word directly to the person he was addressing. “It’s not right to take the children’s food,” he said, “and throw it to the dogs.”

Make no mistake, it’s a serious and calculated insult to describe someone as a dog. It certainly would have been then, and I’m sure it would still be now. To be fair, it’s a word many a Jewish teacher or rabbi might have used back then, to describe someone who wasn’t of their race, and didn’t therefore share the divine blessing and recognition that was theirs as a birthright. But it was still a bad word.

There’s a question for Biblical scholars to answer, then, when reading this passage, that has some serious theological implications. Just what was Jesus doing when he said that word?  Did he genuinely believe that his ministry and mission was only for and to the Jewish people, so that people like this woman were beyond the pale, and didn’t count? If that was the case, then was this a moment of epiphany for our Lord himself? Did the woman’s humble and faithful response to his insult open his eyes to a new truth, so that he realised right then that the mission he was engaged on had wider implications than he’d realised until that point.

In which case, of course, Jesus was indeed deliberately insulting the woman in exactly the sort of way that any other strict and particular Jewish teacher might have chosen to do. But Jesus isn’t just any other Jewish teacher. Last week I preached on the Gospel reading in which showed Jesus stilled the storm, revealing himself as a man in whom resided all the creative power of God. Is it possible that someone like that look at any woman in need and dismiss her so rudely?

But there are other ways of understanding this passage. Could this be one of the several places in the Gospels where an actual event becomes also an acted-out parable, in which the unexpected outcome challenges us to revise our idea of what’s right and what’s wrong, and what God wants from us and for us. If that’s the case, then maybe Jesus, though he says what any other Jewish rabbi might have been expected to say, is very deliberately doing what he does in order to provoke a response of faith from the woman, so you get a set-piece situation designed to open the minds of his disciples to the truth.

Looking at the story as a whole, it seems to me that Jesus quite deliberately put himself and his disciples into a situation in which something like this was bound to happen. He’d withdrawn to the area of Tyre and Sidon, part of what was then known as Phoenicia, today Lebanon; most of the people of this area were not Jews. So the woman came chasing after him, wanting help for her daughter, and Jesus ignored her, making out that she was none of his concern. She kept on following him, she kept on pressing her case. Perhaps the disciples could have urged Jesus to do something to help her, if only in the hope that then she’d leave them all alone, but they didn’t. Instead they urged him to send her away – and he seemed to concur with that, telling them his mission was entirely to “the lost sheep of Israel”.

Still, though, he didn’t actually send her away, and so she came to where he was, did homage before him, and asked again for his help. And we arrive at the point at which he used that insulting word. Question – did he know already, could he read it in her heart, that her desperate desire for her daughter to be healed would render her immune to insult and rejection? Probably he did, I would say – so often in the Gospels we find Jesus able to see beneath the surface, and through into the hearts of those who came to him.

Notice that when Jesus called her and her kind dogs, the woman didn’t rail at him for using such insulting language. She didn’t in fact even reject the name of dog; instead, what she did do was to turn the word back and use it in defence of her case, reminding Jesus that even the dogs were still part of household, able to eat the crumbs that fell from their master’s table.

It’s St Paul of course who develops the concept that the true children of Abraham are those who respond faithfully to the call of God, that it isn’t a matter of birthright but of faith. But here’s one of the places in which that thought process begins, and while the disciples may not yet have been persuaded that their faith should be shared with the Gentiles or Greeks, perhaps they’re beginning to recognise the simple truth that a trusting faith isn’t only found among their own people, it can turn up in other places too.

I find it such a sad thing that organised religion is so often a cause of division, that it raises barriers and creates second-class citizens. Just now in the news we’re once again reminded how divisive a force militant Islam can be; in our prayers in this service we’ll be thinking of the plight of Christian and also of Yazidis and other minority groups, in Iraq and Syria. But I think all religion can become divisive, both beyond and within itself. With that in mind it’s worth noting that the fundamentalist Sunni Muslims who seek to set up a caliphate across central Iraq may look on Christians and others as second-class, but that’s as nothing compared with their hatred for their fellow Muslims of the Shia persuasion.

But it’s not that many generations ago that Christians in this country were being fined, imprisoned, or stripped of civil rights, because they attended the wrong church on a Sunday, and not so many generations further back that Christians were burning other Christians at the stake. The encounter between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman should stand as a corrective to anyone, including ourselves, who might be tempted to draw too tightly the boundary lines between who’s in, and who’s out, of God’s favour.

Years ago, when I still lived in a vicarage, I recall being visited one day by the Jehovah’s witnesses. We had quite a pleasant chat, in the course of which I mentioned some of my own personal heroes of the faith, by which I mean people I’ve been impressed by and persuaded by, and whose teaching and example have challenged me and encouraged me and helped me to draw closer to Jesus. Mother Julian of Norwich, Francis of Assisi, Charles Wesley, Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others. You’ll agree that these people have really tried to live by faith, I asked my visitors. “Yes, sure,” they felt bound to agree. You’ll agree that they’ve really committed themselves to serve God, I continued. “Yes, of course,” they agreed again. But you tell me that because they’ve not called God ‘Jehovah’ they can’t be part of the new world that God is planning for us? “That’s right,” they said; that’s the rule, and there can be no exceptions.

I can’t help but admire the faith and courage and persistence of JW’s, and I’m told that the quality of the fellowship at a Kingdom Hall is second to none. But I had to tell my visitors that day that the God they were trying to tell me about was much too small and too narrow to be the real one. For the real God is like Jesus Christ, like the man who recognises and affirms and responds to faith wherever he may find it.

God is always greater than our best and highest image of him. Those of us who speak for him, those who proclaim his word need constantly to be reminded of that simple truth. Imagine how far you think God can see – well, God can always see further; imagine how much you think God can love – well, God will always love more.

We’re not told what the woman who came to Jesus that day believed about God. She may very well have believed all the wrong things, so far as creeds and doctrines are concerned. Had she any intention of changing her faith or her religious practice? The story doesn’t say, nor does it say that Jesus ever asked her to.

She simply came to Jesus with a faith born of desperation, and she loved her daughter too much to let anything stand in the way of the healing her daughter so urgently needed. She saw in Jesus something that many of the most religious of his own people seemed incapable of seeing, and she saw also that her own status as an outsider need not disqualify her from receiving the help she craved.

I think that it’s because Jesus could see that in her, that he dared to use to the woman the word he did. I feel a little sorry for the Councillor I mentioned at start of this discourse, whose argument the day the word was used may well have been a valid and timely one. The fact is though that today the word itself is rightly ruled as unsayable, for its intent has for so long been to degrade and dehumanise. So was the word Jesus used; except that in this instance he used it (I think, anyway) to jolt and shame his disciples – and therefore us – out of ever using such narrow words, and thinking such narrow things. The big thing that stops us – or should do – from allowing our God to get too small and narrow is simply this: that we know that God is like Jesus. John’s words – “No-one has ever seen God, but Jesus has made him known to us.” Paul’s words – “but we have the mind of Christ.”

I imagine it’s always going to feel safer to make boundaries, raise them up into barriers, and hide behind them;  because then we can say to the people who bother us, “Go away, you don’t belong here.” Like the disciples who asked Jesus to send the woman away, we can pray to be left in peace. But that isn’t the way of Jesus: he takes all the risks of active and courageous and inclusive love. And maybe, depending on how we read this story, we may find he’s also big enough, and humble enough, and open enough in his mind, to be able to change his mind and see the bigger picture. Be that as it may, we too need to take the open-hearted, risky loving way, if we’re truly to be his people.  “Increase in us, O Lord, true religion; nourish in us all goodness. Give us courage and compassion, open our eyes and our ears, and flood our hearts with love, in Jesus’ name.”  Amen.