Proper 18 Year B 2024: Mark 7:24-37

 Dr. Amy-Jill Levine is a well respected New Testament scholar. She wrote an article in March of 2021 entitled Holy Week and the hatred of the Jews: How to avoid anti-Judaism this Easter. In the article, Dr. Levine notes that while in modernity, interfaith dialogue has made tremendous progress in the way in which the passion narratives are interpreted by mainline Christian denominations, we still have to deal with our past and acknowledge that every time the passion narratives resurface, the threat of anti-Judaism reemerges. 

In her article, Dr. Levine is particularly focused on passion narratives, but there are troubling texts throughout the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Dr. Levine acknowledges that people of all faiths have troubling texts in their canons. She lists, in order from least to most  useful, six strategies for dealing with those troubling texts. She begins with excision, or cutting the text out and pretending it isn’t there - what Dr. Levine considers least useful - then moves through retranslate, romanticize, allegorize, historicize, and finally concludes with her recommendation: to admit the problem and deal with it. 

There are several texts in our Bible that I don’t believe a responsible preacher can see coming up in the lectionary and let go without comment. Today’s story of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenecian woman is one of those texts, where some context can help us understand what is happening in this encounter, but we are still left unsatisfied at the end.

We sometimes jump to explain, to try and make the uncomfortable comfortable, too quickly. My colleague Mother Lydia has done a lot of ministry on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. She was teaching about the recovery work she was doing due to the ongoing impact Native American boarding schools have on the reservation, and there was a person asking questions who clearly really wanted the Episcopal Church’s role to be less bad than everyone else’s. He wanted the redemption in her story to be during the time of boarding schools and missed that the redemption is what is happening now: the work of repentance and renewal taking place today. You just have to zoom out, sometimes, to see it. And to accept that although the redemption is important, as is the repentance, it doesn’t undo what was done.

Jesus uses a diminutive of “dog” - so he’s calling them puppies. But I’m glad that the translator kept it as “dog”. Too often when we read about animals in biblical stories, we let our modern lens cloud what was meant by the role played by animals. Jesus was not being cute. He wasn’t calling them puppies in the way you or I might think of a fluffy puppy that we should cuddle. He was making a rhetorical choice by using parallel diminutive language for the ages of the people and of the dogs of which he was speaking. We typically see “dogs” throughout biblical texts used as a symbolic insult most commonly by Jews to describe non-Jews.

Today’s translation states that Jesus said: “for saying that, you may go”, But the Greek reads “dia touton ton logon”, or “through this word”. The same “logos” used in the Gospel of John to describe Jesus himself. “Logos” is not as simple as a spoken word, but it is divine expression.

That said, we should avoid clinging to these parts of the context that we like to make us feel too much better about the entirety of Jesus’ exchange with the Syrophoenecian woman. It’s easy to rationalize that because it worked out ok in the end, because Jesus acknowledged the holiness of her response, that because Jesus was tired and overwhelmed and people just wouldn’t leave him alone, that because it was understandable that he might have a less than kind reaction to this Gentile woman who he didn’t even think it was his responsibility to help, for as many other excuses as we can come up with, that we can feel totally ok with this story.

Oftentimes the argument is made that this encounter marks a change in Jesus’ view of his own ministry, his own purpose. That before this encounter Jesus saw himself as only sent to the “lost sheep of Israel”, as he says in the Gospel of Matthew’s telling of this story. Commentators have suggested that, instead of the heading “The Syrophoenician Woman’s Faith” it should read “The Syrophoenician Woman’s Wit” - a change we could make because the headings of stories in any bible were an addition by a translator or publisher, not written in any ancient manuscripts. Because this unnamed Gentile woman could have made different choices. She could have left. She could have taken issue with being called a dog to her face. But she did what we always say God does - she met Jesus where he was. She basically said, “fine fine I’m a dog but feed the dog too”. And he recognized the holiness of her words.

Jesus, like us, exists as a human in the culture into which he was born. And our fully divine Jesus was also fully human. And whatever culture we live in carries baggage with it. Years of conflicts we might be expected to participate in but the origin of which might be lost to memory. Prejudices that are so deeply ingrained that we might not recognize them for what they are. And because it’s the way things are and seem normative to us, we either don’t recognize that they are problems in the first place and don’t address them or, like we often do with problematic sacred texts, we avoid the problem or try to explain it away.

I still remember a sermon my colleague Chris gave when we were in seminary. I don’t even remember what the text was but I remember him saying, “does this make you uncomfortable? Because it should.” I appreciated the permission. The reminder that things, even things in our sacred texts, are uncomfortable and it is important that we name them as such. But that we also cannot stop there. We are not called to hide from things that are uncomfortable or pretend that problems don’t exist. We are also not called to sort parts of our stories into good piles and bad piles, clinging to the good piles and ignoring the bad - or focusing on the bad and losing hope without the good.

But to get to a place of balance we have to be willing to have the conversation about what it is in a given situation that makes us uncomfortable. Where we can say, “fine, I’m a dog, but feed the dog too.”

We are in a world full of uncomfortable topics. A world where it can sometimes be difficult to see how everything that seems so broken can possibly be redeemable. But the good news is that it is redeemable. Mark included this story in his Gospel, his Good News, of Jesus Christ and it continues to remind us to look for the Good News. We look for the redemption, without hiding from the sin so that we can be whole. Amen.