The Syrophoenician Woman Series

If you have your Bibles with you today please turn to Mark 7:24. The question of the day is how many of you are familiar with that internet website called YouTube? Many of you are. YouTube, if you don’t know, is a website where you can load up any sort of videos; videos of you family, your friends, make any sort of video and load them up to the site where people can look at them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are thousands of videos on there but I suspect there are some videos that don’t get a lot of viewing and on the other hand there are some videos that get a ton of viewing. So much so that they become what they call viral. They grow into a million-plus viewers. Such is the video which I am about to show you, is about a talking dog who is upset because his master is keeping food from him. There are 15 million viewers and counting. [video Ultimate Dog Tease]

That is an extraordinary dog and today we continue the series Extraordinary People. The lesser known people in the Bible who are somehow extraordinary because God decided to use them in extraordinary ways. Today we are going to look at a lesser known person in the Bible. So lesser known that she doesn’t even have a name. She is just an unnamed woman in the story of Mark. She is a woman who became extraordinary not simply because she went to her master seeking food but that she was persistent in seeking out food until she was able to receive a special healing upon her daughter. We are going to look at that story today beginning at Mark 7:24 and take it down to verse 30. (Scripture read here.)

It is a short story and a fairly straight-forward story. It is a story that is actually a little bit longer. It is also told in the gospel of Matthew 15, which we will refer to a little bit. Basically, the facts are pretty simple. You have Jesus going off to the city of Tyre. He gets to the city and stays in a house. He is trying to stay secluded and kept in secret. This woman, with this demon-possessed daughter, barges in and intrudes on that particular house where he is staying. Although in the story it looks like there is some initial hesitancy whether or not Jesus is going to help her, she stays there and persists until she gets what she desires; the healing of her little daughter. The facts of the story are very simple, but I hope you see as we unpack this a little bit more today, we see that this woman truly is an extraordinary woman and hopefully that there is a lesson or two or three in there for us today. Anyway, getting back to the basic facts of the story, we find at the beginning that Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. Tyre is an ancient city but it is also a modern city. As a modern city it is about 50 miles from Beirut in Lebanon and it is also about 100 miles or so from Jerusalem. It is located on the Mediterranean coast. It juts out from the coast. I went on Google maps just to grab a picture of it and this is what it looks like. It is basically this area right here. It is a very popular area. It is a very touristy area. It is an area that is full of ports. This was the vicinity that Jesus traveled to. It says he got to that vicinity and he entered a house and did not want anyone to know it. We don’t know whose house he entered. We have no information in either gospels about what kind of house he went in to or why exactly he went in there. Some suspect the reason he went there was to get away from different people. Like he wanted to get away maybe from the Pharisees, the Jewish leaders, who had just finished harassing him about different doctrines and beliefs. Some suggest that maybe he just wanted to spend some time with the disciples maybe in some teaching and some prayer. Others suggest that maybe he just wanted to get away from the crowds. In this particular point in the gospels, Jesus is becoming very popular. He is almost achieving celebrity status because he is becoming known as a miracle worker. If we look back at Matthew 4, we see that “News about him spread all over Syria and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them.” So he is getting away from these crowds because he is getting the reputation of being a miracle worker. As would have it, even Jesus could not avoid the crowds. He could not get away from the crowds.