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.
The passage goes on to say, “In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.” I want to stop here and address this idea of demon possession or possessed by an evil spirit. Back then we had all sorts of ailments. I think back then people would be quick to label somebody that they couldn’t determine what the illness was. They would label it as just demon possessed. Granted, there were probably some misdiagnoses back then. Similar to today, the same thing can probably be said. When we see someone that is acting strangely or experiencing some sort of psychotic behavior we want to label it with something very quickly. I guess there are 30 or more psychotic terms you can use on somebody. In those terms, we leave out the possibility of some sort of a spiritual component to it. Because we live in America, we sometimes discount the idea that there may be some spiritual root to some psychological problem that is going on. Recently, some of you are aware in the news there was a shooting a couple weeks ago at the Naval Yard in Washington, D.C. where a young man decided to go who had security clearance and got into the Naval Yard and randomly shot 12 people and then he was killed himself. If you kept up with the news, you may have seen that when they found his journals and letters, the reason he said he did it was because he felt that the government was transmitting some sort of low-frequency electromagnetic rays into his brain and that caused him to do the thing that he did; the killing of 12 people. Unfortunately, the guy is not alive and we will never know what caused it. I am sure that people will just simply label that as some sort of psychotic behavior. But few if any would recognize it as possibly being something demonic or spiritual. I think it has to do with us being in America. We are up on all this scientific evidence and psychological evidence and all this stuff we don’t want to acknowledge that there might be a spiritual component to major illnesses. That is usually more in developing countries because in the third world countries demonic possession is a quite common thing. So much so that if you looked at the videos I have seen you would get a chill up your spine watching those particular videos and watching the people that definitely appear that they have a demonic element to them. It doesn’t really matter what we think. All that matters is that that lady believed that her daughter was possessed. Not only that. She believed it so much that her maternal instinct drove her to go out and not only find somebody else who would believe but the person who could give healing to her daughter and that was Jesus Christ.
As we think about that and really examine the evidence here, we would see that this particular woman has no right, at least in the Jewish culture, to go out and seek someone like Jesus because Jesus was a Jew and a rabbi and a teacher. He was a very respected Jew for his knowledge. This woman really was just a common. It says the woman was a Greek born in Syrian Phoenicia. This is a little bit more geography lesson. Basically Syrian Phoenicia is in this area here. It is a part of Phoenicia that Syria is ruling at that time. It is likely that the lady was from around this area. Jerusalem is down here so she is basically up there in no man’s land where the outcasts live. Where the Samarians live and all those people that were considered back then the untouchables. It goes on to say that she was Greek born in Syrian Phoenicia. It means that she was not Greek by race. She was called Greek because she was part of the Greek civilization, the Greek empire and the Greek culture. In the Jewish mind, you were either Jewish or you were Greek. You were Jewish or what else they would refer to as Gentile. So the bottom line is she was referred to as a Greek. She lived in Syrian Phoenicia and because of all this, like the woman Rahab that we studied a few weeks ago, she would have several strikes against her. First, she would be a woman and as a woman back then you really didn’t have a lot of status. Back then, women were treated on the level of animals or livestock. Because she was Greek it means that she was exposed to some of the despicable things of the culture, including the worship of foreign gods, which means she probably had her own household gods and that sort of thing. The third strike that she had against her was that she had this little demon-possessed girl. She had all these things against her that the Jewish people, the rabbis and Pharisees, would cause her to be unclean, untouchable so to speak. But even with all that against her, because she had the maternal love of a mother to find the healing for her daughter, she still went and sought Jesus out. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
Before I go on and go into Jesus’ response, I want to quickly jump over to Matthew because Matthew seems to give a fuller picture of how desperate the woman was and the initial response by Jesus and the disciples. In Matthew it says after she begged him “Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, ‘Send her away for she keeps crying out after us.’” You get this picture that this poor desperate woman is in this house begging for relief for her little daughter and Jesus is kind of dissing her. He is kind of just ignoring her. The disciples pick up on that and say get her out of here. She is annoying Jesus. She is annoying us. She is crying out. Just send her away. Finally, when Jesus does decide to give her an answer, the answer he gives is not only weird, it is downright rude. He says “‘First let the children eat all they want’ he told her, ‘For it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.’” It is not only a weird comment, it sounds outright rude. It is one of these passages that I think we like to avoid as Christians because it just sounds like Jesus is being rude. He is being insensitive. Because we know the character of Jesus, we know that if we were to look up a list of his character traits, we would probably not find rude or insensitive on that list. So what it tells us is maybe there is something else going on here. Maybe we need to read between the lines to try to figure out what is really going on. What some suspect is that Jesus is engaging in what we would call a little bit of word play. A little bit of rhetoric with the people. He is trying to mess with their minds a little bit. He is trying to test this woman and test her knowledge of Jesus and test the knowledge of the culture and test the knowledge of the Jews and also to see if he can invoke some sort of faith in her.
A little bit of background on this is that when he talks about the children here what he is talking about are the Jewish people. The Jewish people were considered children of Father Abraham. Abraham being the patriarch of the Jewish faith. The Jewish people were considered children so most scholars would agree that he is referring to the Jewish people. He says they can eat all they want, he told her, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs. Again, we are talking about children. We are talking about the Jewish people who were told they were the chosen children, the special children, when you have a special child what happens is that child often takes on a little bit of pride, possibly a little bit of arrogance to the point where the person can look down on those people that are outside the family circle. Really this is the case for some of the Jewish people. They looked at the outsiders, the gentiles, the Greeks as really dogs. In this case we are not talking about cuddly dogs. We are talking about scavengers. We are talking about those dogs that would make their way to the streets of Jerusalem and eat up trash and the carcasses of dead animals. These dogs were considered richly unclean. They were considered filthy. When they applied that name dogs to the gentiles they are basically saying you are unclean, filthy. You are on the scale of a scavenger dog. Consequently, you are not only a dog; you are excluded from the kingdom blessings. You are excluded from God’s blessings that God wants to give upon them. When you think about this comment by Jesus, it does come across very rude and very offensive. So offensive the woman had every right to just stomp out of the room. I am out of here. I didn’t come here to be insulted Jesus. What are you doing? But she didn’t do that. She stuck around and you would think why would somebody put up with that. It goes back to the idea that maybe she saw something that we don’t see or the people around her didn’t see. She saw a window of hope. She saw enough hope through the crack of a door that she knew maybe by Jesus saying this he was implying that he is going to do something here. He is going to heal her little girl.
In order to see that, we have to back up a little bit and think about this concept of dogs. Yes, again, the Jewish when they used the term dogs, especially if you look in the Old Testament, they were thinking in the sense of a derogatory sense. They were thinking about this little scavenger. But in many cultures, the dogs were esteemed. In Egypt, some of the dogs were esteemed as gods. Then you had cultures that used the dogs for hunting and shepherding and that sort of thing. In the Greek culture, it was very similar to our culture today. They would use dogs as house pets. They would have them around the house. Recently, I read an archaeological article about how they did a dig and found this lady buried with her little dog. This was thousands of years ago. It was part of the Greek culture. The Greeks treated their dogs like we treat our dogs. So when Jesus is referring to dogs, he really isn’t stalking about the scavenger dogs. If you looked at the underlying word, the Greek has the idea of a little dog, a house dog, or even a puppy. That is the image you get if you were to read between the lines and understand the original language. So this particular word to Jesus could be paraphrased to say first let the children eat all they want for it is not proper to give the master’s dinner to the little puppy sitting under the table before the children get their fill. That takes the edge off it a little bit doesn’t it.? Even if it takes the edge off it, it still doesn’t give an explanation of why this woman possibly saw this as some sort of a window of hope, a window of opportunity that Jesus was about to do something. That Jesus was about to heal her little girl. Again, we have to understand Jesus. She understood that Jesus was speaking in parable. We say a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly lesson or meaning. Here the earthly story is just the story about the puppy sitting under the table and the children sitting around the table. The heavenly meaning goes into the spiritual realm where Jesus is saying as children of Abraham, those children have the first right to sit around that table and to eat of all the good food. This woman got that. She understood that. She might have even understood, if she didn’t understand at that time, that Jesus came first to redeem the lost sheep of Israel. In the parable passage it says that is why Jesus came, to save the lost sheep of Israel. She is not arguing that at all. She is basically saying I get that but I also get something else. She may have been thinking she had her own house pet or she had a dog or she knew somebody that had a dog and when you have a dog and you have a family and you have food on the table, eventually a crumb or two or three or four is going to fall off the table either by accident or intentional. Everybody knows that. That is basically what she is saying. She implies that in her response where she says “‘Yes, Lord,” she replied, ‘but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’” What she is implying here is that any good master of the house who has good children and he puts food on the table, when a crumb or two falls off, he is not going to kick the dog out of the way. He is going to let the dog eat its fill. Basically, that is what she is saying. She says I don’t want all the bread. I don’t want the main course. I just want the crumbs that fall off. She knows, by being around Jews or whatever, that the feast that God wants to give them is phenomenal. It is all of God’s grace is available to the chosen people. God desired that race to live in peace and prosperity and health and wealth and all that sort of stuff. He wanted to pour on the grace upon grace to this generation. All she is saying is with that much grace on the table, can you let a little crumb or two or three drop off and let me eat it. What she is saying is that is all I need. All I need is a little bit of crumb of God’s grace to take care of my daughter. That is all I want. Something got Jesus’ attention because he was so impressed that he told her “‘For such a reply, you may go. The demon has left your daughter.’ She went home and found her child lying on the bed and the demon gone.” Meaning the child was totally at peace and at rest. This is something that happened at a distance. This is only the second miracle story that Jesus conducted from a distance. The first one being the story of the centurion and his son who Jesus healed him from a distance. This was an amazing thing.
Closing on this, we think what was it that made this woman so extraordinary? I think it goes back to several things. It goes back to the idea that she was somebody that was considered an outcast. She was a marginalized person. She had no status. She had no rights. She was probably a single parent. She was probably a pagan believer. She had this demon-possessed girl. But she didn’t care. All she knew was that she had the heart of a mother and she was going to find the person that could heal that little girl no matter what it took. She was going to go after that. When she felt like she was being dissed by the disciples and even Jesus, she didn’t run stomping out. She didn’t run away from it. She stayed there until she got a blessing. What sums up her character and this whole story is that she was an extraordinary woman because she was a woman of great faith. In fact, in Matthew, he closed it by Jesus’ words “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.” She is extraordinary because of the faith that Jesus saw in her. That is pretty much the close of the story. There is probably a lesson or two or three that we can learn from it. I would say the first lesson is don’t quit praying for your family. Don’t quit praying for the people, especially the people that for whatever reason can’t pray for themselves. Don’t stop praying for the people who don’t want to pray for themselves. Keep praying. Make prayer a regular discipline of your life. We talk about prayer as a discipline and I know people don’t like to hear that word because it sounds difficult. It is difficult. It is difficult if you make it difficult but prayer is a discipline. It means that like any other disciplines, you don’t just try it once; you don’t get your answer and you stop. That would be like we decide we are going to go to the gym and start working out to get in shape. We get there one day and have an hour workout and we don’t lose any weight and we don’t get in the shape we want to get and we quit. We wouldn’t do that because we know exercise is a discipline. Why would we think that what is true in the earthly realm would not be true in the spiritual realm? Prayer is a discipline. We are told to pray continually. I think it is in 1 Thessalonians. We are to pray continually over and over and over. Pray for the things that we want. As we pray, we will eventually get to the master. We will come in contact with Jesus.
Which is my second point that is very clear in this passage. Jesus can’t and won’t hide his presence from anybody. He won’t. He can’t. Can Jesus do everything? Probably. But suggest that it is difficult if not impossible to hide his presence. You know why because Jesus is love. If you are a person who is wanting love and compassion and mercy that you can’t get on this earth and you want it so bad for you or your family and you are out to get that love and get that mercy that love is going to find love no matter where it is at. When love is connecting to God’s love you are going to find that way. You are going to make your way to what I referred to several months ago the house of love because that is where God lives. Again, if you really want to pray and you pray in an act of compassion and out of an act of love and that is what you are desiring for yourself or you are desiring for other people, then just pray and seek and you will find Jesus because Jesus is love.
The third point is don’t allow yourself to be marginalized. This woman was an outcast. I think there are people here today, even Christians who are supposed to have such high self-worth, they feel marginalized. They are still thinking about the stuff and the yuck and the muck in their past so they think they are not worthy to eat off the table of God’s grace. This passage says that is not true. Even unlike the woman in the story who had to sit under the table as a puppy, because of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, we now get to sit around the table with God’s children. We are part of the Children of God just as much as the Children of Abraham.
Finally, the point is that, as it always comes down to in all these stories, it is all about faith. We have to learn that faith is the currency of God’s economy. You may not like it. We love to think about other ways we can do it. Everything in God’s economy operates out of faith. The passage that I keep referring to Hebrews 11.1 that says “Faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see.” It is the idea that faith is so sure that the thing you hope for is actually materializing in you. So certain within you that those invisible things outside of you are actually now internalized in you. So again, the story of this woman, she is an extraordinary woman. She was a faithful woman. She was an outcast but she was a faithful woman so she continued to seek out God until she got the answer she wanted. So I would say if there is anybody here today that is dealing with something or a family member or a friend, whatever it is, that you feel like giving up on, you feel like not praying for, you feel like Jesus is not listening to you, you are being dissed, I would say let this woman be an example to you. Continue to pray over and over. Make prayer a discipline. Begin to believe in faith that those things that you are sure of will actually manifest yourself within you. You will begin to see those things happen in your lives and the lives around you. In other words that loaf of God’s blessing that is on the table will continue to spill out to you as in faith you believe. Let us pray.
