[This sermon was part of a Communion Service.]
Welcome to the Lord’s Table. Today we ‘feast’ on … [hold up a piece of bread and a communion cup]. To the naked eye, this doesn’t seem to be much of a “feast,” does it? A typical ‘royal’ feast in Jesus’ day would start out with an appetizer to whet the appetite and would include such things as conger eels, oysters, two kinds of mussels, thrushes on asparagus, fat fowls, a ragout of oysters and other shell-fish, with black and white marrons. “Marrons” are a type of crayfish. During the second course, the guests might be served a variety of shellfish and other marine animals, beccaficos (beka-fee-kos), haunches of venison, a wild boar, a pasty of beccaficos and other birds. “Beccafico” were tiny songbirds … like warblers.
Believe it or not, we’re just now getting to the “main course” where the guests would be invited to dine on the udders of swine, boar's head, fricassee of fish, fricassee of sow's udder, ducks of various kinds, hares, roast fowls with pastry, boiled ostrich or Flamingo or a turtle dove boiled in its feathers, roast parrot, dormice, and Picentine bread. I wasn’t able to find out what ‘Picentine’ bread was. And, of course, to top off this fine royal feast, you had your choice of fricassee of roses with pastry; stoned dates stuffed with nuts and pine kernels and fried in honey, or hot African sweet-wine cakes with honey.
[Hold up the piece of bread and cup of grape juice.] Not much of a comparison … and yet … a Syrophoenician woman knew that a crumb from the Lord’s table was far more rewarding and satisfying than anything offered at a king’s or emperor’s table, amen?
Once again, I’m going to urge you to try and relate to this event in the same way as Mark’s audience did and try to hear it as though you are hearing it for the first time. Also, Mark’s style is to lay out the facts and let you come to your own conclusions.
Jesus has already done some shocking and amazing things, amen? Healing the sick. Driving out demons. Commanding a storm to stop. Raising a girl from the dead. Now … He has already sailed to the other side of the Sea of Galilee to an area dominated by pagans but that region was still part of Palestine, and therefore still part of the Jewish state or region of Judea. Today what should get our attention is that He is in Tyre, an area completely outside of the actual borders of Palestine or Judea. Although this area was populated by many Jews, historically it had a reputation of being antagonistic towards the Jewish people and was noted for the people’s zealous devotion to paganism. Tyre was the home of Jezebel, who in Elijah’s day almost overthrew the Northern Kingdom with her pagan prophets and practices.
This next line is very significant. Mark says that Jesus “entered a house and did not want anyone to know He was there” and yet, says Mark, “He could not escape notice” (Mark 7:24). Word of Jesus’ activities has spread beyond the borders of Judea. He started out ministering in the region around His hometown of Nazareth and Galilee and then began traveling further and further out from there … to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, for example, and sending out His Disciples with His power to heal the sick and cast out demons and warn the people to repent because the Kingdom of God was at hand. And now He has actually left Judea and entered enemy territory, if you will, and Mark’s audience again is wondering why in the world He would ever go to a literally God-forsaken place like Tyre?
On the surface, it makes sense. What better place to get away from the crowd, right? No self-respecting Jew is going to following Him to a place with a reputation and history of paganism and antisemitism like Tyre and why would the pagans living there care who He was or even notice Him except for the fact that He was a Jew. And yet, says Mark, He could not escape notice and He is approached, not by a Jew but by a gentile woman Mark describes as “Syrophoenician” (Mark 7:26).
While Jesus hasn’t really traveled that far away from Judea physically, this woman couldn’t be farthest thing from a Jew. The fact that Jesus was approached by a “Syrophoenician” … man or woman … was shocking to Mark’s initial audience. This woman came from a region of Syria … that’s the “Syro” part of “Syrophoenician” … that was occupied and controlled by the Romans. “Syrophoenician” is a compound word. As I said, it refers to a portion of Syria now under Roman occupation that used to be occupied many years earlier by the Phoenicians … so this woman’s ancestry had roots in two groups of people who had a long and bitter and oftentimes bloody relationship with the Jews. In the minds of Mark’s audience, Jesus’ references to dogs was completely expected and appropriate. And yet, like Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, the faith of this woman provided quite a contrast to the skeptics and doubters who had already started hounding Jesus and challenging His teaching and His authority. The fact that she had heard of Jesus and was willing to approach Him and make a request of someone who, in the eyes of her fellow countrymen was the one who was no more than a dog shows her desperation … as so many scholars and preachers have talked about over the centuries … but it is her response to what sounds like Jesus’ rebuff that shows that her desperation contains a great deal of hope as well.
Now, again, we need to kind of step back for a second and look at this situation from a different point of view. Typically, we hear about the Jews’ attitude towards pagans and non-Jews. In Jesus’ day, the average Jew considered gentiles … everyone who wasn’t Jewish … as despicable. The Roman historian Tacitus said that the Jews “regarded the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies” and considered gentiles and pagans as “despicable curs or dogs” that roamed the streets looking for scrapes of food. Hmmm …
But what about the view of people like this Syrophoenician woman? We know that there was no love lost between the Jews and Samaritans but I think we can safely assume that there was no love lost between the Syrophoenicians and the Jews. If they didn’t call the Jews dogs, I’m sure they probably called them something just as lowly and despicable … and yet, here is this Syrophoenician woman begging Jesus … a Jewish rabbi … to save her daughter from demons … and who could blame her, right? If my daughter were sick or possessed by demons, my only concern would be to find someone who could help her and issues of race and ethnicity and religious belief and gender would be the least of my concern, amen?
As you may be starting to see, this seemingly quick interchange gives us a tremendous insight into Jesus’ heart. There is a lot of speculation about Jesus’ response to this desperate woman’s request. Some see it as uncharacteristically harsh and attempt to use semantics as a way of maintaining our cherished image of Jesus as meek and mild and kind. When she falls to her knees and begs Jesus to cast the demons out of her daughter, Jesus replies: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7: 27). In the Greek, there are two different but related words that describe two different kinds of dogs. One word is “kyron.” A “kyron” is a stray, unclean, undisciplined dog that roamed the streets looking for scrapes of food and garbage to eat and the word was used as a pejorative when used to describe a person … so, yes, if Jesus called her a “kyron” neither the woman, the Disciples, His followers, or the Jew who had gathered around Jesus would have been shocked. Neither would the non-Jews … hurt, yes … but not necessarily surprised that a Jew … even a Jewish rabbi … would refer to a Syrophoenician or any non-Jew as a dog.
But that wasn’t the word that Jesus used. He used the word “kynarion” (kin-ar-ee-on) … which describes a certain type of “dog” … a puppy or a family pet, to be exact. I don’t know if being called a “puppy” or a “pet” is that much better. “Kynarion” (kin-ar-ee-on) are still animals and seen as something less than human. In Jewish households at that time, people ate with their fingers and then wiped their hands with a piece of bread, which was given to the pet dogs to eat. Jesus described the Jews as His “children” … and used the word that describes human children … but He refers to her and her “kind” as animals … cute and cuddly as a puppy might be … therefore as someone less than a human … but this is where I once again would challenge you to step back for a moment.
All the commentaries that I read describe this as Jesus challenging her faith but I think the truth is that He is challenging us. He gives us the response that we would expect … actually, He is more generous than Mark’s audience would have expected. He doesn’t just completely blow her off or let His Disciples chase her away. Listen carefully to His response. “Let the children be fed first” … let the Jews “dine” first … let the Jews get their fill … and if … if … there is anything left over … then you can have some. He isn’t saying that she can’t have anything. She just has to wait until all the Jews are fed first and then and only then … if there is anything left over … she and others like her can have the scrapes, the leftovers, the crumbs, the hunk of bread that the Jews wiped their hands on after they finished their meal … but not before. I mean, what if there isn’t enough to go around? What if He only had JUST enough to feed the Jews? If He fed her and other non-Jews like her, there might be Jews who would get left out and that wouldn’t be fair for some of the Jews to get left out because He gave some of the food that rightly belonged to the Jews to some “kyron” or “Kynarion” (kin-ar-ee-on) … some unclean dog or family pet … a sentiment that would have made perfect sense to the Jews listening to Jesus. Imagine their shock and horror if they approached Jesus for some spiritual nourishment and Jesus shrugged His shoulders, held out His empty hands, and apologetically said: “Sorry, I just ran out … gave the last of it to those dirty dogs over there!” I think that it is at that exact moment … when we nod our heads in agreement and say “right on … we should come first” that Jesus reveals our hearts. “Yeah! We should come first. And because we’re so generous, we’ll let you have the scrapes, the leftovers, the crumbs once we’ve had our fill … and we can feel good about ourselves for having shared our crumbs with you. We’ll be glad to share so long as our needs are met first, amen?
Again, I’ve read and heard so many times that this was a test … and this time, I agree … only it wasn’t, I believe, a test of the woman’s faith … she had already demonstrated plenty of it and I’m pretty sure that Jesus knew what her response would be. The test was for us, who were pleased with Jesus’ initial response that the children of Israel should come first and let everyone else get what was left over … and it was a challenge to our faith. The idea that we should come first is based on the fear that there might not be enough to go around … and I believe that Jesus is using this opportunity to ask us if we have been paying attention or not.
You see, if we are truly beginning to understand who Jesus is at this point, then we would know that this is not an issue … not even a possibility. This woman has approached the very God of the Universe incarnate. The God who not only created the universe and everything in it but constantly sustains the very universe that He created. The sun that He created rises every day. We see the stars in the Heaven night after night. Rain waters the land that provides us our food season after season. When God freed His children from bondage, He led them through the wilderness and feed them with … what? Manna! Bread from the very storehouses of Heaven itself … and He continued to provide them with manna for 40 years even after they refused to enter the Promised Land … a land that He promised to give them … a land that He promised flowed with milk honey … a land that the spies reported was every bit as rich and bountiful as He had promised that it would be … the very land where God had been watching over them and caring for them for thousands of years. And yet, they still believed that there was only so much of God to go around … even after they had just seen Him take five loaves of bread and two fish and feed 5,000 men and their families and … and … had twelve baskets full of leftovers!
You may not have noticed this but at no point in His ministry does Jesus say: “Sorry. All out of power. Nothing left. Go home.” He sometimes got tired and retreated for a while like He’s doing here but the issue, for me, is not whether there is enough to go around. There was no reason for Mark’s audience to begrudge what Jesus had done for this woman or fear that someone else might be deprived because He gave what was theirs to somebody else … to somebody who, in their eyes, was less deserving and therefore a waste of His power.
To the ears of Mark’s audience … and to our ears … the idea that there is … or should be … a hierarchy to God’s blessing makes sense … but it is that hierarchy that Jesus was challenging then and I’m challenging you this morning to question. You may not even be aware of it but if you stop and think about it for a moment and get honest with yourself … we all have a kind of hierarchy of expectation when it comes to who should receive God’s blessings … and who shouldn’t … who should be saved … who should be healed … and who shouldn’t. Who should be punished and who shouldn’t … and it’s a shock when, for example, a person or a couple or a family gets killed by a drunk driver and the drunk driver lives … or a person who rigorously took care of their health dies of cancer in their 40s or 50s and some lazy, obese smoker lives to be 80 or 90 years old.
You see, this is where Mark holds up the mirror. Jesus does, in fact, honor her request … and Mark just ends it there. Like I’ve been saying, Mark lays the situation before us and then deliberately leaves us hanging. You may have heard so many sermons on this passage that you’ve not stopped and asked yourself how YOU feel about it. Jesus’ followers did. Mark’s audience did. I’m sure that most of them were puzzled. Why would He waste His time and His power on this “dog”? More than a few of them, I suspect, would even resent the fact that He did. She had no right to ask for anything. She deserved nothing … not from Jesus at least. Let her go and pray and make sacrifices to her own gods. Let her go bother her priests, her teachers, her spiritual leaders … oh, that’s right! She can’t because none of them have the kind of power that our Jesus has and, well, tough luck, Lady … that’s what happens when you’re born on the wrong side of the spiritual tracks, so to speak … only that’s Jesus’ point. No one is born on the wrong side of the spiritual tracks because there are no spiritual tracks. All the world and all the people in it are His. We’re the ones that divide people into groups and countries and decide who is on the right side and who is on the wrong side … who is deserving of our time and effort and who is not … and so we tend to put our views, our rules on to God.
And the placement of this incident, in my opinion, is, again, no accident. Look at the discussion that Jesus had with some religious leaders just before this. Some Pharisees and scribes criticized Jesus’ Disciples for not properly washing their hands or washing their food before they started to eat it. In the eyes of these religious leaders, Jesus’ Disciples were every bit as uncouth as the Syrophoenician woman who approached Jesus … and maybe just as dirty or gross as a dog eating garbage because the food that they were eating was polluted by their impure hands.
Jesus challenges their assumptions. “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? (Thus He declared all food clean). … It is what comes out of a person that defiles” (Mark 7:19-20). When it comes to the Syrophoenician woman, He again has to push them to see past their long-held expectation that God would, of course, take care of His “chosen” first but being “chosen” … as Jesus demonstrates by saving this woman’s daughter … is being the first to serve God’s people … that God’s chosen should be the ones who see to the needs of others first and trust that God will take care of all His children. What isn’t fair is God playing favorites. What wouldn’t be fair would be God limiting His blessing to a certain group when all are His children are suffering or in just as much need. As Jesus is trying to show us and teach us here:
“You have heard that it is said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? (Matthew 5:43-47).
If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? If God only loved those who loved Him then this poor woman was without a hope or a prayer, amen? I don’t know about you, but I could never love and worship a God who only loves some of His children and not all of them … who only loves some of His children if they meet certain requirements. Jesus goes from Tyre to Sidon in the heavily Roman area of the Decapolis and restores the hearing of a man … and we assume that the man was Jewish but Mark never says so … and this, to me, is the lesson that Mark is trying to teach us … and the lesson is that we really can ‘t keep assuming that, can we? That God’s love, that God’s healing is limited to just a select few or is given out according to a rigid hierarchy … which I am eternally grateful for because I am that Syrophoenician woman … outside the circle of God’s so-called chosen children according to the Jews of Mark’s day.
And here’s the best part … the part that should sting. Jesus uses a woman … a Syrophoenician woman … to give us the right answer. “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:28). And I can just see Jesus smiling as He tells her: “For saying that, you may go --- the demon has left your daughter” (Mark 7:29) because she knows what Jesus is hoping that everyone else knows … that what she is asking for is but a mere crumb of His power … that He has enough power and enough love go around … that there is no need for a hierarchy because there is no scarcity of His power, no scarcity of His love, no risk in asking, no qualifications or conditions on His love … again, how could I love and worship a God who only loves some and not others, who only hears and helps others and not some because they failed to measure up or were in the wrong “group.” This woman didn’t choose to be a Syrophoenician. She didn’t choose to NOT be a Jew. How fair would it be if God only loved the Jew first? We’d most likely still be waiting since most Jews continue to reject Jesus as their messiah, let alone the Son of God. And yet, He continues to provide for them and protect them even to this day … and the Muslims … and the Buddhists … and the agnostics and atheists even if they don’t believe in Him. And that’s the God that I love. That’s the God that I trust. That’s the God who never chooses favorites. That’s the God whose power never runs out. That’ the God who is ready to help all … who, like this woman, believe that even a crumb from God’s table is more than sufficient to meet all our needs and the needs of everyone around us and then some.
As we come to this table and feast on this bread and wine, I am so grateful that God is the One who made up the guest list and not one of us and you should also be grateful that I am not the one who determines who may or may not sit at the table, amen? Like this unnamed Syrophoenician woman, come to the Lord’s table. Come with courage. Come with hope.
Turn now to page 13 in the hymnal as we prepare ourselves for the feast of this table and remember the feast that is yet to come, amen?
