Christian Art | The Syrophoenician Woman
Mark 7: 24-30 – Week 5 Ordinary Time, Thursday (Audio Bible KJV, Spoken Word)
24 ¶ And from thence he arose, and went into the borders of Tyre and Sidon, and entered into an house, and would have no man know it: but he could not be hid.
25 For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell at his feet:
26 The woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter.
27 But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.
28 And she answered and said unto him, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.
29 And he said unto her, For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter.
30 And when she was come to her house, she found the devil gone out, and her daughter laid upon the bed.
In today’s Bible reading, we hear how Jesus left Galilee to travel to Tyre and Sidon. These Phoenician cities on the Mediterranean coast were outside of the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas and they were largely non-Jewish, howbeit there would be a significant presence of those Hellenized Jews who constituted a general diaspora.
Much of our Christian faith flows from the impact of the Hellenized Jews – i.e. Jews who were Greek speaking and influenced by Greek culture and thought – which is why we recognize so much that is true and which tends towards Christian truth in classical Greek philosophy, perhaps especially the works of Plato.
We are taught that Jesus withdrew to this area to escape from persecution at the hands of Herod and of the Jewish authorities, and to concentrate on training his disciples.
Jesus has desired to be discretely present in the house he is staying at, but he cannot be hidden. This is significant given that this is a different area, though but 30 or thereabouts miles away, from the environs of Galilee – signifying cross-cultural fame. The Jews here will be for the most part quite culturally distant from those living more closely to Jerusalem – now, of course, destroyed at the time of Mark’s writing – and Jesus’ fame has also spread to the Gentiles.
In yesterday’s Gospel reading, of Mark 7: 14-23, we heard Jesus effectively abolish the dietary laws of the Jews and the requirements for ritual purifying prior to taking part in a meal. This reflects in Acts, when Peter has a vision telling him that all foods are clean, this enabling him to visit and convert the Gentile Cornelius.
Today’s Bible verses seem to work in counterpoint to yesterday’s. A Gentile woman, a Syrophenician – in the parallel episode in Matthew’s Gospel (15: 21-28) she is termed a Canaanite – approaches Jesus begging him to heal her daughter. Jesus’ reply seems to exclude the non-Jew from the meal that is faith in Jesus: ‘Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.’
As we have it conventionally in English translation, this is very offensive language. The Jews would call non-Jews dogs. Today we would term such language grossly racist. However, something quite important has been lost in translation here. In the Greek, from which our English Bibles (New Testament) are translated, the word Jesus uses is not dogs, which would be the standard Jewish term of racist abuse; it is puppies – kunariois (transliterated). Jesus, in other words, is taking a Jewish saying and playing with it, shifting it by using the diminutive, and disarming it – abolishing the thought behind the racist exclusivity. In other words, with what is basically a light-hearted and pleasant play on words, Jesus takes a thought that is old and tired and wrong and puts some love in it, and so Jesus enables the woman to come back at him with her most humble response, expressing her faith absolutely, and thereby bringing about the healing of her daughter.
This little scene, which might initially seem to contradict previous verses, in fact presents a joyous affirmation of the truth of what Jesus has said already. All we need to do is to ask, to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, and all can then be healed. Puppies included.
BLESSED is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
2 Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.
3 When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.
4 For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah.
5 I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah.
6 For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him.
7 Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah.
8 I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.
9 Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.
10 Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.
11 Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart. (Psalm 32/31)
Concluding Prayer
Almighty ever-living God,
we make our prayer to you at morning, noon and evening:
dispel from our hearts the darkness of sin,
and bring us to the true light, Christ your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.
We process. Glass exhibition cases, old reliquaries. A forearm here; here a nun’s fingertip. In chapel, at a glance, there are the usual faces. But they all stand to attention. Jonathan breaks from the procession to – fire the organ with oomph and dignity: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The angel-squadrons of the sky look down with sad and wondering eyes to see the approaching sacrifice. When we’ve done the readings, the Arch holds that tree in his hands to deliver the homily. He rocks quietly on his feet, some few seconds, as if balance defeated it. A way you might affect as the Spirit moves… Copying. Then he says: ‘Our palm fronds may seem to us today rather dry. I mean this not in a literal sense, but by the standards of those who originally lined the roadways in order to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, as they proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, who would be clambering up and ripping their palm branches fresh from off the trees. I think perhaps also our faith is somewhat distant from that of the people there on that highroad into Jerusalem, and something of our sense of the meaning has shifted in vividness from what it was then. And of course the expectation of all those many people is markedly different, but in many important respects the same. There are the same essential qualities to all our faith in God, which springs complete from our humanity, and that is one and the same in value for all of us, and time is consistent on this point. So then, let us renew the fullness of Catholic faith, and let us ask the Lord’s blessing as we embark upon our Holy Week. ‘Our Lord enters into Jerusalem in order to refresh us. He is to die in order that we may have life. There is a living reality here, both spiritual and as entangled in the joy of our daily living. We have Ladies’ Day where I grew up. They still have it, and they close the roads off, and little children parade, dressed-up like spring brides. When I was a boy, there was a May Day festival, and there was a May pole on the field, with the people dancing, like Morris dancers might be one way of visualizing this if you’ve never seen it, with their ribbons tied onto the top of the May pole, and they would weave around each other, dressing the pole, which is what we called it. It was like a dance with red and white and blue ribbons all hung off of the top of the May pole, which stood there all year, only like a telegraph pole, but it was concreted in, and then there was a slide, and swings – one baby-swing and two you could have a go at – terrible health and safety but that’s what it was in those days. ‘There was a round-a-bout – we used to run it round and round to try to get it off its central axis. It were rusty as anything and creaked like mad – on concrete. And climb up where it was all greased up at the top. Ruth, who was big as the next four of us, used to sit there sucking on the lollipops we nicked for her from Raddies, and she’d direct matters. We were trying to destroy it, and get it to dislodge from its central axis, and fly away – roll off into that farmer’s field, which he only ever kept for silage, but we never succeeded. There was a car someone had left there so we spent forever smashing that up, until someone who lived in one of the houses there took exception to our doing that, so he put thick grease under the door handles and gave us a right talking to. ‘It would only be a few stands, hot-dogs and things like that. The man selling the hot dogs would have his records on full blast. There’d be a couple of set-up stalls. Air-rifles – that sort of thing. But we all had them, and we all went shooting, of course, if not with twelve bores then with smaller gauge. Or pay a pound – I have no idea how much it was in actual fact then – it might have only been a few pennies – and we’d get all that time smashing up the crockery the man would put up for us to smash on the dressers. That was my particular favourite thing to do at these festivals, by the way, in case you were wondering. You got a little bucket of so many cricket balls. ‘I dread to think what went into those hot dogs. Probably EE rules would forbid it now. But it was a fair mix in those days. A lot of young people then were C of E. We’ve done a lot to hang onto our young people, which is a tremendous encouragement when you consider how things are, while in recent decades the Church of England hasn’t been so successful. People still want it on feast days and what are essentially now civic celebrations. It’s strange to see, though, how all the little stands there people have are run by the police and people like that along those lines. There’s no May pole. That was a sort of faith that ran and ran beneath all the theoreticals of it in the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The May pole isn’t there now in the particular place I’m thinking of. Considering May poles were officially suppressed hundreds of years ago – as a part of the protestant reformation. One or two of you are probably thinking I’m remembering things from that time! ‘I should have liked to say that those processionals were so hardwired into us, that even after the last thirty years, when I became a bishop, they are still with us. They were […]
In this reading, Bernard of Clairvaux reflects on the moment of the annunciation, focusing on Mary’s reply to the angel Gabriel. The reading does not retell the biblical narrative in a descriptive way but pauses at the moment before Mary speaks, treating her response as a decisive point in salvation history [ … ]
Through the time of Lent, we recall the Exodus. We recall the release of the then chosen people of God from their slavery in Egypt and their time in the wilderness on their way to the promised land, during which time God provided for them [ … ]
