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.
John speaks of the Last Supper in a different way from the Synoptic Gospels. He omits, for example, the institution of the Eucharist, because the other Gospels and Paul have already spoken of this in their accounts of the Last Supper. Through chapters thirteen to seventeen, John gives an extensive account of Jesus’ teaching at the Last Supper, in which Jesus builds on his teachings so far and leads his disciples to a greater understanding of the love that they must share and of the way ahead [ … ]
On Tuesday, His Grace turns to the theme of Jesus’ hidden years. His Grace asks the students to consider questions concerning what really happened: ‘Who, for instance, was Joseph? Was he indeed a carpenter, or has Joseph’s true role in the society in which he lived been misconstrued and forgotten to us? Though it be a beautiful, simplifying image to grasp, which offers to us much that is of value in Catholic faith… ‘A wise elder, which carpenter could mean, or a great engineer, an architekton, which in the Greek does not mean carpenter. But carpenter in the Hebrew could mean a wise man…’ His Grace turns the pages of his Bible back and forth, as if to itemize the paucity of information. Then he says: ‘What I think I can say to you with confidence is that it is of profound significance that we simply don’t know what Jesus was doing for most of his earthly life. There are some very different possibilities. One idea cherished by the Church is that Jesus worked with his father Joseph as a carpenter. Another possibility is that Jesus lived and prayed and studied closely with John the Baptist. They were cousins, and very close, almost the same, in age. Luke’s Gospel tells us clearly that Jesus and John knew each other from within the womb before they were born. So there may have been something quite important happening there. You see, we don’t know – it is an impossible mystery to us – just how much Jesus had to learn. This is because, if Jesus knew everything, humanly speaking, even as a tiny baby, then how can we say he is fully human? We simply can’t probe too far into this mystery, but we can draw extraordinary truth and healing from this thought, which becomes of immense relevance in our own lives. Jesus came to know and to understand himself not merely as a son of God, but as God the Son, and so as self-identical with his Father. It is not an adoptive relationship. Jesus is God. Now so much is hidden here. But this is a great gift. If you think about it, how do we come to know that we are loved by God, that we have our relationship with God? What are we born with in here’ – his chest – ‘and what do we have to learn? This is to say, what is gifted to us by other Christians at our baptism? ‘Jesus must have studied, and experienced profound revelation about who and what he truly was, and, so it seems to be, these studies cannot have been confined to the Semitic world. But this is the important point: there is a hiddenness about all of this. No matter which schools and which sects our Lord might have encountered all these years, this to us is as a desert space. What this means is that we can enter into the hidden life of Jesus, and there we can discover our own being with God, our own sonship. Our own particular being loved by God can come to us, if we can enter within this great unknown – into this desert space, where we are loved by Jesus. I firmly believe that there may be a great Lenten mystery in this period of our Lord’s life.’ A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 1 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 2 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 3 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 4 | King James Audio Bible | KJV A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 5 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Holy Week | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 6
The opening passages of John’s Gospel affirm key, central truths concerning the nature of Christ. He is the Word, the perfect, ideal and original Word giving meaning and life to all utterance. We sense here the influence of classical Hellenic philosophy on the developing understanding of Christ through the first century. And, from the very first verses of his Gospel, John affirms the divinity of Christ. Christ is with God, the Father, and he is God. God the Father and God the Son are distinct and too of one being; they are consubstantial [ … ]
