Syrophoenician Woman: Jesus' Teacher
Faith of Our Mothers 17
Sometimes Christians are so eager to defend Jesus that they forget to follow his example.
In my doctoral study I wrestled with a difficult passage in John’s Gospel (7:8) and was shocked to find no commentators willing to examine this verse closely, because it raised questions they would rather not consider.[1] The passages in Mark (7:24-37) and Matthew (15:10-28) about the Syrophoenician (or Canaanite) woman present similar challenges. In Jesus’ interactions with this woman, he makes comments that seem both sexist and racist. So, are we going to take the Bible seriously, even when it shows Jesus in a bad light, or will we smooth over the text in order to defend Jesus and the Bible?
Didn’t Charles Spurgeon say, “Defend the Bible? I’d sooner defend a lion. You don’t defend the Bible; you open its cage and let it roar.” So, let’s open this cage, shall we?
Jesus has just been battling with the Pharisees over impurity (Mark 7:1-23). They think, he says, that impurity works its way from the outside in through the things we touch and eat. Jesus says it is the other way around. If our heart is impure then the impurity will work its way out from our heart and be externalised in bad behaviour.
It seems that this argument might have made things a little hot for Jesus, because he feels a need to cross into gentile territory and hide (v24). Of course that doesn’t work. In Mark, Jesus’ attempts to hide are always thwarted by people who demand his help. In this case, help is demanded from the last person he seems to want: the person most qualified to push him to live into the full implications of his own teaching. Having argued that impurity cannot enter us from the outside, he finds himself confronted by someone he has been taught to consider impure indeed: a Greek woman with a demon-possessed daughter.
His initial response is “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”[2] Matthew (15:24) explains that this means his mission is to Israel, not to gentiles like her, but there is no getting around the derogatory nature of this comment. It is racist and probably also sexist, since Jews of Jesus day considered dogs impure.
We, the readers, want Jesus to heal this woman’s daughter, don’t we? Many of this Gospel’s first readers would have been Greek Christians, and surely they would be eager for Jesus to give her what she needs - just as they had come to this Jewish Messiah trusting that he would meet their need for salvation.
In the first half of Mark 7 readers have been enthusiastically standing with Jesus against his opponents, the Pharisees. Then there is a plot twist. In this second argument we find ourselves on the side of Jesus’ opponent. This is not a comfortable place for Christians, yet it is the place both Matthew and Mark have led us to. They don’t try to smooth things over. They seem to want us to be uncomfortable.
Then something totally unexpected happens. The woman argues back. Puppies under the table get the crumbs that fall from the children’s plates. She speaks of domesticated dogs; dogs that in her culture seem to be welcome in the home.
Notice what she is doing. She is questioning Jesus’ assumption that dogs are impure and so, by analogy, questioning his assumption that gentile women with demon-possessed daughters are impure.
Jesus has been challenging the Pharisees’ assumptions about impurity. Now the tables turn. A woman is challenging his assumptions. This gentile woman is re-enacting his earlier argument, forcing him to take his own insights further. If “outside” things don’t make people impure then ethnicity doesn’t make people impure. Gender doesn’t make people impure. Having a child with an unexplained and incurable illness doesn’t make people impure.
If Jesus really believes his own words about purity, then he will relate to this gentile woman the same way he would relate to a Jewish man.
He hesitates but doesn’t send her away. He praises her and heals her daughter. She has won the argument. She has changed Jesus’ mind. She has saved her daughter’s life.
Perhaps we still want to defend Jesus. Perhaps we want to say it was all an act. He was just pretending to hold racist, sexist views so she could challenge them; and then he pretended to lose the argument so the disciples would learn a lesson. The problem with that is that neither Matthew nor Mark points us in that direction.
Perhaps what is going on here is much more interesting. Perhaps Jesus really did need to learn this lesson from a gentile woman. Perhaps his theological formation was not yet complete and needed an outsider perspective to point him back to the truth?
Jesus was fully human. We believe that don’t we? As a child he learned to walk, to speak, to read, to reason. Do we think that at some point he stopped learning? Surely not! Wise humans never stop learning. Perhaps Jesus had learned all that his own tradition could teach him, so he has argued with his teachers and walked away from them. Who will be his teachers now?
What’s that cliché about the teacher appearing when the student is ready? Jesus was ready and the very best teacher appeared – a gentile woman with a ritually unclean daughter, refusing to take his “no” for an answer, ready to fight for her child, and so to help Jesus take a step forward in understanding the will of God.
The outsider is the hero of this encounter, but we have no reason to feel ashamed of Jesus’ behaviour. He shows that he could learn from an outsider – that an outsider could change his mind. This is not weak. This is not wrong. This is one more way in which we are all called to follow his example.
As Christian people took the message about Jesus further and further out from its beginnings in Judea, they did not take a fully formed, hermetically sealed understanding of what it means to be church. They argued with outsiders and both they and the outsiders gained new insight. And that didn’t stop once the New Testament had been written. Wherever Christian people took the message of Christ there was more for the church to learn from outsiders – though, admittedly, the church has often been exceedingly slow to learn. The learning has never stopped. We are still learning from outsiders today – or we would be if we followed Jesus’ example.
For a long time, women were outsiders in the church, but our theological mothers stood up and fought the church, refusing to take “no” for an answer, because their daughters’ futures were at stake. Our futures.
So, we rise and call our mothers blessed. And we bless the name of this Syrophoenician woman (whatever her name might be) for having the courage to be exactly the teacher Jesus needed when he was ready to walk in the scandalous extravagance of fearless love.
So let’s pray:
God of the outsider, We stand in awe of all who we have Excluded, marginalised and “othered”, Who by arguing, demanding and protesting, Have become the teachers we most need And, maybe, least deserve. Help us to be good students who, Like Jesus, can listen, learn and grow Into the fullness of your love For all. Amen
With Love from Rev Margaret
[1] If you are curious about what I discovered when I ignored the warnings and took a close look anyway, you can read about it in my book, Son of Mary.
[2] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Mk 7:27). (1989). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Thank you for this take that focuses on what being open to otherness can teach us. It’s a great way to”in” to a difficult text! 🙏