Two Gentiles and the Power of God

Proper 18, 16th after Pentecost 2024; Mark 7:24-37

The two stories read this week develop hints in last week’s Gospel that something is afoot in Jesus’ ministry about how the reign of God relates to non-Jews. Mark—and all the Gospels—are accounts of a Jewish Messiah, who then turns out to be the savior of the world through or even despite that particular identity. However Jewish particularity is always part of this picture, and the idea that a divinely-appointed liberator could be relevant to others is not straightforward.

In modern western settings where the language of inclusion is orthodoxy, these two episodes may be confronting and underwhelming respectively. The first in particular, a Syrophoenician woman’s request of Jesus, is baffling or even offensive relative to our assumptions about intercultural relations. We must pay attention to the radically different setting, and attend to the narrative arc of the Gospel of Mark itself (including that issue of Jewish particularity), to understand how and why this is.

The Syrophoenician woman pushes particular buttons because we may perceive both ethnic chauvinism by Jesus and, if not sexism then at least a sort of feisty transgression by the woman of accepted roles which he does not question. The second point should probably be granted without much qualification. It is worth noting the parallel with the boldness of the woman with a flux (read a few weeks go: 5:25-34), who was Jewish yet also overstepped the usual boundaries of gender roles by touching him. This parallelism should tip us off that neither story stands alone, and that we are reading not just an anecdote, but a narrative.

Through the first half of Mark there is considerable repetition or at least reprise: two feeding stories, two sea miracles, and now a pair of double healings. These often seem to involve a kind of repetition for gentiles, or at least in gentile territory, of things that had taken place first for Jews. This pairing of stories about gentile healings echoes how the story of that other assertive woman in search of healing, and its companion piece about Jairus’ daughter, illustrated Jesus’ acts of liberation for Jewish people. We have also noted before how the two sides of “the sea” (of Galilee) represent the Jewish and Gentile worlds. Now the power of God breaks through long-established barriers, and crosses not the sea but the wider expanse of cultural and religious difference, which Mark (and Jesus by implication) will emphasize rather than deny, not because the barriers are good, but because they are real and need to be addressed.

The most obvious distinction in this case, accentuated initially by Jesus in his response to the Syrophoenician woman, is the distinction between Jewish and gentile peoples. We have already noted that gender also plays a part here. There is yet another aspect too, which typical identity-focussed readings don’t seem to catch as quickly: seemingly presented as an inhabitant of wealthy Tyre, the gentile woman comes from a population whose relationship with rural Galilee was quite unequal as well as ethnically fraught. Ancient cities were parasitic on their rural hinterlands (which means particularly for food, hence grain and bread, on which more below). Her place relative to Jesus was thus not necessarily marginal or oppressed at all, and ethnicity was not the sole or primary form of barrier between them.¹

So when Jesus responds to her request with the infamous metaphor of children and dogs potentially competing for food, he is certainly beginning with a Jewish particularism that could be chauvinistic. However the centrality of food here requires more reflection about who is being marginalized and how. Galilean peasants, relative to wealthier “Greek” (i.e., gentile) and other city dwellers, experienced food insecurity daily—hence the importance of the multiple miraculous feedings. The children’s access to bread (the word in the Greek is indeed “bread,” the main staple, not just “food”) was not at all secure, and the concern of small households (urban as well as rural) to obtain it daily was constant. Jesus thus depicts his work among his people not as a privilege, but as duty and necessity.

Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib (Egyptian, ca. 1684; W.592, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Jesus is quite right to underline the necessity of feeding the children; modern readers may tend to think the children’s pickiness is more likely to be an issue than their hunger, but that is why context matters. Jesus uses the same word for the children being “fed” as appears in the miraculous feeding scene, better rendered perhaps as “filled” or “satisfied” (see 6:42). The issue is not status but the necessity of satisfying hunger. Of course the metaphor has an uncomfortable aspect, not least with the “dogs.” This of course is not complimentary, but it is a metaphor and its reference is about responsibility. He is not, by the way, calling her a dog.² The image is about the order of access to the necessity of food, not the character of the participants. Families are responsible for feeding their own members; the more familiar “charity begins at home” makes a similar point.

The woman herself, while demonstrating a striking willingness to engage Jesus beyond social norms, actually accepts the premise of the difficult metaphor rather than challenging it. It is unlikely that she is supposed to find it offensive or surprising at all; were a Jew seeking something from her, the dynamics of power and responsibility would simply be reversed. In any case, her desire to have Jesus’ power exercised to heal her daughter causes her to press her point within that world Jesus conjures with the household image. Yes, dogs—domestic dogs here, probably not so unlike modern pets, and with their place in the pecking order—would actually get fed too, just not first.³

It is not so much that Jesus seems initially to hold the woman at arm’s length, because his Jewishness made that a given, but that his power is ultimately made available to her, and how. She is certainly a model of faith beyond expectation or norm (like the Jewish woman who touches his cloak in the parallel story), but his surprising capacity to fulfill the needs of the gentiles as well as of the “children” when such faith is shown is the point. Why would anyone otherwise imagine a Jewish Messiah had anything for a Syrophoenician? Just as for the woman with the flux, the strength of faith does seem to impact the outcome; she wins the argument, but is not however “schooling” him about inclusion as an abstraction.

The second story also involves a surprising extension of the work of Jesus beyond Jewish territory. Mark describes an unlikely itinerary (v. 31) whose point is not really the geographical puzzle it presents, but this surprising fact of Jesus’ presence among the nations, and so it seems fair to take the implication that this man is also a gentile. Jesus’ very tactile interaction with him (note, by the way, the contrast with the complete lack of contact with the possessed girl), whose hearing and speech are both impeded, may be implicitly exorcistic (remembering that the previous story was explicitly so).⁴ Jesus is not a faith healer, but the one who wields divine power over all that afflicts humankind. This is a combat. The curious retention of an Aramaic word (ephphatha) reminds us of the parallel story of Jairus’ daughter again (see 5:41), where a similar reminiscence of Aramaic was included at the moment of healing, and underlines the effective power of Jesus’ powerful speech over these forces.

The people’s response involves further attention to speech; Jesus orders them to silence, but to no effect. In fact the people “proclaim” (v. 36) the event in terms that even sound like preaching. Their acclamation of his power reminds the reader of Is 35:5-6, where a similar restoration of senses is a sign of God’s renewal of the fortunes of Israel. The change here is not in the healed man only. This contradiction is characteristic of Mark; Jesus is always urging silence, and people are always talking. It is a paradox that draws our attention both to the power of his actions and also to the incomplete understanding that any character in the Gospel seems to have of them, at least at this point in the story.

So these stories have to do with the surprising expansion of the work of this insurgent leader of God’s people. Although the two healings suggest the possibility of Jesus’ work becoming universal, in the geography of the narrative as well as in the explicit ethnic jostling for “food” in the first case they remain exceptions. As Morna Hooker points out, there is no “gentile mission” in Mark; Jesus never even teaches on gentile territory, even though these events reflect a power which is not constrained by ethnicity and thus hint at more to come.⁵ For us to read these stories as though ethnic and religious barriers should already have been neutralized, and that Jesus ought to have acted “inclusively,” is to miss the point. It is because of the work Jesus is still to do, and which is not yet understood, that a reign of God which includes all peoples can come about.

1. Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context : Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991, 69-73.

2. No more than are the people referred to by expressions about fish in the sea, leopards and spots, etc., being “called” the animals involved in these literary comparisons.

3. On the nuances that may be involved on various “dogs” see Joel Marcus, Mark: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday, 2000., 1:463-4

4. Marcus, op. cit. 478.

5. Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark. London: A. & C. Black, 1991, 181.