By the Rev’d Andrew Coyle

Season: 2nd Sunday of the Season of Creation

Readings: Prov 22:12, 8-9, 22-23 | Jas 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17 | Mark 7:24-37

Our Gospel reading tells us that Jesus is in the region of Tyre. He has gone north away from Galilee and towards the Mediterranean coast into the area known as Phoenicia. Why has he gone there? We don’t know exactly. But the text says that he entered a house and did not want anyone to know that he was there. So perhaps he is escaping the crowds, looking to get some space and solitude. Whatever the reason, he is now in Gentile country. And Gentiles, as you might know, are all those who are not Jews.

The word “Gentile” translates as “nations”. So Gentiles are the people from the other nations outside Israel, people who are different in culture and religion from the Jews. Now we don’t know exactly how Jews and Gentiles perceived and behaved toward each other in Jesus’ time. But it is pretty clear from the Jewish point of view that “distinctions were to be kept
between Jew and gentile” (Amy-Jill Levine, The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 250).

The manner in which separation between the two was to be maintained varied depending on context, but we do have some insight from scripture regarding some of those differences. We know from The Acts of the Apostles that the apostle Peter was troubled by the idea of sharing a meal with Gentiles and we also know that there was controversy in the early church concerning the relationship between Gentile converts and the Jewish Law – should Gentile converts keep the Law and how much of it should they be required to keep?

Today’s gospel reading also gives us an insight into those relationships and it’s not a particularly pleasant one. Jesus has this encounter with a Gentile woman of Syro-Phoenician origin and it would be fair to say that he is not very polite to her. In fact, he calls her a dog. She has heard of him and the way he has healed people who were sick and cast out demons and she wants him to do the same for her daughter. She falls on her knees and begs him to do this. But Jesus responds by saying, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Jesus is speaking in metaphor but his words are no less offensive for that. The “children” to whom Jesus is referring are the people of Israel. Jesus is saying that because this woman and her child are not Israelites, Jesus’ gifts of healing are not for them. It is hard not to experience that as a slap in the face, a rejection and an insult, a dismissal of her worth as a human being and that of her daughter. This woman, though, is utterly committed to the well-being of her daughter and she comes back at Jesus.

She is not going to give up. So she says, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She takes Jesus’ own words and turns them to her advantage, turns them back on Jesus. And I think we can see in this a moment of recognition, a moment of conversion even, for Jesus. So he says, “For saying that, you may go–the demon has left your daughter.” And the woman goes home and finds her daughter lying on her bed, free from sickness and possession. Jesus has met her in her need. And that’s where this particular encounter ends. As we hear, Jesus heads off into the region of the Decapolis and heals someone else.

And we might ask, what insight does this story offer us as we journey through this Season of Creation? Well, one of the things I think we can see happening in this story is an expansion of Jesus’ horizons. In this woman’s persistence, she is entreating Jesus to see her for who she is in this most basic and fundamental way. Not as a Gentile, not as someone who is to be kept at arms-length, but as someone who is in need, someone in whom Jesus can recognise his own humanity reflected back at him. And so Jesus responds to this woman’s need, recognising in her situation this universal reality of a parent’s love and care for her child, recognising in her situation not the differences between them but the things they have in common, the things that bind us together in our human experience – our capacity for love and compassion, our fear for those dear to us and our desperate desire to shield them and save them from harm.

In this Season of Creation, we too are being invited to see what we have in common with one another, but not just with our fellow humans, but also with the entirety of the life that surrounds us. It is perhaps hard to see what we have in common with a housefly or a tūī, or a weka or a whale or a bat or a centipede, but we share a common existence. We are bound together in ways that we don’t fully understand but which we can nonetheless appreciate as an ecological interconnection. We share a place, a planet, a sense that we are part of a whole. And we are being invited to see ourselves as part of this whole, and to recognise that there is a need to which we are being called to respond – the healing of the earth, the care of its creatures, and the preservation of our common home.

In the beginning, when God called the world into being and brought forth life in all its wonder and diversity, God declared that all that God had made was good. And in this declaration, we are being invited to see that all that lives both testifies to the glory and goodness of God and has intrinsic value in itself by virtue of the goodness that God has declared to be present in the life of the world. Jesus heard the cries of this Syrophoenician woman and was moved to empathy and to action. His ears were opened to her need and a connection between them was stirred and made.

We too are being invited to hear the cries of our world and to be moved to empathy and action. And isn’t it interesting that what immediately follows on from Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman is the healing of a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment? Jesus puts his fingers into that man’s ears, and he spits and touches the man tongue and
he says, “Ephphatha! Be opened!” And the man’s ears are opened and he can speak without difficulty. And in bringing hearing to this man, Jesus is symbolically making it possible for him to hear the cries of the world. And in bringing speech to him, Jesus is also symbolically giving him the opportunity and the means to speak on behalf of the world.

Our cognisance of the goodness of the world around us goes hand in hand with an invitation to speak out and proclaim the goodness of the world and its creatures and to act for their safekeeping and security. This is our calling as the stewards of God’s creation, and it is a calling that opens us to the pain of the world, but it is also a calling that enables us to wonder at God’s goodness.