A sermon preached by The Reverend Canon Dr. David Anderson at St. Jude’s Anglican Church, Oakville, on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Sunday, September 8, 2024.
I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Over the course of my life, I’ve learned a few important lessons. I’ll admit that I have not always been quick to learn these lessons and certainly, I still have a lot to learn. One of the things I learned the hard way is that when it come to coping with a sick child—especially your own children—it doesn’t matter what Dad thinks. I mean, don’t even ask him. He doesn’t know what he is talking about. The thing that you need to know is this: listen to Mom. She knows and she is always right.
As I said, I learned this the hard way. When our girls were quite young our family lived in St. Catharines for about three years. During that time, Kaelynn, our youngest was constantly getting sick. She had ear infection after ear infection. And a series of other strange illnesses which turned out to be hypothyroidism, which is very rare in small children.
I will never forget, however, how one winter night we had been watching the Winter Olympics. Kaelynn had been sick all day with a sore throat and a low grade fever. The poor thing really felt rotten. But the day definitely had a bright spot as the Canadian men won the gold medal in hockey. Immediately, I grabbed Fiona, our eldest child who was about four or five at the time. I threw her into her car seat in our minivan and we started driving through the city honking the horn and listening to all the other proud Canadians do the same. But Kathy was home with our sick child.
It wasn’t long until my phone rang, and it was Kathy. “I think you better come home. Kaelynn is really sick.” Kathy continued, “I think she as scarlet fever.” Now, while Kathy thought Kaelynn had Scarlett Fever, I thought I had a hysterical wife. Nevertheless, Fiona and I went home immediately.
On arriving home, I could see that our little one was now sicker than she had been earlier in the day, but I could not imagine where Kathy had dreamed up this far-fetched idea it was scarlet fever. That sounded to me like something from the olden days. This was my reasoning: Kaelynn had a sore throat, sure. She had a fever, yes. Possibly she was even suffering from strep throat. But it was late evening, and children are always sicker at night; let’s just give her some Tylenol and see how she is doing in the morning. She couldn’t possibly have scarlet fever. That is what Dad thought.
But Kathy had already been on the phone with my mother. My mother told Kathy that she was sure that children died of scarlet fever. There was no point arguing; we were going to the hospital emergency room. My mother came to our house to look after Fiona, we loaded Kaelynn into the minivan and off to the hospital we went.
I remember that we had a long wait. A nurse confirmed Kaelynn’s fever has high and off came Kaelynn’s clothes to cool her down. I was astounded to see that Kaelynn was in fact a bright red. I believe that I told Kathy it was diaper rash. Eventually the ER physician, a rather cocky young doctor, came along and immediately confirmed that we were likely looking at scarlet fever, which I learned is an allergic reaction to the streptococcal infection that is strep throat. It was then that the doctor asked the question that finished me entirely. Looking at Kaelynn’s parents he asked, “Why did you wait so long to bring her in?” Kathy just glared at me. Always listen to the mother.
As Gospel readings go, today’s reading is really quite odd. Jesus is in Tyre of all places, way north in modern Lebanon. He is in a place at a great distance from rural Galilee where most of his ministry has taken place. But it is not just distant by mileage. Culturally speaking it also could not be further away. The story is also odd because Jesus seems to be alone. There seems to be no disciples on the horizon. Mark makes it clear that Jesus wanted to escape notice, he “did not want anyone to know he was there” (v. 24b). To add to the strangeness of the story, we learn that even in this foreign land, Jesus “could not escape notice” (v. 24c). On top of that, somehow (we are not told), a woman comes to learn about Jesus and finds him (v. 25).
But strangest of all is Jesus’ palpable rudeness. It makes us uncomfortable as contemporary readers. We don’t like to think about Jesus being rude, even for a moment. But there you are. Some interpreters have tried to clean this passage up for us by telling us that Jesus’ use of the word ‘dogs’ is better translated as ‘puppies’—as if that is better. Or they tell us that it was common at that time for Gentiles to be referred to as dogs—as if that is some excuse. Others have suggested that Jesus is only testing the woman to see how she will respond—that he uses the epithet with a sort of twinkle in his eye. But none of these explanations will do. The fact is that Jesus offers what amounts to a very harsh refusal. He uses a dehumanizing metaphor that is certainly jarring for us to hear. Nowhere else does Jesus ever respond to a person seeking something from him with such a bald insult as this.
We do know that Jesus had been wanting no one to know he was there. The secret, however, was out. Perhaps this had irked him. He was caught with his compassion down. But even this seems like a poor excuse for the insult.
Jesus’ refusal is harsh, but note that his refusal is not final. For one thing, what Jesus had said before his ‘dog comment’ was this: “Let the children be fed first” (v. 27a, emphasis added). Asked to heal the child he did not say, “absolutely not.” Instead, he said, “not just yet”: the children are to be fed first. It seems that Jesus’ response is more about timing. Blessings will come to the Gentiles, in time, but for now Jesus’ work is on behalf of the Jews. I think we tend to miss this in the reading because we get preoccupied with Jesus’ harsh words. We also tend to have difficulty imagining the divine Jesus might be persuaded to change his mind about something. Numbers 23:19 says, “God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind.” On the other hand, we have the story of Sodom where it seems that God is influenced by Abraham who negotiates with God so that God agrees that if only ten righteous persons can be found in the city, the city will not be destroyed. We also have the story of the children of Israel worshipping the Golden Calf in the desert and angering God. Moses pleads with God so that we read in Exodus 32:14: “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he had planned.” We have the story of Jonah, when the king of Nineveh’s hears that his city is to be destroyed, but calls the people to repent and reasons, “Who knows? God my relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish” (Jonah 3:9). The fact is that you can never trust God to be unmerciful.
Jesus does change his mind. He heals the woman’s daughter. Why? In Matthew’s telling of this story, it is because of the woman’s faith. There Jesus says, “Woman, great is your faith!” (Matthew 15:28). But in Mark, Jesus says nothing about the woman’s faith. Jesus says that he is responding to the woman’s words. The woman had responded to Jesus’ refusal by saying, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat they children’s crumbs” (v. 28). Jesus responds, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter” (v. 29). It is not so much her faith as it is her reasoning, her logic.
To be sure, this woman is clever. She has astutely reconfigured Jesus’ metaphor by speaking to the children’s crumbs that fall to the dogs under the table. Her words have theological insight, wit, and humility. This woman knows something—and we are not told how she came to have this insight. What she knows is that there is an abundance available in the kingdom of God. It is as if what she said was this: “Go ahead. Feed the children. Let them have their fill. Let them eat all they want. But the table cannot hold all the food you bring, Jesus.” The excess must start spilling to the floor—even now!
The woman does not only understand the abundance of Jesus’ food, but she also appreciates its potency. She does not ask for her daughter to be treated as one of the children. “Look,” she says, “I am not asking for a seat at the table. My daughter is suffering. All I need is a crumb or two. I know that will do the job. But I can’t wait. I need it right now.” Parents of sick children do not wait around.
In any case, immediately after Jesus has left Tyre he carries on with a new policy in place. He cures a man who is deaf and who can barely speak, and then he goes on to feed four thousand people. These events occur in the Decapolis, a region populated mostly with Gentiles. Mark does not focus on the ethnicity of the people, but it does seem that Jesus has taken the wisdom of the Syrophoenician woman to heart. The timeline has been accelerated; Gentiles are to receive blessing too, even now. The woman’s persistence has benefitted more than her own little girl. So, thanks be to God for this tenacious Syrophoenician theologian.
But let us notice that her theology doesn’t originate in books or study. Her theology has come out of her painful experience of a sick child and her own fierce motherly love. I tend to agree with the argument that says that this woman’s tenacity amounts to what we call ‘faith.’ Her persistent efforts, for refusing to go away until she gets what she wants, her hopeful insight in believing that even a crumb of grace will make all the difference, and in the end her trusting acceptance—taking Jesus at his word—and journeying home knowing that her daughter has been healed. In Mark, as in the Letter of James, faith is not about getting Jesus’ name and titles correct, or articulating doctrine perfectly. What faith is about—when it right down to it—is about clinging to Jesus and expecting him to do the things that he said he has come to do.
Maybe, just maybe, we can all be a little more like the Syrophoenician woman. We just keep coming back. We come to church to hear the word of God and to receive the blessed sacrament. We are persistent. Why? I would call that faith. It is our faith that if any of what we hear when we come to church is true, then it also has to be true for us as well.
It is a little like the story of Jacob in that story where he wrestles with the angel all night long, not giving up until he gets his blessing. May her faith help us all to see new dimensions of the truly abundant good news of God for us in Jesus Christ.
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