If we examine this story there are so many factors that add up to making Jesus and this woman outsiders to each other.
Tyre was an important commercial and political centre as the leading city of Phoenicia. The region included not only the city but also the farmlands and villages located near the border of Galilee that were crucial in terms of feeding the population of the city.
Tyre itself was largely a Gentile population but in the borderlands the area was ethnically mixed – Jew, Gentile, all immersed in an often-uncomfortable collision of ethnic, religious and cultural difference, and all of it heightened by economic tension between the city dwellers and the residents of the villages.
What happened was that the poorer farming communities would be captive to the needs and desires of the wealthier city dwellers. When there was times of poor harvests and food was scarce the poorer farming communities would go hungry at the expense of those in the urban settings who had more resources.
And so we likely have this setting where Jesus is among fellow Jews in the borderlands, where tensions are high, where people feel marginalised, defensive, and vulnerable to exploitation in a context of chronic scarcity – a seedbed for hostility, bitterness and strained relationships.
And then this woman, seemingly from this elite urban classes, comes to Jesus in a desperate state.
And in many ways, she herself is an outsider - in conventional Mediterranean “honour culture” it would have been inconceivable for an unknown, unrelated woman to approach a man in the privacy of his residence—much less a Gentile soliciting favour from a Jew.
So we have all kinds of factors that make both Jesus and this woman outsiders to each other – ethnicity and culture, gender, religion, economic realities, a sense that one people have been exploited by the other….
It’s a dramatic set-up that leaves us expecting that there’s no way of overcoming the distance, the otherness.
It’s impossible to imagine that good would come from this situation.
The whole scene is immersed in difficulty – a world seemingly lacking in grace and mercy, where people are in survival mode.
The text seems to ask, what happens when we’ve become outsiders to each other?
Can there be any healing here?
What happens when our lives are defined by otherness, by distance?
And what might bring us together?
How can we learn to live without enemies?
How can our hostility become hospitality?
How can we rewrite history?
In what way might we need to learn a new way of being?
One of the big challenges in this text for me is that we might imagine that Jesus would be on the front foot showing us the way forward here because when Jesus is involved, God’s heart is engaged.
But then something deeply troubling seems to take place.
Jesus is harsh and refuses to offer healing to someone in a situation of vulnerability.
This is a striking story because the hero or the protagonist doesn’t seem to be Jesus. There’s no story like it!
Jesus calls the woman a dog.
Now there are many thoughts people have offered about this passage –
maybe Jesus said this with a playful look, maybe he gave a wink.
Or maybe he says those words through sad, compassionate eyes naming the normal barriers and dynamics at play in typical relationships between a Jewish man and a Gentile woman – almost as if to say, “I know how this conversation is supposed to go for outsiders like us, let’s name it so we can subvert the way things normally go so we can then pave a new way that is more human.”
These are certainly possibilities.
But is it also possible that Jesus spoke out of his cultural perspective, that perhaps he defaulted to an instinctive reaction to this outsider who may have even brought oppression to his people?
Is that what we’re dealing with here in Jesus’ harsh response, the anger of the rural Jewish poor and the pain of the marginalised?
Is this a reaction to the exploitative economic realities that crush Jewish families and their children?
In reality the text itself doesn’t tidy the matter up, we’re left with questions hanging – surprising questions that we might struggle with.
As I’ve sat with this episode over the years I can’t say I’ve come to a conclusive answer.
But I want to suggest, as the episode unfolds, perhaps we have two heroic examples of what it looks like to overcome distance and otherness in a way that brings good out of almost impossible circumstances, examples that might offer hope for all of us.
We have to say, at least on the surface way the text is presented to us, that the initial sustaining energy for this relationship originates in the woman.
She comes to Jesus with great courage and desperation.
She is labelled harshly but perseveres despite insult so that her daughter might be healed.
We could talk about the sacred mother-daughter love that she demonstrates, the kind of love that ignores all kinds of barriers and endures all things to make sure that her loved ones may flourish and have the best shot at life.
That’s a powerful form of love. It’s a beautiful kind of love.
It’s the passionate, sacrificial and protective love of a parent. If we all lived from that place we would embrace a rich way of being in the world.
But I think there’s something even deeper than a parent’s love for their child at work in the text, something even more profound about this woman that creates the healing possibilities that this episode encapsulates.
And I think that quality is worthiness.
She hangs in there. The voices that reduce and dismiss and condemn come at her like waves rushing in but she does not allow them to pull her under for good.
She seems to know who she is. She knows that she is worthy.
And she knows that Jesus can heal her.
Somehow she holds onto a greater vision that hatred and division.
She had every right to destroy Jesus in her heart, to put up the walls and shatter the possibilities for relationship between outsiders.
But she doesn’t. And in the process she models for all of us how to avoid being trapped by another’s characterisation as enemy.
‘Her tactic is the verbal form of the strategy in martial arts of meeting the opponent’s attack by using its own force against the perpetrator. Instead of confronting the insult, she turns the offensive label of contempt to a character in a domestic scene so familiar and so obvious that the logic cannot be refuted: children are always dropping food, and pets gobble it up almost before it hits the ground. Likewise, she and her daughter will get what they need from the bits and pieces that fall from the table on which Jesus’ ‘food’ is intentionally served. Her witty ‘words’ turn his rejection into assent to her request’ (Ringe, A Gentile Woman, Revisited, p.90-91).
The woman’s presence is entirely disarming and non-defensive.
She refuses to repeat the cycles of hostility and suspicion that reflect the shared history of their people.
Perhaps she understands on some level Jesus’ reaction and accepts his pain on some level, absorbing and deflecting the hurt that comes her way in the process.
Let’s be honest. Few things in life are harder to do than this.
The most instinctive and natural thing for all of us to do when we are hurt or insulted is to armour up, to default to a place where we will no longer show any hint of vulnerability to those who might hurt us.
It’s unnatural under these circumstances to show grace.
But the problem is that it only creates a kind of prison for ourselves. No healing can come from that place. It only creates bitterness, hostility and anger in us.
And unless we can find something life-giving to do with our anger and our hurt it destroys us. It saps us of energy and steals our joy.
So how do we do stop that from happening?
How do we disarm our own ego-defences that are endlessly determined to protect, prove, and when necessary, attack?
How do we avoid getting stuck in the endless cycles of bitterness?
I believe the only way we can do this is if we can hold firm to our worthiness, the deepest part of who we are as human beings that is not defined by how we are treated by others.
We can live from our bruises but we are better off living from our unbreakable worthiness that is grounded in God’s profound love for us.
That’s the ultimately truth of who we are. You have infinite dignity of worth. Nothing and no-one can take that from you.
The first and last word about you is that you are loved, you are loved, you are loved.
And then the extension of that is that so is everyone else – even those who have just hurt us!
They are still God’s beloved. They are our brothers and sisters. We are bound together and when we hurt another we also hurt ourselves.
Love is who we are and love is our destiny. Not hate. Never hate.
Author and spiritual director Alexander Shaia tells a story about how when he was seven years old, racists burned his grandmother’s house to the ground.
The Shaia family had emigrated in the 1950s from Lebanon to Birmingham, Alabama and were Maronite Catholics.
At that time, Birmingham was less than one-half of one percent Catholic, and Maronites were a tiny, obscure minority even among those Catholics.
They were outsiders in a very real sense - a minority of a minority within an immigrant minority in a city that was, in those days, not kind to minorities.
“They waited until nightfall so they could slip through the shadows. Then they scoured her house, dug in her closets, opened her wooden chest, stripped the mantels of her beloved mementos, and put everything into a big pile in the living room. All the Catholic artifacts, statues, and family pictures from her tiny home were added to the stack. Placing the crucifixes atop the heap, they poured on kerosene, lit matches, and fled.
Fire engulfed the structure in minutes. Summoned from my bed, I rushed to her house with my family and watched the conflagration, despairing, certain that my grandmother was inside, perishing in agony. We all called her “Sitto,” which is Arabic for grandmother, and she was especially beloved to me. Since she walked with a cane, I was sure there was no way she could have escaped the terrible fire. However, hours later she appeared, having fortuitously been taken to church by a friend that evening. Her restoration to us was joyful, but I will never, ever forget the smell of the charred wood, nor my fear, nor the palpable experience of hate that surrounded me that night. Indelibly imprinted on my seven-year-old heart was the clear understanding that being “outside” meant the risk of pain and terror, and perhaps even the loss of life itself.”
Alexander Shaia goes on to talk about how the family met for their regular Sunday dinner five days after the fire:
“We always met on Sundays at Sitto’s house—everyone: parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole extended crowd—and usually we sat around the big, old mahogany table, which was covered for the occasion with embroidered linen and china. My recollection isn’t clear whose house we went to that week, but I do remember that the tables were planks on sawhorses, the chairs were folding metal, and the tablecloths were paper.
The grown-ups sat in the middle, the kids around the edges. Sitto, as always, was at the head of the makeshift main table, and when the room hushed, she led us in saying grace. Afterward, there was silence, and then her eyes, clear and direct above the glasses perched midway down her nose, slowly moved to meet the eyes of every person in the room—even ours, the children. We all waited patiently in the silence. Finally she spoke. Her voice was soft, and she said only two words, though she repeated them until she was sure we understood and accepted them: “No hate. No hate.…” And I felt the burden lift from the heart of my family.”
Sitto and the Syro-Phoenician woman both embody the kind of grounding that transforms hate and anger into a healing force for good.
In our little household we try and let this same spirit shape our lives and our relationships. We’ve got a family motto that we come back to all the time, especially if in our interactions we’ve somehow forgotten to live it out.
We say to each other, “remember, no hate, no hurt, no harm. Always love, always love, always love.”
Because we do make mistakes. And it’s brave and hard coming back to that place of love. But we are beloved and love is our destiny.
Which brings me to the way I think Jesus is heroic in this episode.
I used to really struggle with the possibility that Jesus might make a mistake and treat someone with a lack of compassion, that he might have these reactive judgments that somehow missed the full picture of who another is.
And while there are obviously different ways to read this text I’ve come to warm to it over time.
Maybe there’s even something here that can deepen our appreciation and understanding of what love and compassion looks like.
What I want to propose here is that what if love, even here in Jesus’ experience, isn’t so much about always getting it right every time, or finding it easy, but is best displayed in our willingness and capacity to say “I got it wrong, I’m sorry. Let’s make it right. Let’s start again.”
I don’t know about you but that’s a love I can really relate to. Because I have these reactions that rise up within me all the time, that feel right and appropriate. Only they don’t always come with the right spirit. Sometimes they dismiss or reduce others. Often I get it wrong.
But in preference to rumbling with my judgments I rationalise them, justify them, build a strong case around them.
Because then I don’t have to change. Then I get to maintain the high-moral ground. I get to remain guarded.
And I might walk away feeling like I am right and that my cause was a noble one but perhaps all I really did was hurt or dismiss someone when instead it might have been an occasion where some kind of healing could have happened between us.
And if it wasn’t some kind of healing or flourishing for them, perhaps it would have been for me. Maybe some healing or freedom from my own pride, or lack of compassion, or whatever else.
One of the things I’ve been learning is that Jesus comes to us with great tenderness and grace but usually that grace comes in an uncomfortable form –
in the form of otherness, in the form of an outsider that maybe we might have already made up our mind about, or maybe in the form of someone who has hurt us.
Whichever the case, Jesus may come to us in a form that is hard for us to love – at least from each of our own unique experience. Those that are hard to love for me will be different for you and different for others again.
I think those occasions are Christ coming to us, saying “can you receive me?”
If you can you will be drawn into a larger kind of life, a bigger kind of love which is good for us and good for the world.
But usually we struggle to receive Christ in his most uncomfortable forms for some time.
But grace keeps coming, keeps offering us discomfort, keeps offering us opportunities to enter in this one wild life that is before us, perhaps even within us.
And I think that presence comes with words saying,
“No hate, no hurt, no harm. Always love, always love, always love.”
COMMISSIONING AND BENEDICTION
Let us go and bear witness
to the healing power of Jesus Christ.
May we be a people defined by Christ’s affectionate love,
May God give us strength to choose reconciliation, courage to choose a higher love,
And way we, by the Spirit’s power, embrace even those who might hurt or dismiss us so that a greater good might come.
