Hilton Head Island, SC – March 27, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 7:24-30; Matthew 15:21-28
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And he said to her, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” – Mark 7:27-28 (RSV)
In the first century of the Common Era, Jews who lived in Judea, especially in the southern area around Jerusalem, tried to avoid any dealings with Gentiles if it was at all possible. Because Judea was then under Roman occupation, and the Romans were Gentiles, Jews especially stayed away from Gentiles. In their minds, the Romans were the worst of Gentiles.
In Hebrew, the word for Gentiles is goyim. It simply means “peoples.” The word is totally synonymous with the English word “nations.” A nation is an ethnic group of basically one people, like the English, Russians, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Zulus, Peruvians, or whomever. Thus to the Jews, everyone who was not a Jew was automatically a Gentile.
The eleventh chapter of Isaiah is a messianic prophecy which is often read in Christian churches during Advent. It says, “In that day the root of Jesse shall stand as an ensign to the people [the Goyim, the nations]” (11:10). Then it says, “He will raise an ensign for the nations, and will assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the ends of the earth” (11:12).
In a way, that’s what Jesus did, not so much in his lifetime, because he spent most of his time during his three-year ministry among Judean Jews, but slowly, and then with an ever-quickened pace, Gentiles came flocking into Christianity in the second and third centuries, even as Jews by that time had rejected Christianity and Christians for the most part. (You can’t blame them. In general we Goyim have never treated Jews very well at all.)
In his thirty-second chapter Isaiah wrote, “Draw near, O nations, to hear, and hearken, O peoples! Let the earth listen, and all that fills it; the world, and all that come from it. For the Lord is enraged against all the nations, and furious against all their host [their armies], he has doomed them, has given them over for slaughter” (32:1-2).
Xenophobia usually is resisted with more xenophobia. Peoples who innately fear other peoples tend to disdain or even commit war against one another. Nationalism comes much more readily to most of us than does internationalism. Currently the Ukrainians are being viciously reminded of that every day. However, Isaiah had previously written that the Messiah would be “a light to the nations.” Isaiah did his best to try to establish strong ties between Israel and their neighbors, but it was always a hard slog.
Today, the northernmost region of the state of Israel is called “the Galilee: ha Galil.” In the Gospels, it is called simply “Galilee,” not “the Galilee.” In Jesus’ day Jews who lived in southern Judea fairly rarely saw Gentiles, but those who lived in the Galilee saw them regularly, because they were surrounded by Gentiles on three sides: west, north, and east, and Gentiles passed through the Galilee frequently.
The first time in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus encountered a Gentile was when he and the disciples were on the east side of the “Sea” of Galilee, as it is known in the Gospels. It is really just a big lake in a very deep volcanic fault, one of the longest in the world. The lake is 650 feet below sea level. (Very little of this will be on the final exam for this sermon series, but it is useful information for you to know.) However, I am not going to say any more now about the episode of the deranged man on the east side of the lake, because it has only a slim, tangential bearing on the sermon for today.
In today’s episode, Jesus went with the disciples – in quotes – “to the region of Tyre and Sidon.” This was in the southern part of modern-day Lebanon, on the Mediterranean coast. Back then it was known as Phoenicia. The Phoenicians were originally Greeks who migrated from the Greek islands and settled there many centuries before the time of Jesus. Jesus went to Phoenicia to recharge his batteries from having healed so many of his fellow Jews. Healing greatly depleted his energy, and he left the Galilee for a few days of R&R to try to revive himself. He did not want to be known primarily as a healer. He wanted to be seen as a teacher, preacher, and prophet.
Somehow a Phoenician woman had heard of Jesus, and she brought her daughter to him for healing. The daughter, we are told, had an “unclean spirit.” (We heard about another instance of that supposed medical phenomenon two weeks ago.) The mother begged Jesus to cast out what she presumed was a demon in her child. To us, Jesus’ response to her is absolutely shocking, if we can make any sense out of it at all, which, on first hearing it, it is hard to do. “Let the children first be fed,” said Jesus, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and feed it to the dogs” (Mark 7:27). Our second reading for this morning was Matthew’s record of this same story, and it makes a little more sense, but Jesus’ response still seems almost heartless. Initially, Matthew writes of Jesus, “But he did not answer her a word.” In Matthew’s telling of the story, next, “the disciples came and begged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she is crying after us” (Mt. 14:23). These poor beleaguered chaps didn’t like goyish females pleading with them about anything, even about wanting her daughter to be healed of her strange infirmity.
Up to this point, this is a skin-crawling story. Both Jesus and the disciples appear to be Goyiphobes. Furthermore (and this seems like total xenophobia), Matthew says Jesus said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Even if he really thought that, it appears as though this was a cruel thing to say to a distraught Gentile mother who implored Jesus to heal her daughter of a serious behavioral malady.
Here is where William Barclay’s commentary on these two passages is very helpful. First of all, he gives folks like us an explanation of what all first-century Middle-Easterners thought about dogs. They didn’t perceive canines to be beloved house pets. They saw them as wild animals in packs which lived on the edges of villages or out in the countryside, constantly on the prowl for food. People back then were as terrified of dogs as Western movies make us think people in the Old West were terrified of wolves, and they always steered clear of dogs.
But what does the statement mean, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and feed it to the dogs”? Dr. Barclay was convinced that Jesus said this with a smile on his face, rather than a scowl. Matthew says when the woman first approached Jesus, she said, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon” (Mt. 15:22). Jesus knew that she knew that Jews often called Gentiles “dogs.” Probably some Galileans had even used that epithet against her. But this lady is one very smart goyish mom, so she instantly came back at Jesus after the smile and the “dog-retort,” recognizing that he was testing her by what he was saying, rather than demeaning her. “Yes, Lord,” she responded, “but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” So with gentle kindness Jesus said, “For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” Jesus couldn’t find a place to rest up, even in Phoenician Goyland, but he did find a woman who recognized him as a unique servant of God. Her persistence and shrewd response to him enabled her daughter to be healed.
If this was a life-changing event for the mother and her child, might it also have been a “conversion experience” for Jesus? Did it suddenly dawn on him that his mission from God was much larger than he had envisioned when he first called Peter and Andrew to be disciples several months earlier? Is it possible that you and I are Christians in a some indefinable measure because of the persistence of this “Syro-Phonecian woman,” as some biblical commentators describe her? Might Jesus have been as subject to spiritual growth and “Aha! moments” as you or I or anyone else? Could it be that by means of this happenstance, God was calling him to reach out to Gentiles as well as to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”?
According to all four Gospels, on the last day of his life Jesus had a conversation, however brief it may have been, with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, whom we are told reluctantly gave the order for Jesus to be crucified. Pilate had asked Jesus if he claimed to be the King of the Jews. In the synoptic Gospels Jesus either gives no answer to that question, or he says to Pilate, “You say that I am.” Does that mean, “You have made that claim; I have not,” or is it a question that Jesus was asking of Pilate, “Are you saying that I am King of the Jews?” In other words, just hours before he was to be executed, did Jesus wonder if the Gentile governor of the nation of Israel thought that Jesus might be the King of the Jews, and it prompted Jesus himself to wonder that as well?
Then the fourth Gospel says Jesus and Pilate had a philosophical discussion about the nature of truth. Jesus said to Pilate, “You say that I am a king.” If John has the actual dialogue correct (which is always a valid question for everything written in every Gospel), he next has Jesus tell Pilate, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to be a witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth bears witness to the truth.” To that Pilate asks three immortal words --- “What is truth?”
What is the truth concerning Jesus of Nazareth? Was he the Messiah? Is he the Messiah? In the last couple of years of his life, did Jesus come to believe that his mission was an ecumenical rather than a limited one, a mission to the entire world and not only to Jews? Did Gentiles help him to discover that truth which he himself had not originally perceived? Did a deranged man on the eastern shore of the Galilean lake and a distraught mother in Phoenicia and an apparently somewhat incompetent Roman ruler of one of the most eastern provinces of the vast Roman Empire play a part in convincing a peasant Galilean prophet that he was perhaps more than even he had imagined himself to be? Who is Jesus? And who was he? How can we know answers that are beyond dispute to those questions? And how can we try to find the answers for ourselves?
There was a man living at that time who greatly expanded and altered the Jesus Movement in ways that Jesus himself very likely could never have anticipated. His name was Saul, and he was a Jew who came from the Greco-Roman city of Tarsus. It was on the south coast of Asia Minor, or what we now know as the modern nation of Turkey. Saul claimed to have met the resurrected Jesus Christ on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus. It was a vision he never forgot, one which propelled him to become the self-appointed “Apostle to the Gentiles.” By this experience his name was changed to Paul. “Saul” is a Hebrew name; “Paul” is a Greek name. Paul, who probably was raised to become a Jewish Pharisee, became the primary missionary to the Gentiles. That almost certainly happened because Jews wanted nothing to do with him. He had an overpowering personality which was both very influential and extremely inflexible, and his fellow Jews found him too much to bear. Therefore, having too much to offer the world but being too much for other Jews to put up with, Paul became our first missionary, the one who brought Jesus Christ to us, the Gentiles. In one sense Paul of Tarsus is much more the reason why Christianity became a Gentile religion than is Jesus of Nazareth.
God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. Gentiles played only minor and mainly negative roles in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, but by the end of the Greek Bible, the New Testament, they assumed the major roles, and Jews faded from the picture almost entirely. Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons; wise men never try.
Sometime in the 1930s, a song of the American South was discovered by somebody. No one knows who wrote the song, where it was written, or the person was who first began to popularize it. But it eventually became a big hit, and recordings of it were made by Sister Rosetta Sharp, John and Alan Lomax, Louie Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, Johnny Cash, The Brothers Four, Hank Snow, Bruce Springsteen, and many more. A more eclectic bunch of singers than that you couldn’t find. Woody Guthrie also sang it, and he used a phrase from it as the title of his autobiography, Bound for Glory. The song is called This Train.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory, this train,
This train is bound for glory,
Don’t carry nothin’ but the righteous and the holy,
This train is bound for glory, this train.
The second stanza declares that “this train don’t carry no gamblers, no hypocrites or midnight ramblers,” and the third stanza declares that “this train don’t carry no liars, the truth is all that we desire,” but in the end, the main message is that this train is bound for glory.
The amazing thing is that this train may never have included any Gentile passengers at all if Jesus had not become convinced by a Gentile lady in the region of Tyre and Sidon and others like her, and maybe even by the Roman who condemned Jesus to death, that he needed to enlarge his ministry to include us, the Goyim. In the process, millions of gamblers, hypocrites, midnight ramblers, and liars somehow also got on board. Jesus and God are much more accepting and forgiving of us than we are of ourselves.
Thank God. And, as many people say these days, thank you, Jesus.