The Ordinary Miracle of a Grumpy Jesus

Mark 7:24-37

Mark 7:24-37

The story of the Syrophoenician woman is one of my favorite stories about Jesus.  Jesus is both God and Human.  All of both.  In this passage, Jesus demonstrates the very human power to screw up, and the very saintly power to reconsider.  If in every story about Jesus he made the right call the first time and made no mistakes, then there would be no human part of him to speak of.  We just don’t work that way.  Humans are messy, confused and often a little preoccupied. In this story we see Jesus trying to lay low for a bit.  I’m sure days off are few and far between for Jesus.  Right in the middle of this chill time, this woman seems to run in and jump in front of Jesus to ask him to help her.  He does not take it well. Jesus responds with a very 21st century dose of snark.  He essentially calls her a dog and lets her know that she is not worth his time.  Not cool, Jesus.  

Where the story gets interesting is in who the woman is and what Jesus’s snarky retort says.  The text explains that this woman is “a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin.” This means simply that she is not a Jew and she is from Greece.  The story doesn’t give her a name, but for the purposes of this discussion we’re going to call her Paula, just so I don’t have to keep writing “the woman” over and over for reasons that will be clear in a minute.  

Paula asks Jesus for help, and Jesus immediately notices that she is not Jewish and she is Greek.  Jesus is Jewish, and he is not Greek. Jesus doesn’t want to deal with her, so he makes it clear that he knows she’s different, and he doesn’t like it.  In this moment Jesus is making a pretty common mistake for all of us.  He is, rather thoughtlessly, defaulting to the dominant narrative of his time and place.  The dominant narrative is the story that we tell ourselves in a community about how the world works.  This was true in his time, just as it is true in ours.  In Jesus’s community, like most communities, one of the dominant narratives was the people who are different are bad.  In group good.  Out group bad.  Jesus sees that she is in the out group, follows the dominant narrative, and lets her know that he wants nothing to do with her.

This is of course the same Jesus who makes the Samaritan the good guy in his story and teaches us all that the first shall be last, so we know that this is not where he is really going to fall on this issue.  He’s just having a bad moment.  Happens to the best of us.  Paula does not crumple at this searing criticism from a man who has more way more power than her in this scenario. Imagine this.  You are an immigrant woman who believes that the man in front of you can heal your sick daughter.  You beg at his feet to help, and he verbally slaps you down.  Most of us would not be able to take that.  Paula is undaunted.  She keeps her faith in him, even with him being a real jerk at this point, and comes back with a pretty witty retort.

At this point we get to the everyday, miraculous part.  Jesus is confronted with a big dose of reality.  Paula is not a random Greek woman he can just dismiss because his culture sees her as a dog.  Something less than human.  Paula reminds Jesus that she is in fact a human, made in the image of God, a person of faith in him and a person with sharp comeback skills.  Where the dominant narrative would dismiss her as worthless and undeserving of Jesus’s help, God sees her as a blessing.  In the end, Jesus reconsiders and heals her daughter.  It is in the reconsideration that I think the real miracle of this story lies.  

This story is all too real for our time.  We live in a country where there are people begging for help constantly.  The dominant narrative of our time tells us that people need to work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  If they don’t have enough it is because they don’t deserve it.  We worked hard to get what we have, and we have no reason to help if we don’t want to.  If we were to follow the radical teachings of Jesus, that would mean reconsidering this narrative of deservedness.  Even when we are having a bad day, there is no one who is not worthy of God’s love, and no one who is not worthy of help. Even you.

See you next week.

Between now and then hit the comments and let me know where Jesus’s call is leading you this week.

You are not the only one who would like start their day off with a little look in to Jesus’s teachings. Share this thing, so we can broaden our conversation and build a community of people living Jesus’s call.