Pentecost 16 – 2024
Mark 7:24-37
Marian Free
In the name of God in whose eyes nothing and no one is unclean in and of themself. Amen.
Some years ago, I watched a move titled simply Water. It was set in rural India in the 1940s. Set against the social movement of Gandhi’s non-violent resistance it tells a story of a number of widows (aged from about 12) who were forced to live out their lives in an ashram in order to expiate the bad karma which had led to their current situation of destitution. The widows were in effect an impoverished religious order. They rarely left the dilapidated building that was their home and when they did they were clearly identifiable in their plain white saris. A scene that has stayed with me is that of a young, beautiful widow who happened to be walking in the street when another woman brushed up against her. Even though the physical connection was brief and not caused by the widow, the other woman recoiled in horror and disgust and began to abuse widow for causing the contact. In that culture a widow was considered to be unclean and her impurity deemed to be contagious. The offended person was angry with the widow because it was the widow’s responsibility to keep well out of the way of the rest of society so that she didn’t risk sullying anyone else.
In our culture it is difficult to understand the purity laws of another culture – how contact with an otherwise moral and clean person might cause us to feel in some way polluted. We might shudder if we were touched by someone who had not bathed for several days, and we might want to wash ourselves after the encounter, but we would not consider ourselves seriously contaminated and unfit to mix in society until we had undergone some form of purification.
Purity laws abounded in first century Judaism. The Pharisees (and the Essenes) in particular were anxious to avoid impurity and there were rules about bathing to restore purity. The reason that the Jews didn’t enter Pilate’s quarters when they handed Jesus over was that they feared being made unclean before the Passover and therefore unable to celebrate the festival. In Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, the Priest and Levite passed by the wounded man because, had he been dead, touching his body would have made them impure and unable to enter the Temple (which was their destination).
Jesus’ encounter with the woman from Syrophoenicia Jesus takes place immediately after a discussion with the Pharisees and scribes on the subject of purity.[1] The Pharisees and scribes had challenged Jesus because he and his disciples did not observe the purity regulations – washing before eating, cleaning the outside of cooking and eating utensils and so on. Jesus’ response was to challenge the hypocrisy of his opponents who kept the letter of the law but not the Spirit of the law, whose inward nature was not at all impacted by their outward behaviour. Observing the purity laws had failed to purify them. (He on the other hand did not need to keep the laws governing purity as he was pure on the inside.)
After this encounter with the Pharisees, Jesus sought refuge in a house in the region of Tyre. Here, his own relationship with the purity laws was challenged by a desperate woman – a woman who was a source of impurity on three accounts. She was a woman; she was a Gentile, and she was the mother of a child who is possessed by a demon. For all these reasons, according to Jewish law, Jesus should have nothing to do with her. But the woman will do anything for her child. Even though Jesus insinuates that she is no more than a dog, undeserving of his attention, she will not take “no” for an answer. She refused to accept that she and her daughter were not worthy of Jesus’ attention due to their race, their gender and their state of health. She even accepted the description of “dog” and turned the argument around: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs under the table.”
The woman confronted Jesus’ attitude towards outsiders and thereby his concept of clean and unclean, pure and impure. In so doing she forced Jesus to recognise that he was being that he was being inconsistent. If it was not the “outside” of a thing that makes it clean or unclean, then surely it was not the external identifiers of a person – race, gender, physical or mental health that could determine their state of purity. In his debate with the Pharisees, Jesus claimed that it was not what goes into a person that defiled but what comes out. Taken to its logical conclusion his argument implied that all people should be judged according to their inward nature not their outward characteristics.
This most extraordinary story of a woman, an outsider confronting Jesus and changing Jesus’ mind, makes more sense if we understand the context in which Mark was writing. Mark, and indeed all the gospel writers, were writing to an audience that was primarily Gentile in origin. The evangelists had to answer an unspoken question – How was it that those to whom Jesus was sent did not accept Jesus’ message, and those who were outsiders did?
Placed alongside each other, the debate with the Pharisees about purity laws and Jesus encounter with the Syrophoenician woman provide an answer to that question. The Pharisees were too rigid to see in the rule-breaking Jesus the one whom God had sent. The Syrophoenician woman dared to claim God’s promise that the Gentiles would be included.
All that of course is ancient history. We belong to a faith that has little connection with the faith from which it grew. That said, there are at least two lessons for us in today’s gospel. One is that it is not ours to judge others. The second is that God’s embrace can and does include all people regardless of sex, gender, race, religion or any other criteria that we might use to separate and divide.
Beware of calling other people: “dogs” or any other slur – they might just supplant us in the kingdom.
[1] I am grateful to Dr Margaret Wesley for this insight.
Swallowsrest 