Pentecost 17 – 2018
Mark 7:24-37
Marian Free
In the name of God through whom all things are made clean. Amen.
In the early part of this century, an Indio-Canadian woman produced three controversial movies – “Fire”, “Earth” and “Water”. I have only seen the last of these. “Water” follows the life of two widows – one who is only eight years old and another who appears to be in her late twenties. The movie is set in 1938 when widows in India were allowed to remarry but, as we all know, some traditions – especially those that are rooted in religion – are not easily overturned by legislation. Chuyia and Kalyani who were members of the Brahmin caste had only two choices when their husbands’ died – to throw themselves on the funeral pyre or to marry their husband’s brother. If they chose to do neither they were forced to enter an ashram. For the remainder of their lives they were to live as nuns, hidden away from society and dependent on the charity of others. Their hair was cut short and they were robed in white so as to make them identifiable to the public because their status as widows meant that they were considered unclean and were to be avoided.
It is a powerful and disturbing movie that demonstrates the way in which, as one commentator puts it, “an ancient religious law has been put to the service of family economy, greed and a general feeling that women can be thrown away.” The widows have no social status, in fact it is as if they did not exist. In one scene, a woman brushes up against Kalyani who, though she is young and beautiful causes the other woman to recoil in disgust, screaming at Kalyani for allowing herself to get so close. Her widowhood has made Kalyani ritually impure and she has, albeit inadvertently, made the other woman impure through contact. Societies such as that in which the movie is set have strict protocols that must be observed so as to avoid any possibility of pollution of the one by another.
In our reasonably enlightened and unstratified society, it is difficult for us to imagine the utter revulsion that people in some cultures feel when exposed to others whom they have been taught to see as soiled or polluted. We do not feel that we have to have religious rituals that would restore us to purity or make us fit to attend worship.
As the gospels and the letters of Paul reveal, issues of clean and unclean were the lived reality of first century Jews. The Pharisees worry that Jesus does not wash. In the parable of the Good Samaritan the priests and Levites avoided the Samaritan because they did not want to be polluted by his injuries or by his status as a Gentile. The priests do not enter Pilate’s quarters when they bring Jesus to be tried because they do not want to be rendered unclean by the contact.
Today’s gospel stands alone as a powerful story of a woman whose desperation meant that she refused to be silenced and whose persistence, it appears, changed the course of Jesus’ ministry.
If we look at the context of this story within the gospel as a whole, we can see that Mark uses this story in a very particular way to illustrate Jesus’ argument with the Pharisees regarding ritual purity and concerns about what food is clean and unclean. The narrative section in which the account of Jesus’ meeting with the Syrophoenician woman occurs actually extends from Mark 6:31 (the account of the feeding of the 5,000 Judeans) to Mark 8:21 (the feeding of the 4,000 Gentiles)[1].
The discussion begins in Jewish territory (6:31-7:29) and concludes in Gentile territory (7:31-8:21). Both the geography and the narrative setting serve to highlight the central point – Jesus declares all things to be clean. In technical terms Mark uses a chiasm to place the emphasis on the central point – clean and unclean. Simply put, the story is framed by two different accounts of a miraculous feeding (and a misunderstanding of the meaning of bread). Within those outer brackets are two other sets of brackets. Immediately inside this the stories of feeding we find instances of Jesus’ healing ministry and inside those again are two controversy stories (with the Pharisees and with the Syrophoenician woman). Nested within this framework is Jesus’ discussion with the disciples in which he declares all things to be clean.
It is clear that in Mark’s retelling of the story Jesus’ discussion with the woman serves to emphasise the point that he has already made in his argument with the Pharisees – that cleanliness and purity depend not on outward behavior, but on inward disposition. Boundaries related to food, religion or ethnicity have no place in the Kingdom that Jesus is announcing. Borders considered to be immutable are being torn down in the new world that Jesus’ teaching is bringing into being.
In the short account of Jesus’ interaction with the Syrophoenician woman a number of significant frontiers are crossed. Jesus (for no apparent reason) not only enters Gentile territory but presumably the home of a Gentile and he engages directly with a woman. The woman, who by Jewish standards is unclean on account of her race and her gender is further tainted by the presence of an unclean spirit in her daughter. According to the social and religious norms of the day she should not have approached Jesus, let alone entered the house in which he was staying. The woman’s actions demonstrate her deep love for her child. Jesus’ actions reveal his understanding that the social and geographic boundaries of his time are a human artifice that have nothing to do with true holiness.
The society of Jesus’ time and place believed that the impure polluted the pure. In declaring all things to be clean, by responding to the pleas of the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus exposes the false thinking of his age. God, God’s temple and God’s people cannot be polluted by the unholy and profane. Impurity does not flow from us to God. Rather purity and holiness always flow in the other direction from God to us. God is not tainted by our behavior or by our failure to observe certain protocol, neither is God sullied by those deemed (by us) as unfit for God’s presence. Rather God’s love and goodness extend outwards from God making holy all those who, like the woman, believe that they are not beneath God’s notice.
[1]For more details read “The Construction of Identity in Mary 7:24-30: The Syrophoenician Woman and the Problem of Ethnicity.” Smith Julien C.H., Biblical Interpretation.20 (2012), 458-581.
Swallowsrest 