For the Sake of the Despised

Allow me to repeat Jesus’ words. He is approached by a Gentilic woman, most likely from the region of modern-day Syria, who has asked for an exorcism for her daughter. What does Jesus say? He says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Jesus refers to this woman and her daughter as dogs. Let that sink in. In our modern context this is shocking, offensive, and just plain rude. Why would Jesus do such a thing? To answer this question, we need to do some work in understanding how we have received the Bible in its current form, the historical context of this gospel, the cultural implications of the term “dog,” and then we need to cross the interpretive bridge to our own time. 

Let me begin by saying that the Bible as we have it before ourselves did not just appear. The earliest traditions described in the Old Testament which include Abraham 1800 BCE as well as Moses and the Exodus in 1300 BCE were passed down by oral tradition. It is likely that the majority of Old Testament history in Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Samuel, as well as 1 and 2 Kings were written during the Babylonian exile around 500-450 BCE. The apocrypha was included in the Old Testament canon until the Council of Jamnia in CE 90. It is at this council, after Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and the emergence of gospels and letters from Jesus followers that the Hebrew Bible was finalized for Jews. That’s just the Old Testament. 

The New Testament and the development of the Christian canon has a story of it own. The first letters were written around 45-50 CE while Mark was written ten to fifteen years later during the Jerusalem wars. However, the books that we have in our New Testament were not the only ones written. The Didache, the Epistles of Clement, and the Gospel of Thomas are a few of the books that were in contention for joining our canon. Over the course of nearly three centuries, the church painstakingly began to define what books were in and what were out. The early church provided a definition of its canon in 382 at the Council of Rome. Things were settled in the canon until the reformation happened. Sixteenth century scholars challenged the Apocrypha having compared Greek translations of the Old Testament with older Masoretic texts. Many Protestants have removed the Apocrypha from their canon, while Roman Catholics affirmed their status at the Council of Trent in 1546.  

Why is this significant? It is significant because the Bible did not appear before our eyes. As Christians we do not believe that God hand wrote the Bible and handed it down to us without error. The Bible has been carefully developed over the course of centuries by the power of the Holy Spirit as testified by the church over centuries using the best textual methodology and translations available. We can say that the Bible is authoritative for our lives, while acknowledging the interpretive gap that exists between historical events, their writing, and their inclusion in the canon. As twenty-first century listeners we hear Jesus calling a woman a “dog” and are alarmed, but let’s return to the setting of these historical events to understand them in their time and place. 

So, let us turn to the issue at hand. What is the cultural and historical significance of Jesus, a Jew, calling a Gentile a “dog?”  The Old Testament and Jewish tradition generally think negatively about dogs. This negative imagery is related to the fact that the dogs described in the Bible and in Jewish tradition are generally the wild, scavenger sort rather than the domestic variety we are used to. The New Testament continues with this negative attitude. Dogs are associated with pigs (Matt 7:6), a symbol for opponents and heretics (2 Pet 2:22; Phil 3:2; Rev22:15) and are generally seen as outsiders to the community of God’s grace. As Turner notes in the Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, “The biblical writers … seem unfamiliar with any kind of warm personal relationship between a dog and its master.”[1]

Yet, the story isn’t as straightforward as this. It would be an exaggeration, however, to say that the image of the dog is always negative in these traditions. Friendly dogs, for example, appear in some manuscripts, and there is some distinction between household dogs and wild dogs. Domestic dogs, moreover, can symbolize righteous Gentiles.[2] Indeed, the Syrophoenician woman’s self-description as a dog that is within the house, but that is in a position inferior to that of the children, corresponds to the way in which Gentile sympathizers with Judaism (“God-fearers”) were regarded by some Jews.[3]

The exceptional emphasis on “dogs” is perhaps illuminated by the physical setting of our passage in the region around Tyre and the putative setting of our Gospel in the tumult surrounding the aforementioned Jewish War. For the Tyrian region was one that was badly hit by tension between Jews and Gentiles that led up to and accompanied that war.[4] The first century Jewish historian, Josephus, reported that the Tyrians were among the Jews’ bitterest enemies (Ag. Ap. 1.70) and cites massacres between the groups going back to the first century BCE (Ant. 14.313–21). During the Jewish War, Tyrian Gentiles killed a considerable number of their Jewish neighbors and imprisoned the rest in chains, and a Tyrian army burned the Jewish fortress of Gischala (J.W. 2.478). To make matters worse there were socioeconomic issues between the two regions. Additionally, there was bad blood between the Tyrians and the Galileans, partly because much of the agricultural produce of Jewish Galilee ended up in Gentile Tyre. Being the main urban area near Galilee, Jewish peasants often went hungry supplying those comfortable urbanites. When Jesus speaks about the unfairness of taking bread out of the mouths of Jewish children and giving it to the so-called Gentile dogs, his statement may partly reflect the socioeconomic tension between the two communities.[5] You can imagine that preexisting strife between Jews and Gentiles may have poisoned the atmosphere of the mostly Gentilic church at Tyre.

And so now we have the difficult task of putting this all together. It is clear that the Christians in Tyre might have held fast to their anti-Jewish sentiment. While Mark may feel that the Christian communities in this region needed to be sharply reminded of God’s continuing favor for his ancient people, but, at the same time, we cannot so easily write off the veracity of Jesus’ words. The Christian exegete Theissen adds that the saying is morally offensive, as though a doctor should refuse to treat a foreign child; and he points out the incongruity that Jesus couches his refusal to help a child in a parable about the necessity of attending to children.[6] The story of the Gentile woman from the Tyre region who wrests a blessing from Jesus is both remarkable and challenging. It presents the only account in the Gospels of a person who wins an argument with Jesus and portrays a Jesus who is unusually both sensitive to his Jewish claims to salvation and unusually rude about the position of Gentiles. 

There’s no escaping the ethnic slur built into “dogs.” In the context of last week’s sermon regarding the interior of our hearts, this Sunday’s lectionary proves that Jesus’ offensiveness is a fact we must face. We are confronted by this passage in contrast with Jesus’ claim that defilement comes from within, not from without. We must wrestle with the puzzling notion that a radically inclusive and loving Jesus would say what Mark ascribes to him, and that the Gentile so insulted would accept the slur. We must face with the puzzling reality of this passage without looking away. 

The deeper question is whether we can follow a God who was born of low status, despised by social and religious elites, and humiliated on the cross. Perhaps most alarmingly in this passage, we see a God who came not only for those who were despised­–those who were seen as second-class dogs– but a God who was also despised. A God that entered into the messiness of our geo-political conflicts, a God that is familiar with the intricacies of tribalism, political division, and hateful rhetoric. My suggestion for us this morning is not to look for any easy answer because life rarely offers them. Probe into Scripture, question it, yell at it, and listen to it. For it is when we do that we encounter God in our midst. For it is to those who are despised, who are overlooked, and who are powerless that God became human for. As Euthymius paraphrases her reply: “Since then I am a dog, I am not a stranger.”[7] It is to these who are eager to petition and know God that Jesus has opened the doors of heaven. It is this God, who willingly took on suffering, humiliation, and death­– who intimately knows the reality of humanity as their own– that has come for us and our salvation. It is to us, those who have been despised, who have been cast off, who have been forgotten, whose voices are silenced, that God has not forgotten. We, like the Syrophoenician woman, must learn to see the “yes” hidden in the “no.” 

[1] Turner, N. “Dog.” In The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, edited by G. A. Buttrick, 1:862. Nashville: Abingdon, 1962. 

[2] Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 27, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 464.

[3] Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 27, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 464.

[4] G. Theissen. The Gospels in Context: Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 77-78. 

[5] Theissen, Gospel, 72–80. 

[6] Theissen, Gospel, 61-65.

[7] H.B. Swete, The Gospel According to Saint Mark, (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 149.