The Gift of the Syrophonecian Woman

In reading about Tyre, it sounds much like Long Beach Island, a peninsula in the sea approached by a man-made causeway. No miniature golf or soft-serve, but Tyre did have the largest hippodrome outside Rome. A hippodrome, if you haven’t seen Ben Hur or Gladiator in a while, is where the chariot races, gladiator conquests, and the ancient equivalent of “Wipeout” would take place.

Like President Obama going to Martha’s Vineyard, Jesus wanted to just get away, but “he could not escape notice,” and a woman “whose little daughter had an unclean spirit,” had “immediately heard about him,” approaches Jesus, falls at his feet and begs him for help. Scripture is sly. The woman pleads for her “little daughter,” meaning the girl is innocent. She is possessed of a demon, a condition scripture abundantly shows in adult males, and it would exile the girl into the fringes of society. Nothing good will come to this girl as she grows into a woman. I suspect that the mother is pleading with Jesus to help her daughter not turn out like she has, working the boardwalk in a beach town, not far from the races and boxing matches.

She is not of Jesus’ people; she is not a Jew. She speaks with an accent. She is exotic, Syrophonecian (and we all know what those Syrophonecians are like). Even a divine Jesus cannot escape his earthly upbringing; he reveals here that he has been conditioned to distrust, if not despise her.

This is a pivotal moment. This is the first time Jesus has opportunity to help a person not of his people, his own ethnic group. I am surprised when he says, “Let the children be fed first,” meaning, let Israel receive the grace of God that he has brought into the world. Who Jesus is, and what he brings, is meant for his own people. Again, surprising, but I am shocked when he adds, “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

There is no sugarcoating this remark. Jesus has called her a dog. It is a raw insult, a slur and an epithet all in one. Each time I read this passage, I am shocked by it. I wonder why it is even here.

I think it has been saved because of the woman’s response. In my mind’s eye, she stands up, breathes in deeply of God’s love for her, and looks Jesus in the eye while his disciples probably laugh at the joke he’s made. “Sir,” she says with some defiance, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

The room must have been absolutely silent. “What would Jesus do now?” the onlooker must have thought. The tension thick, the silence long. Finally, he says to the woman, “You are right (implying that he was wrong), the demon has left your daughter.” Notice that he doesn’t say, “Because of your great faith, your daughter is well” (Matthew adds this softening detail in his version). The mother’s faith is of no concern; this is a matter of justice. Further, I think she has changed Jesus in expanding his own sense of his mission to all of humanity.

And, the story, through Jesus’ vulnerability and her persistence, reveals the sinfulness of racial slurs and ethnic stereotypes. She, of all people, has revealed to Jesus that there is one humanity, and in Christ, there will be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, female nor male.

Some years back, I was taking money out of a fairly remote ATM in downtown Pasadena, where we lived. As I was punching in the codes, I heard a car door slam, and I could hear footsteps coming up behind me. I turned my head just a bit, and could see that the person who approached was wearing new Nike sneakers, a hip running suit, and was African American. Without looking at his face, I chose to discriminate, to give in to how I was conditioned by racism and prejudice, and convinced myself I was about to be mugged. There is not a doubt in my mind that if glimpsed a person with my complexion, I’d relax.

As the money came out of the wall, I grabbed it and turned with it in full sight, figuring if I just handed it over, I might be safe. I don’t know who was more surprised by this scene: me, or the man standing before me, Jerry Oliver, the chief of police in Pasadena.

The story of Jesus and the Syrophonecian woman speaks right to the sin of racial stereotyping and our society’s chronic racism. That Jesus himself falls into the same trap I did at the ATM machine reveals both the naturalness and likelihood that we will use prejudice to draw bad conclusions. That Jesus is changed by the woman’s deferential yet firm challenge of Jesus’ assumptions about her reveals how Godly we are when we work not only to confront prejudice within but to confront a society whose structural and institutional racism must be systematically dismantled.

At the heart of our Christian faith is the hard-to-swallow belief that the human, and consequently humanity, is flawed and prone to sin. Not only does our personal racial and ethnic prejudice reveal the flaw, our collective racism and oppression does as well. The good news of our Christian faith is that we cannot save ourselves from ourselves; God in Jesus Christ saves us if we are open enough to place our common flaw back onto God.

When we do, our lives must reflect our faith, not only with our lips, but with our lives. Our flesh must give testimony that we believe that “God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:14) among and between religious and ethnic groups. In our second lesson from the letter of James, he drives home this same point to the earliest Christians struggling to make the church come true: “My brothers and sisters, do you, with your acts of favoritism, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” The churchgoers have been discriminating, making the rich people more important than the poor, treating one group with deference, the other with disdain. James scolds them for having made “distinctions among yourselves.” To fulfill Christ’s commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” demands that there be no partiality. With the Syrophonecian woman, Jesus made the same mistake. There can be no distinctions or discriminations in the household of God.

James insists that what Christians, then and now, profess with their lips, they must live out in their lives. His challenge is blistering: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but to not have works?” In other words, faith is manifested in action. Because of our trust in the resurrection, we must act differently in the world. The Christian life will be a full-body, contact sport with people with whom we might rather discriminate.

James chides, “If you see brothers and sisters naked or hungry, and say to them, ‘I’ll pray for you to find clothes and food,’ and then don’t supply their needs, what is the good of that?” If faith is not manifested in action, then there is no faith. “So faith, by itself, without actions and deeds and works, is dead.” If we want our faith to be alive, we must save lives in real physical, practical terms.

James’ challenge is still current regarding the church’s commitment to the poor, but it may be extended rightly to challenging the sins of racism. As we have been slow to learn, there is no such thing as distinct human races. We are all humans, each with unique characteristics that differentiate us one from the other, passed through our genes, but we are all the same model with different paint jobs and varying features. The very theory of distinct human races is a false construct maintained because it benefits some groups of humans and allows them to maintain economic power over other groups; this is no longer a matter of political opinion, but scientific fact.

At the excellent exhibit on Race at the Franklin Institute, a young woman of African American and Latina heritage says in a video, “Race is the least important aspect about me, yet it is often the most significant factor in how I am perceived.”

The least important thing about the woman who petitioned Jesus on behalf of her daughter was that she was Syrophonecian, yet it, for a moment, was the most significant factor in how Jesus first responded. Today, in our gospel, both the persistent woman and the chastised messiah reveal the Good News: We, who are many members, are all one body in Christ.