Throwing Food to the Dogs

I’m in the process of packing up my office, getting ready for the next part of my priestly journey. Among the books I found when I moved in was a real treasure: Lectures on Preaching by Phillips Brooks. Nowadays if Brooks is remembered at all, he’s known as the author of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” In his time, though, he was considered one of the greatest preachers of the century. In 1877, when he was only 42, he was invited to give the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale University. The book contains those lectures, which are as fresh today as then.

In his chapter on “The Congregation,” Brooks speaks of “some people who as mere strangers have wandered in and taken their seats among the people who are always there…They are to the congregation what the few people who came into contact with Jesus who were not Jews – such as the Syrophenician woman, and the Centurion, and the Greeks, who asked to see him – were to Christ’s disciples. They kept men’s [sic] conception of His ministry from closing in tightly on the Jewish people. This is the danger of the country parish, where you know everybody who comes into the church. You forget the mission to the world.”

The Syrophoenician woman shows up in Sunday’s Gospel reading from Mark. (In Matthew she is Canaanite, an easier reading for the deacon.) She is rebuffed by Jesus when she asks for help for her daughter. He tells her that it is not fair to throw the food of the children (of Israel) to the dogs (the Gentiles). She responds by saying that even the dogs eat the children’s crumbs. “For that saying,” Jesus relents and heals her daughter.

One might think that Jesus himself needed just what Phillips Brooks described: someone to keep his ministry from closing in tightly on the Jewish people. Perhaps Jesus needed to figure out what he was doing as he went along, learning the Messiah business by living it. From that point of view, the Syrophoenician woman taught Jesus that he was supposed to pay attention to Gentiles, as well as Jews.

I find that explanation unsatisfying. For one thing, I think Jesus knew what he was doing all along. For another, he deliberately traveled into Gentile country and spent time there before going back to Galilee. But why did he treat the woman so rudely if he already knew that he was going to heal her daughter? Was he just testing her? Was that fair?

Jesus’ disciples must have been pretty edgy when they stepped out of familiar territory. The food wasn’t kosher, nothing was ritually clean, and everyone looked and sounded strange. Imagine a group of white Iowans walking through a black neighborhood in Chicago, and you can understand how out of place the disciples felt. So when a local woman asked for help, Jesus must have voiced exactly what the disciples were thinking. Leave us alone. Stick with your own kind. Remarkably, the woman not only persisted, but turned Jesus’ words back at him. Now she’ll really get it, the disciples must have thought. Instead, Jesus offered words of comfort, of healing. Can you imagine what effect that must have had on them? Previously he had told them that there were no foods that were unclean – and now there are no people who are unclean. Just in case they missed the point, Jesus healed a Gentile man who couldn’t hear or speak. It was enough to make one look for another church!

The New Testament repeatedly tells us how the first Christians had to reinterpret everything they had learned from the Jewish Bible in the light of the Word of God, Jesus Christ. God really meant it when he said to heal the sick and give food to the poor. God really meant it when he said that all humans are made in God’s image. God really meant it when he said that he desires all people to be reconciled to himself and to one another. But even Jesus couldn’t say all of that at once, because he knew it wouldn’t be understood. He had to lead his disciples to the truth at a pace that they could follow. Sometimes that meant taking a route that at first seemed to be going in a different direction.

We still often act as though God didn’t really mean it. But not this Sunday. This Sunday we will be feeding anyone and everyone who comes to the park across the street. No questions asked. No checking IDs or income. No comments about feeding the children first and then the dogs. No one will be told, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill” until they have been given a plate of food.

Will anyone fed this week show up in church next week? Maybe. If they do, may they be like the Syrophoenician woman. May they open up the church to the world, and the world to the church, so that all may experience the love of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

[Pentecost 15: James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37.]