Little Crumbs to Abundant Love

Rev. Debra McKnight's Reflection

June 28, 2020

This is an awkward text. A woman approaches Jesus, her child is sick; she asks him for help and he calls her a dog.  She has come to find him, sought him out, broken all the gender norms and approached him at the table. Begged him for help, called him Lord, and he called her a Dog.  

We might say, well he was tired, he was trying to go unnoticed. Maybe he needed a break? Maybe? We are pretty familiar with ‘the perfect’ Jesus who says let the little children come to me, the Jesus that heals people, feeds people and welcomes the outcast. The Jesus that eats with the tax collectors and prostitutes, the Jesus that touches the unclean and sends lepers home well.  Honestly, this cold foulmouthed Jesus, who insults a woman in her hour of need, just doesn't go with our perfect image of Jesus. When we ask the question “what would Jesus do?”, we never think, oh, he would call you a dog or that he would use a pejorative slur. That’s right calling her a dog is more than just being a jerk, it's a religious-ethnic slur.  

It’s a familiar pejorative for Jesus. It relates, in part, to the woman’s religious community. Ancient people thought the Cynics were aggressive, and loud, and even shameless in their opposition to social norms, they were dogs (Mary Ann Tolbert, Mark, Women’s Bible Commentary).  She is a part of a non-Jewish upper class, her daughter’s sick bed is not a peasant’s pallet (krabbatos): they are free-citizens of Tyre. Her people eat well. They fill their bellies with the grains grown in Galilee, while Jewish peasants working in the fields hunger (Rhoads, 370.). It is in this setting that a Gentile woman asks a Jewish man for help and Jesus in all of his humanity and divinity, responds saying “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the little dogs.” And given the context of pain, that might seem a reasonable response. It just doesn’t seem very much like Jesus. 

And to make it worse, Jesus calls her a doglet, a little dog.  He takes the pejorative from the culture and adds a diminutive. He had to add ‘little.' It’s like the -line of Frauline or the ita/ito in Spanish or the little before Debbie, not that I would know personally.  All of which can be used out of affection by a parent but also as a way of making people feel small or insignificant; little can put people in their place. 

He calls her a doglet and I have to wonder if the slur even shocked her, because without missing a beat she responds, “Sir, even the dogs eat the little crumbs from the master’s table.” With quick wit she turns his metaphor on its head. She strikes like lightning, brilliant and quick. She’s not begging anymore, she doesn’t appeal to pity or fairness, she is makes a theological statement (Matthew L. Skinner, “She departed to her house”: Another Dimension of the Syrophoenician Mother’s Faith in Mark 7:24-30”, Word and World, Vol 26, Number 1, Winter 2006, (pgs 14-22) p17).  She says God is bigger than your vision and somehow he listens. Somehow he lets the walls down and changes. Who is he to ration God’s gifts. Who is he to set a boundary at God’s table and turn someone away. He grows in his ministry. His faith in the abundance of God means no more crumbs for anyone at God’s table.  She challenges him and it goes directly to his values, does he really believe in God’s abundance and offer crumbs or worse refuse them? 

She has the best line of the whole story. This book is about Jesus, he’s supposed to have the good lines, deliver the witty prophetic response, share the hard truth in profoundly simple earth shaking metaphors and she schools him. She is the only person to push back on Jesus and change him. The Religious leaders push back, the political leaders push back, and sometimes even the disciples push back. None of them change Jesus. He will answer their questions with questions, he will quote the scripture, he will give them another parable, he will get the whole town so upset they want to stone him and sometimes he will turn over the tables and send the money changers out to prove his point. What is it about this woman and her challenge that makes him change, he lowers his defenses and hears this woman’s critique.  He doesn’t try to prove why he is right or why she is wrong…like most of us would…I’ve heard. He receives this challenge and is better for it. 

It’s hard for us to imagine Jesus learning, it's hard to imagine him needing to. We like to claim the prepackaged perfect Jesus, the one who says the right thing.  I wonder if we shy away from this earthy, real man because this Jesus holds us more accountable than the perfect one. Perfect Jesus just might take care of everything for us, but this human Jesus growing asks us to do the same. If Jesus has to grow, we have to grow, as well. If Jesus has to rethink his assumptions and his language, we do, too. Growing is painful and challenging, often it’s just too much work. We are in a collective space of growth, a moment in history that requires us to grow into the values we think we possess, and I just am not sure how we will come out of it. 

I have been struggling with how Jesus changed. He changed his mind and his heart in almost a moment and then changed the course of his ministry. Suddenly he wasn’t just focused on the children of Israel, suddenly his ministry was to the whole of humanity. I have been thinking about how we open and how we close, how we change and if we can change. And as I watch folks post things on social media, I often think, we need a class for this. We could fix this crisis with some better Social Studies curriculum or a program or a book. I have a bias. I was a Social Studies teacher before seminary and learning was what changed and challenged and broke my heart over and over. I keep thinking if folks understood the 1930’s in light of the 1920’s we could chart a better economic course. If folks understood the impact of Woodrow Willson showing Birth of A Nation from our highest office leads to blood and violence we could understand the impact of the President today. If folks understood that even the most progressive legislation that raised folks out of poverty furthered White Supremacy. If we just had better social studies classes that didn’t just go from the Revolutionary war to the Civil War to World War Two or focused on critical thinking and research skills rather than memorizing dates. When I was preparing to teach, there were some states that teachers couldn’t even say civil war, they had to say the war between the states, and you can imagine where those states are located. We have so much work to do on really understanding the violence of our past and the choices folks have made at each step. History is heartbreaking and most of our textbooks don’t share the heartbreak or even make it interesting. I keep thinking, we have a thinking problem and that we could really solve a lot of our struggles with “A Moment of Zinn” and I mean Howard Zinn. 

I keep thinking this is a thinking moment. But, I am not sure thinking is really going to save us. We are in a place where one debunked paper can upend previously solid vaccination practices. We are in a time when one outlying story or voice can challenge statistics or science that show a vast impact. We are in a place where conspiracy theories and fake news get around fast. We are in a place where masks are political. We can’t apply the same line of thought to different concerns. Often the same folks who name they are “pro-life’ are not shouting for children separated from their parents at our southern border, they are not marching against the death penalty, demanding more funding for education and less incarceration, access to healthcare, the end of police brutality or military conflict and more. We can’t have a nuanced conversation about life and what is life giving, we can’t even have a conversation about black lives being taken without folks reacting as though reform and accountability are anti-police or that somehow this is in conflict with all lives mattering.

I keep thinking this is about thinking, but I wonder if it is more about feeling. We don’t have to be Doris Kerns Goodwin to know that something is amiss when Lincoln is pictured in a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.  There is something visceral in the conversations of the moment that I don’t think a program or a history course can impact. Perhaps life was better before social media or cable news, but it's a place where we see folks grappling and debating without the real presence of one another. It is a minefield and it is heartbreaking to see people you love post things that feel so hurtful. Everything is a struggle. I see people posting sarcastic comments about how can people be so offended by a syrup bottle or a rice box, but they are clearly offended by this change, or frankly, they wouldn’t be mocking it. Minimizing its importance or questioning this action. This is clearly more than a rebrand, somehow that syrup bottle changing matters even to them and perhaps they don’t quite want to think about it.

Resmaa Menakem, a therapist with a deep focus around trauma and the body, speaks of how our bodies inherit the trauma from those generations before us, all of us, those in white bodies and those in bodies of culture, as he says. He notes how challenges or moments of interaction might make us uncomfortable, perhaps even enraged, how we inherited generations of violence and sacristy and desire for safety. His work asks folks to sit with their being, to notice their feelings, their rage, their worry, their fear after interactions. Perhaps some moments don’t get past our protective lizard brain to our thinking brain. He works with people and asks them to do their own work. To breathe deeply and reflect after interactions or in the midst of rage. What does it mean to feel anger about the phrase Black Lives Matter? What is happening when you feel angry or hurt or afraid perhaps it's not even an interaction with a person, but rebranding a syrup bottle that is causing some kind of gut response. 

Menakem speaks about elders, not just folks who grow old, but folks who are comfortable in their being. People who have done this deep work of reflecting on their presence in hard spaces and they carry wisdom that not only attract us to listen, but models this work of self reflection and practice that gives us pause before we act or re-act. I wonder if this is why Jesus can change. He has done the work of praying, centering, listening to God’s nudges and reading the stories of those who have gone before. He has sat with all kinds of folks and is practicing his commitment to life that is abundant for all people. So, when this woman challenged him, he didn’t wall up or send her a meme to put her in her place or say something smart or rude or angry. He changed. Her challenge made him look at the values he thought he believed and he practiced living and then he saw how he missed the mark. He changed his ministry, his door opened wide and the table invited more people to feast. He changed his ministry. Her critique landed and he grew ever more surely himself. 

The values of our country are exposed. We have work to do if we intend to live into the values of our founding. This work is hard, it requires us to dig in deeply and reflect on who we are if we are going to be who we are called to be. May we have the courage to hear the challenge that will make us grow, may we have the courage to get comfortable in our skin and to grow into the people God created us to be. May it be so, Amen.