| Lectionary - Proper 18 | | Date Created: Sep 04, 2006, 01:43 PM |
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The Gospel reading for this coming Sunday is Mark 7:24-37.
The first half of the gospel reading is one of my favourite bits of all the gospels. At least it is if I'm right about it. I think Jesus is testing/probing/doing his provocative question-asking thing when he says to the Syro-Phoenician woman: "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs." I think he's trying to get her to come back at him the way that she does: "Even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." He certainly commends her after it and does what she asks. The Matthew 15 version even goes so far as to say "Woman, you have great faith!"
My pal Antony thinks I'm reading too much into the text and ridicules me about putting a twinkle in Jesus' eye when he says harsh things. I maintain that this is a warranted interpretation. I could convince him, I'm sure, if only this story was in Luke's Gospel. There, Jesus' Nazareth sermon includes his comparing his ministry with that of Elijah who did not heal the sick in Israel but instead healed the offspring of a Syro-Phoenician widow in his own day. Could Jesus have said such a thing about his ministry only to travel to that part of the world and then intend to refuse to help such a person? I don't think so. But because they're in different gospels, historically, there's room to question the order of events etc and narrativally (narratively? narrative-critically?), it's suspect to use events from one version of the story to amplify or reinterpret events in another; it's suspicious that none of the gospel writers themselves link that teaching with that event.
If I'm wrong and Antony's right, what could Jesus possibly be saying? Mark may provide a clue with verse 27. Unlike the Matthean version, Mark introduces a time element. "First let the children eat all they want..." The implication is that it fits in with what we know of Christianity from Acts and the Epistles. The earliest guys, even The Apostle to the Gentiles, regarded it as "for the Jew first and then the Gentile."
If this was the point of Mark's story, though, it looks as though Matthew missed it. |
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