Moral Conversations

AM Psalm 69:1-23(24-30)31-38 • PM Psalm 73
2 Samuel 5:1-12 • Acts 17:1-15 • Mark 7:24-37

Say you are shopping at the mall, and coming toward you is a renowned physician, a local medical superstar, walking along with several interns and residents. A woman beside you recognizes him. Her eyes widen. She veers away, walks quickly over to him. She tells him that she has a daughter who is deathly ill. Could he possibly find a moment to take a look and maybe help her daughter toward health? The doctor stops, rolls his eyes and barks at her. Are you my patient? No, you’re not. So stop wasting my time. Beat it. And by the way, you’re a dog. So is your daughter.

She’s not a dog, you would probably say (I know I would), but that doctor: he’s a pig.

But that was Jesus. Jesus was no pig. He was the man we look to as our ultimate model of compassion and giving of self. And yet in today’s gospel he commits an act of breathtaking cruelty toward someone who, as any parent can tell you, is in a place of depthless despair. I’m getting to be a pretty old guy, but, looking back, I cannot recall personally witnessing anything approaching such cold, uncaring-ness. What, for heaven’s sake, do we make of this?

We know of course where the story goes. The woman does not kick Jesus in the shin but answers: Even your dogs get crumbs from your table, O All-So-Mighty Healer. Can you spare a few for my daughter? Jesus does more than relent. He commends the woman to all around him as a paragon of faith—one, he implies, we should emulate.

As we read the story, we are naturally drawn to the woman, her awful situation and her brilliant reply, but the focus ought to be on Jesus. What was he thinking? Well, he was born fully divine, right? (“God from God...true God from true God.”) So he must have been infinitely compassionate from the moment the woman approached. He must have barked out that insult because, omniscient, he knew how it would all turn out and how it would give him a chance to make his point. As we in the education dodge would put it, this was a “teachable moment.”

Or maybe not. Jesus was also fully human, right? And as humans live, they learn, or at least they should. In Jesus’s back-and-forth with the despairing mother, was he teaching, or was he being taught?

Suzanne tells me that the fifty-dollar term for that possibility is “process theology.” The idea here is that God is in dynamic relationship with us. Jesus was God among us. He was always acting out God’s way, in this case as a human who was evolving and learning as he moved through his thirty-three or so years here. In today’s reading, when that woman stops Jesus to ask help for her daughter, his innate, infinitely compassionate God-ness meets his innate human narrowness of prejudice. As the two meet, he learns. I get it, he says: There are no bounds to the circle of those we are called to care for. And he asks us to learn with him.

Such a way of reading the story, I know, is full of contradictions, but with scripture, what else is new? Personally I love the idea of God-in-man in constant conversation with man-in-God. I wonder about the expression on Jesus’s face as he hears the woman’s reply about crumbs from the table. Was his face calm, with a slight knowing smile? Or was there a shock of recognition? Did he blush?

Written by Elliott West

Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for thirty years.