To The Dogs
THE FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Isaiah 35:4-7a • Psalm 146 • James 2:1-10 [11-13] 14-17 • Mark 7:24-37
One unforgettable religious tradition from my years in the Hindu kingdom of Nepal was “Kukur Puja,” which means “dog worship.” I’m sorry to say this, but Kukur Puja really outdoes our St. Francis Day pet blessings. For Kukur Puja, people honor dogs as if they’re gods. They bestow colored powders on dogs’ faces, concentrating the powder on the spot between the dogs’ eyes, which connects all living beings to the divine. People shower dogs with flowers, and give them necklaces made out of marigolds.
This reverence isn’t just for pet dogs, but for the many strays wandering the streets of Kathmandu. Most of the time, these dogs are feared and neglected. But one day a year, they strut around like gods.
The woman in today’s gospel probably had a perspective on dogs that was closer to Hindu Nepal than to contemporary America, where dogs are beloved companions year-round. She knew that dogs generally hold a low social position. But, even dogs get scraps and crumbs once in a while. As for human beings who are treated like or compared to dogs: even they are worthy of direct, divine attention.
This woman meets Jesus a little outside his usual stomping grounds. He’s retreated to Tyre after exhausting his powers in Galilee, healing, feeding, and expelling demons among his own people. But just when he tries to hide and recuperate, a non-Jewish woman tracks him down. She falls as his feet and begs him to drive a demon out of her daughter, but Jesus puts her off. He explains, it isn’t right to give food to dogs when the children of the house are still hungry. But the woman points out that even dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall under the table. Surely Jesus can spare something for her and her little daughter.
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I spent many years viewing this encounter between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman as a story about Jesus overcoming his all-too-human bigotry thanks to a clever retort from a desperate mother. But recently, I’ve developed a new perspective on Jesus’s reluctance to give too much of himself away.
A few years ago, I heard a member of the Hoopa Valley tribe in northern California speak about a coming-of-age ceremony for young women, called the Flower Dance. Like many other Native American dances and ceremonies, the Flower Dance had been suppressed and discontinued after white settlement of Native American lands. But her tribe revived it.
The Flower Dance is a multi-day affair celebrating a girl who begins menstruation. The girl—now a young woman—chooses seven women—one for each star of the big dipper—to be guiding lights in her adulthood. These seven women, plus her grandmother and a medicine woman, surround her, read stories to her around a fire, and prepare herbal steams. For several days in a row, the young woman runs to seven sacred bathing spots along a river. She wears a special veil that only lets her see one step ahead—a preparation for the uncertainties of her adult life. The ceremony is serious, but little children run behind her and try to make her laugh. They shout things like, “Come back to your childhood!” On the last night of the Flower Dance, the community dances until 3am.
When I first heard about the Flower Dance, I had an unbidden swell of feeling. I wanted something like that. I wanted it for my daughters. I wanted it for all young people who yearn to feel powerful, sacred, and worthy at a tender point in their lives. I mean, the sacrament of confirmation is great and all, but this Flower Dance sounded amazing.
However, my impulse to grasp at religious traditions that weren’t my own was something that the Flower Dance speaker trained me to keep in check. She explained that the tribe keeps most details of the ceremony and choreography secret. She shared a few photos with us that aren’t available anywhere online or in print. But she made it clear that the Flower Dance belonged to a particular people, who lived along a particular river. It was something we could learn about, but not something we could take.
Another Native American woman, from the Tulalip Nation (“Tuh-lay-lup”), has put this sentiment more bluntly. In response to white people who lead sweat lodge ceremonies and vision quests for paying customers, she says this: “First they came to take our land and water. Then they wanted our mineral resources. Now they want to take our religion as well” (Janet McCloud).
I wonder if Jesus, living in Roman-occupied territory, and encountering a woman whose Greek culture had so transformed Judaism linguistically and philosophically, shared sentiments like these. Perhaps he wondered: What might happen to his people if he gave himself away? Would his words and deeds even make sense torn from Jewish culture or uprooted from Galilean soil? Why should he give away a kingdom that his own people needed most?
When Jesus encountered the Syrophoenician woman, I wonder if he sensed in his human gut or his divine omniscience what would become of the words and deeds that he gave away so freely. In fact, within a generation of his own death, the spread of the Jesus movement beyond Judaism changed Christianity from a religion based on fulfilling Jesus’s teachings to a religion based on holding beliefs about Jesus Christ. Early Gentile Christians depicted Jews as dull and blind to their own Scriptures, and as violent enemies of Christ. The faith that bears the name of Christ turned destructive toward the very tradition and people to whom Jesus himself belonged.
Perhaps it was a potent mix of exhaustion and foreboding that made Jesus resist the Syrophoenician woman’s request. Even though he heals her daughter, I don’t think Jesus is all that transformed by this encounter. According to our translation today, Jesus tells the woman, “You may go.” But in Greek, this phrase is really a one-word command (ὕπαγε), more like “go away” [cf. Sarah Rudin]. It’s identical to the word translated elsewhere as “Get behind me”—as in, “Get behind me, Satan” (Mk 8:33). And it’s the same word used in our reading from the letter of James for the dismissive “Go,” said by someone who sends the poor away with warm wishes, but without meeting their bodily needs (James 2:16). This word doesn’t exactly suggest a moment of transformative reconciliation between this woman and Jesus.
After this encounter, Jesus first heads deeper into Gentile territory but then circles back to Galilee, and eventually makes his way to Jerusalem. In the second half of today’s gospel, Jesus heals a man with a word in his native language, Aramaic, which Mark the evangelist had to translate into Greek. People who see the miracle respond with words that echo the prophet Isaiah about the Lord making the deaf hear and loosening the tongues of those who struggle to speak. I wonder if these words made Jesus feel suddenly at home—known, and among the people he was born to serve.
Our reading from the letter of James gives us a glimpse of a Christianity more deeply rooted in Judaism than the forms of Christianity that dominated in later years. This passage is the only place in the New Testament that uses the Greek word for “synagogue” to describe a Christian gathering. (Our translation uses the word “assembly.”) For James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, an assembly of God’s people was an assembly of God’s people; you didn’t need separate words for distinctly Jewish gatherings or for gatherings of Jesus-inspired Jews. For James’s Christian community, belonging to God’s people through our Lord Jesus Christ meant remembering God’s long history of choosing the poor to be heirs of the kingdom. It meant fulfilling the Levitical law to love our neighbors as ourselves. It meant that faith and works were inseparable. For James, Christianity was a form of Judaism—not an alternative. This is what Christianity might have been like if the apostle Paul wasn’t such a prolific letter-writer, or if the Roman Empire hadn’t come down on Jerusalem with an iron fist.
For someone like me—a non-Jewish Christian, and a non-indigenous American—Jesus’s hesitance before the Syrophoenician woman is a reminder to think through the consequences of ripping Jesus out of his Jewish context. It’s a reminder to learn from the generosity of those who share glimpses of their own traditions, but to accept that some religious practices are tied too deeply to cultures and landscapes to be grasped for ourselves. It’s a reminder that not every cross-cultural or interreligious encounter needs to end with an embrace. But if we walk away more focused, more grounded, and more convinced of the dignity of all creatures, then the ground where we met will have been holy.
© 2021 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas