Theology ThurSday
by Dave Holzhauer
If you’ve ever picked up a book off of the shelf that you’ve never read before and started reading half way through, you’ve likely felt lost in the story pretty quickly. The same goes for a show that you started in season five. Sure, with intelligence and insight, you can probably figure out a lot of what’s going on, but you know you’re missing a lot. Context matters.
The same is true in Scripture; each author had a purpose in writing, and context is key. Vignettes are often related to what happened before or after them. In the Gospel of Mark, this relationship can often look more like a rope than links of a chain, with ideas continuing on and interacting with other parts of the story.
At the beginning of Mark 7 the Pharisees ask why Jesus’s disciples don’t ritually wash before eating: “And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’” (Mark 7:5). For anyone unfamiliar, the Pharisees were obsessed with ritual cleanliness and purity, even creating a washing ritual to avoid becoming unclean by having touched something unclean. After Jesus publicly declares that it is not external factors that defile a person, the disciples don’t get it, so Jesus reiterates: ‘” …What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery,coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”’ (Mark 7:20-23).
The vignette that follows this exchange is that of the Syrophoenician woman.
“And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.” And he said to her, “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.” (Mark 7:24-30)
While all commentators I’ve been able to find chalk this vignette up to testing of the woman’s faith, this has always seemed incomplete to me. It seems odd to sandwich a quick exchange about faith between the disciples not understanding what defiles a person and the healing of a deaf stammerer. This doesn’t fit with how the Gospel writers structure their books. Any time the disciples are slow to understand something that Jesus is teaching them, a teaching moment example seems to follow.
The Syrophoenician woman would have been seen as doubly defiled: a Gentile and unclean through contact with her demoniac daughter. Remember also that the Gentiles of the ancient Near East would have worshipped an array of pantheons of gods and goddesses, an anathema to any Jew. But aside from proving the virtue of persistence, she is an example to the disciples and to us of what Jesus said in Mark 7:20-23, that pride, envy, slander, etc. are what defile in God’s eyes. And as Jesus has shown before, he’s willing and able to clean up any defilement that you and I ask him to.
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