NOTES for Mar 7:24-37

The story of the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter sometimes strikes the reader by the apparent harshness of the Savior's words addressed to the healed girl's mother. The comparison with a dog, unworthy of attention, really looks at least excessively harsh. Meanwhile, the woman's own reaction to this seeming harshness is quite calm.

Traditional exegesis explains what happens by the woman's deep repentance, her readiness to acknowledge any sin in herself if such acknowledgment will help her daughter. On closer examination, however, the dialogue between Jesus and the woman who turned to Him with a request for her daughter's healing resembles a parable more than anything else, a parable the woman understands and in whose language she answers the Savior. It may also be noted that the image of a dog as a symbol of uncleanness occurs in the Gospel text fairly often. This is not surprising: the Torah really does include the dog, like the pig, among unclean animals, and among all such animals these two were the ones Jesus' interlocutors and listeners most often saw.

Then Jesus' question takes on a definite meaning: does the clean person have the right to the Kingdom, while the unclean person, for example the same Gentile, does not? And the Syrophoenician woman was undoubtedly a Gentile. Can someone who has never known either purity or sanctification share in the Kingdom opened to the children of God, and all who belonged to the people of God were such children? And the woman, understanding the Savior perfectly, speaks of the crumbs that fall from the table. In essence, she accepts both Jesus Himself and the Kingdom He brought into the world. She accepts it while understanding that she herself has no right at all to this Kingdom that has come into the world. But she does not claim much either. She asks only for the smallest thing; the faintest reflection of the Kingdom's light is enough for her, enough for her daughter's healing. And she receives what she asks, receives it as an undeserved gift that she could not have expected in any way.

Thus the question of the people of God and the Gentiles is resolved in relation to the Kingdom. The one who asserts his rights to this Kingdom will have to prove the rights he has asserted; he will have to correspond to what he has claimed. But to the one who claims nothing, understanding that he has no rights to anything, the Kingdom will be given freely, on one condition: his humility must be genuine. It can only be, to use philosophical language, an existential choice for the one asking, and not at all a tribute to politeness, even religious politeness. Thus the Kingdom reconciles all: both those who feel their own strength and those who feel weak and unworthy of what they seek. It reconciles them by the love that both the strong and the weak need equally.

The words Christ spoke to the Syrophoenician woman sound very troubling: "...it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." As if He were supporting xenophobia and superiority over people of another faith as second-class people. But let us put ourselves in this woman's place. Suppose we are asking Christ for some mercy, and He answers us: "I have no time; I am busy distributing deserved mercies to the lawful children of God, and you are a dog; you are not allowed to eat from the master's table." Most of us would be indignant and would answer that "these children of Yours are no better than I am, and as for my being a dog, name-calling is rude." But this woman, with astonishing humility, agrees and says: "You may think of me whatever You consider necessary; I really am a sinner. But could not even crumbs of Your mercy fall to me?"

Crumbs, because from her point of view, the healing of her daughter is such a small thing for the Almighty that it would hardly impoverish the children showered with the Creator's endless mercies. And such humility before Christ does not remain unanswered.

And one more important point: Christ does not refuse to help her, a pagan woman, but in order for this to become possible, she needs to agree that the truth is contained in faith in the one God. The Jews, as monotheists, accept this truth, while pagans do not. After all, if the Syrophoenician woman does not agree that this is truly so, then who is Jesus for her?

Jesus' words, His answer to the request of a pagan woman to free her daughter from the power of dark forces, may seem too harsh, even cruel. Yet there was no cruelty in them. There was only the statement of a simple fact, obvious to everyone then: the world is divided into Jews and pagans, into the people of God and all other peoples. This is a fundamental distinction that could not be ignored.

"Dog" in this case is not an insult, but only a symbol of uncleanness: for a Jew, every pagan was unclean by definition, regardless of what kind of life he led and even regardless of whether he believed in the God of Israel. God cleanses a person. To be clean, one must belong to the people of God, which, as the sages of the Second Temple period taught, is a spiritual unity, a kind of single spiritual body. No one can be clean without belonging to the people of God. Pagans, of course, viewed the matter differently, but the woman mentioned in the Gospel story was turning to a Jew, hoping in the power and mercy of the God of Israel, and therefore her opinions and views were not important in this case.

By comparing pagans with dogs, with unclean animals, Jesus thus dots every i. The people of God really are the people of God; purity really is important; and paganism really is lower than Yahwism, as much lower as any pagan religion, whatever may stand behind it, is lower than the faith of Abraham and Moses. The coming of Christ did not mean the blurring of all boundaries and the erasing of all differences. As such, they remained unchanged. Something else changed: the common order of things, which, while preserving differences and even boundaries where they are appropriate, decisively destroyed every wall and barrier. In the fallen world, the impassability of a boundary often becomes the only guarantee of its reliability.

In the Kingdom it is not so. There are no boundaries and differences there that are impassable and insurmountable. Nevertheless, the differences themselves do not disappear. They only acquire a new quality, ceasing to be hostile to one another. These are the differences Jesus offers the pagan woman to accept, and at the same time to accept her own spiritual and existential quality as a given. Otherwise, without accepting oneself in one's own quality and condition, one cannot enter the Kingdom.

Of course, there could be no question of any rights this woman had to her daughter's healing. But in the Kingdom there is no talk of rights at all. Talk of rights begins only when all relationships have been destroyed and each person who once participated in them is now feverishly trying to preserve the remnants of what he once lived in naturally and freely in its fullness. And the woman accepts the rules of life in the Kingdom. She claims nothing. She only asks Jesus to enter her life and the life of her daughter. Then He enters, for such trust opens to Him doors that, for the one who opens them, become the doors of the Kingdom.

When we read in the Gospel that this woman was Syrophoenician, this does not mean that she was "second class," or of the wrong origin, or had displeased Jesus in some other way. We know that Jesus is always ready to help and heal the poor, the sinful, and the rejected. The point is that she is a real pagan, that is, she believes in pagan gods, worships them, and offers sacrifices to them. This is precisely why the Lord subjects her to such a test of faith: to help her understand for herself why she is turning to Him for help and not to her own gods.

Here a line is drawn, as it were, between a person's pagan ideas and turning to Jesus, that is, prayer. Prayer to Christ (and to the Father in Christ) is incompatible with paganism, and paganism is not necessarily belief in other gods, but also the quite ordinary Christian tendency to place hope not in the one God, but in something else: in money, in one's abilities, in one's party, in "it will work out somehow," and so on.

Paganism is when we live not for God, but for someone else (for example, for ourselves). If, being such pagans, we want to ask Christ for something, to turn to Him in prayer, we will need, together with this Canaanite woman, to go through a complete reappraisal of our faith, to understand why we have turned to Christ and not to our idols...

Today the evangelist for the first time draws our attention to the fact that Jesus heals not only Jews but also representatives of other peoples who lived in the lands surrounding Palestine. In this case the daughter of a woman called "Syrophoenician" is in view. In the New Testament this is what residents of the Phoenician cities, Tyre and Sidon, are called. These cities are located in the territory of present-day central Lebanon. The modern name of Sidon is Saida.

At first glance, Jesus' treatment of the woman who turned to Him for help seems too harsh: today we perceive comparing a person to a dog as humiliation and insult. Yet in those days and in the setting in which the Savior's earthly ministry took place, His phrase sounded somewhat different. In those days there could be no talk at all of universal equality or equal rights for everyone. This also concerned, among other things, the equality of people before God: for a Jew, for example, every pagan was in this respect a second-class person, since he did not belong to the people of God and, as a rule, did not think about God. Even those representatives of pagan peoples who were interested in Judaism and came to synagogues to listen to the reading of Scripture and the sermon, as did happen, were still not considered equal by Jews. Full equality required becoming a Jew all the way: being circumcised, beginning to observe all religious rules, in a word, completely changing one's way of life. Those who did not do this were considered ritually unclean by Jews, the same as unclean animals, among which they included dogs.

By comparing the woman who came to Him with a dog, Jesus evidently means only to tell her that the Kingdom of God, which she wants to touch, and without such a touch no healing is possible, is given first of all to the "children," that is, to the Jews as the people of God, and only afterward to everyone else. When the woman agrees to this order of things, she receives what she asks for just as those who belong to the people of God do. In this way the evangelist points out that the Kingdom of God, which Jesus brought into the world, is open to everyone, whether Jew or pagan.

Jesus forbids the healed man and those who accompanied him to spread the report of the miracle that had taken place, of which they had become witnesses. And this is not the first time He has proclaimed such a prohibition. It looks very much as though Jesus wanted the event of healing, the event of divine intervention in a person's fate, to remain a mystery, a secret between Jesus and the one who had been healed. And all for the simple reason that a miracle can happen only on the personal level; and only on that level, in that inward and hidden dimension, does God reveal Himself to a person. For any miracle, in the end, whether healing, rescue in the midst of mortal danger, or something else, if it is, of course, perceived as a miracle and not as a random coincidence, is a flash of divine light in our life. And such a flash is our personal, intimate glimpse into the depths of life, into the depths of God, the appearance or sharpening of the ability to hear the "harmony of Heaven."

As for outside observers, for them everything "miraculous" is most often perceived as some kind of divine trick, or as the deeds of a good magician providing for the material well-being of his charges. It was precisely from this perception that Jesus wanted to protect everyone who might hear the story of the miracle or see someone they knew healed. After all, in the final analysis, the purpose of every word and action of Jesus, and therefore of God acting through Him, is to open a person's eyes to his real disastrous condition and, what is still more important, to show the path of liberation: liberation from being fixated on one's own problems, from attempts to get rid of them by one's own strength and to be happy at the expense of others and only for oneself... Incidentally, this may be why the witnesses of the healing of the deaf-mute also turn from amazed outside observers into active participants in the miracle. For they meet God in the act of their compassion and active care for their maimed fellow tribesman, whom they "brought to Jesus."

Faith and long-suffering are symbols of Christian steadfastness in trials. When the Lord helps us, when all suffering ends, we often begin telling everyone about what has happened. And at that very moment we often drown out the voice of Christ addressed to us. Christ says to almost everyone He heals, "do not tell anyone." He calls us to silence, to finding peace, to the struggle against the noise produced by the surrounding world.

In fasting we ask that the spirit of humility, patience, and love be sent down to us. To receive these gifts, we need silence. Silence as time for conversation with Christ. And in our prayer, whether we pray according to rules or in our own words, few words are necessary. They are necessary precisely because Christ's work is accomplished in silence and secrecy. In the silence of morning and the slight chill of dawn, His friends and disciples learn that He is not in the tomb. That He is risen.

As the Gospel testifies, crowds of people in need of help followed Jesus, because they valued His ability to heal above all else. The last lines of today's passage point to this: "He has done all things well: He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak." The evangelist records words about the Lord Himself, who is grieved that the crowds follow Him only because of miracles and do not see something more essential.

Having healed the deaf man with a speech impediment, the Savior asks him not to tell anyone about it. Perhaps this is precisely because the miracle, though it played an enormous role in the healed man's life, was not the most important thing. Far more important was what Christ had done in his soul, the way the Good News had touched this man broken by illness. Yet speaking about how the heart has changed is much harder than telling how you stopped being deaf and mute. But it is precisely this kind of witness that the Lord expects from us.

The people who brought the deaf man with a speech impediment to Jesus did not merely ask Him for healing; they also specified how it should take place. They “begged Him to lay His hand on him,” that is, to bless the sick man in the presence of the whole crowd. Jesus, however, takes the deaf-mute man aside to a secluded place where, alone with His disciples, He performs a series of physical actions quite unlike the customary blessing: He puts His fingers into the man's ears and touches his tongue with saliva...

How often in our lives, when asking the Lord for something, we expect Him to act in ways that are clear and obvious to us. But He works His miracles neither according to our plan nor in a way that we necessarily see, just as the friends of the man with the speech impediment did not see the miracle. Yet neither this healing nor God's other works lose any of their power because of that.

The Savior's words that nothing entering the mouth can defile a person are sometimes interpreted to mean that there is nothing in the world that is unclean in itself, and that nothing can harm a person except what comes out of his own heart. Yet Jesus is speaking about why nothing entering the mouth can defile a person: it passes through the person and is thereby cleansed. This statement, strange at first glance, turns out to be quite logical if we keep in mind the second part of the explanation, which speaks about what comes out of the heart. It presupposes that if a person's heart stops spewing into the world everything the Savior lists, then nothing unclean will be able to defile him.

Of course, Jesus speaks about uncleanness not in the sense of sinfulness, but in the sense in which the Torah speaks about it: as a special kind of psychophysiological and spiritual state that hinders communion with God and obstructs sanctification. It is in this sense that certain kinds of food are called unclean, or non-kosher, in the Torah. They are not bad in themselves, but they are not suitable for a person who wants to live a full spiritual life.

Perhaps this was so before the coming into the world of the Messiah, who brought the Kingdom with Him. The Kingdom is where the concepts of cleanness and uncleanness truly become irrelevant, because the fullness of relationship with God there is completely different and cannot be compared with what existed before.

For a resident of the Kingdom, nature remains nature. Until a person's full transfiguration, his physiology remains what it was before. But it no longer has the same influence on a person's spiritual state that it once had. The process of digestion no longer interferes in spiritual life. On one condition: if the heart is pure and no filth comes from it. Just as it should be for a resident of the Kingdom.