NOTES for Mar 7:24-30

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.