Have you ever had a moment when, a certain someone seems to be able to see right through you? And then you know that you can never undo that moment. My wife is good with that. Just a look and she knows.
As in every church since the days when Joseph played wide-receiver for Israel, pastors early in their career get asked to take over the youth ministry. While pasturing the Libertyville Church we held a College Career age group in our parsonage. Greta usually brought snacks and one Thursday night we were introduced to a can of Pringles, sour cream and onion. Pringles were very addictive. All packaged so none would break. So that night we voted them up by making them disappear.
Seeing this, I wanted to save some; so I hid one can, behind my back, against the sofa. That’s when that look came. “He said are you keeping all those for yourself?” So the lid came off, as they quickly inhaled that package, along with most of the other food in the house.
It’s like this moment we meet in Mark’s gospel. The healing of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter is a key moment in Mark’s gospel. It sums up the sequence of miracles that’s gone before.
We’ve had stories of an unclean spirit, of a closed door, of a woman drawing improperly close to Jesus, of a parent distressed over a daughter. It’s as if all the previous miracles are coming to a head here with this woman and her demon-possessed child.
Why is that important? Well, this story is also equidistant between the two decisive miracles in Mark’s gospel – the feeding of the ,5000 in Chapter 6 and the feeding of the 4,000 in Chapter 8.
Let’s look at those two stories for a moment. The feeding the 5,000 took place in Jewish territory and resulted in twelve baskets left over. These numbers five and 12 are significant. Five is shorthand for Israel because of the five books of the Law that begin the Bible. Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel.
Also the other feeding story with the four thousand took place in Gentile territory and resulted in seven baskets left over.
Again the numbers four and seven are significant. Four refers to the four corners of the earth and seven refers to the seven days of creation. What links all these together is the word satisfied.
This woman is a Gentile. She is a global person, part of the group who’d settled to the north of Israel in the land broadly known as Syria. Listen to what Jesus says to this global woman: “Let the children be fed first” – or, more literally, “Let the children be satisfied first.” Why is the word “satisfied” so important? Because it’s precisely the same word that appears in the feeding of the 5,000 where it says “and all ate and were satisfied,” and again in the feeding of the 4,000 where it says, almost identically, “they ate and were satisfied.”
So what’s happening in this intense dialogue between Jesus and this woman is an enactment of the transformation from Jesus as the messiah for the Jewish people to Jesus as someone for the whole world. The debate between Jesus and the woman begins with healing – but Jesus quickly turns it into a debate about food. Jesus crystallizes the whole question about the extent of his mission into a drama about food. Jesus comes first to the Jews: they are hungry, and then they are satisfied. Jesus has an argument with a Gentile woman: he says let the Jews be satisfied first – then we’ll worry about the Gentiles.
Is this a teaching technique? Because this is not the Jesus we meet elsewhere. I wonder if he was giving voice to the crowd’s myopic view. Allowing the crowd to hear back their views in hopes they may self correct.
She says you’ve got more than you need for the Jews – you’ve got enough to feed the whole world with the leftovers, the crumbs. And I’m hungry! Hungry for the food that only you can give! Then Jesus comes to the Gentiles: they’re hungry, and then they’re satisfied too. The first feeding tells us after Jesus has fed the Jews there’s plenty left over for the Gentiles. The second feeding tells us after satisfying the Gentiles there’s still plenty left over.
There may be plenty left over, but that’s not what it feels like. Remember we start with Jesus getting away going up to Tyre. Which is way up in Yankee territory, up where it’s all Gentiles. It says, “He didn’t want anyone to know he was there.” So no one should bother him, right?
Wrong. Here’s this woman, breaking every cleanliness code in the book, bursting in through the closed doors and spending time alone with a male stranger. She’s breaking national boundaries, as a Phoenician; she’s breaking religious boundaries, as a Gentile; she’s breaking gender boundaries, as a woman; she’s breaking propriety boundaries, as a person who won’t respect Jesus who needs space. And the degree of transgression she’s asking from Jesus matches her own.
He’s already crossed a territorial line by being in lands north of Israel. She’s asking him to take on the boundary of the demonic by healing her daughter. And she raises the whole issue of food laws – the most common stalling-point in Jewish-Gentile relations – by her talk of giving food to the dogs.
Earlier we know that Jesus broke through these dietary laws by declaring all foods clean. Now he makes an even more radical step by declaring all eaters of food are clean. That means salvation can apply to the Gentiles, they too can become members of the inrushing kingdom, they too can eat and be satisfied at the Lord’s Table. This is codified a few verses later, when the four thousand are fed. There is so much God, so much grace, so much kingdom, so much forgiveness, so much eternal life, all metaphored by the astonishing abundance of the two feedings and the many baskets left over.
But while the gospel is one of overflowing glory, here we get the other side of the story too, the sense of drowning in overwhelming anxiety. The woman in this story represents the simple truth that the gospel means overwhelming grace. Jesus’ reaction reflects back to the Israelites that their real fear is that overwhelming grace means overwhelming anxiety.
Here’s the challenge. Here is a woman with her persistent demand that Jesus take the logic of the gospel to its conclusion. She may be high maintenance, she may be a disciple with more elbow activity than we’d think polite or well-mannered or respectful. But she’s obviously right. And here on the other hand is Jesus, modeling for the crowd the ancient loyalties of Israel, to be set apart and so reflect the holiness of God, understood in the Jewish law.
I was so small minded, to think I could keep the lid on the Pringle Chips as something that was just for my family.
Sometimes we are in this story whenever we think that the gospel is too much. Too many people to love and two many social issues to respond to.
Let’s instead identify with the woman? – Knocking, nudging, demanding, teasing, and even flirting our way to Jesus’ attention, and then into the kingdom. That’s the question this story puts to us; because everything in us is trying so hard to avoid seeing ourselves as beggars.
But it’s up to us how we hear it. If we assume salvation belongs to us, our gospel is going to be one of entitlement and responsibility, where Jesus seems to be dashing off some kind of unfulfillable public policy memo. But if we allow ourselves to be like this needy woman, our gospel is one of astonished grace, that God has bent his ear even to us and showered upon us healing and forgiveness and eternal life.
Both of these gospels describe degrees of overwhelming – but only one of them is one of joy. Look at the way today’s passage starts and finishes. It starts with Jesus doing a Greta Garbo and saying “I vaunt to bee allown.” But his day off is shattered by this woman whose thorough understanding of the gospel makes her impatient and dangerous. The passage ends with Jesus’ ironic gesture of releasing a man’s tongue and then telling him to say nothing to anyone about it.
Mark tells us, “The more he ordered them to keep quiet, the noisier they proclaimed it.” The lesson is clear - the gospel is not a cylinder of Pringles. You can’t keep a lid on it. Whoever you are – Jew, Gentile, synagogue leader or mother of a demon-possessed child; rich or poor; black, white or in between; gay, straight or both - whoever you are the gospel is going to overwhelm you.
What was going on with me and the Pringles years ago was not just me being greedy and hoarding the chips. What was happening was that I was realizing, like many young pastors before me and since, that ministry was starting to take over my life. That these young people with their needs and discoveries and questions and tender faith were beginning to disturb my deep-rooted introversion and my newly-minted financial independence.
Ministry was beginning to overwhelm me. So I literally and metaphorically put the top back on the Pringles.
What a fool. You can’t put a lid on the gospel. The moment you try to do so you look as mean and ridiculous as I did. It just can’t be done. It may be that right now you’re feeling overwhelmed. It may be that you’ve come here this morning precisely for a bit of peace and quiet – because your domestic or professional life is overwhelmed. Maybe you feel overwhelmed with the pressures of trying to be generous and kind without becoming totally exhausted and humiliated and bankrupt. Well, I’ve got news.
Maybe you’re reading this story from the wrong point of view. The gospel is all about being overwhelmed, but not by responsibility and anxiety and strategic administrative policies and domestic chores. The gospel is all about being overwhelmed by the discovery that there’s room in the kingdom even for one like you. That’s what this woman discovered.
If church or Christianity has become for you just one burden among others dragging you down into bewildered exhaustion, maybe it’s time you started reading the story from her point of view. You can’t put a lid on it. You can’t keep it under control. The gospel is all about being overwhelmed. But are you being overwhelmed by burdens – or by grace?