THE GOSPELS OF Mark and Matthew both include the story of a Gentile woman who begs a reluctant Jesus to heal her daughter (Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:21-28).
I thought of these texts last fall while reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an autobiographical work of the acclaimed poet Maya Angelou, who died last year. Born in 1928, Angelou spent most of her childhood with her grandmother in small-town Stamps, Ark. After a few years of eating candy from her grandmother’s grocery store, Maya developed two cavities that, she writes, “were rotten to the gums.” However, the white dentist in Stamps did not take “Negro” patients, and the closest black dentist was 25 miles away.
For several days no aspirin touched the blinding pain, so her grandmother finally took her to the white dentist, determined to beg and plead for help. Her grandmother recounts the dentist’s final rejection in highly colorful language: “Said he’d rather put his hand in a dog’s mouth. … He said, ‘Annie, I done tole you, I ain’t gonna mess around in no niggah’s mouth.’”
We may recoil at such naked racism, but in the segregated Jim Crow South, this sentiment must have been typical. I can imagine white churchgoers reacting to this story by thinking, “The nerve of that woman begging help from a white dentist! She got what she deserved.”
In Mark, we find Jesus also comparing a woman of a different race to a dog. Matthew includes the same story, only here Jesus adds that he has no obligation to this woman because “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (15:24). Most commentators are uncomfortable with Jesus’ response in both places, but it is often softened by an explanation that he was testing this woman to see if she had enough faith. Or perhaps he teased her, with a twinkle in his eye, by calling the dogs “puppies”!
But it won’t do. Calling a person a dog was one of the worst insults one could use in that culture. Dogs were not pets; they were unclean scavengers who competed with vultures for carrion and other garbage. We can understand this remark coming from Jesus’ opponents, but why from him?
This story is unique in that it is the only account we have where Jesus is out-argued in public debate—and by a woman at that! Why was it included in both Mark and Matthew, why at this particular place in their narratives, and why did Luke’s gospel omit it? What can it teach us about Jesus’ humanity? What can we learn about inclusion and gender roles that relate to our ethical behavior today?
Learning from literary structure
Most gospels scholars believe the narratives of Mark and Matthew were shaped to meet the needs of their communities. (The consensus is that Mark wrote first, and that Matthew used Mark as one of his sources.) A major struggle within the early church concerned the inclusion of Gentiles. Can they be part of the Jesus Movement? If so, do they have to observe Torah? This story demonstrates that Jesus himself made the shift toward Gentile inclusion—and learned something in the process.
The reason Luke omits this story is because, as a Gentile writing to Gentiles, he arranges his plot differently. Already in Luke 2:32, Simeon proclaims the infant Jesus “a light to the Gentiles.” Jesus’ genealogy in Luke 3 goes back to Adam, whereas Matthew’s begins with Abraham. Jesus’ inaugural address at Nazareth in Luke 4 includes biblical stories of non-Israelites included in God’s plan. This theme continues throughout. Luke’s omission strengthens the case for why Matthew and Mark include this story.
But what if Jesus began healing Gentiles in Mark and Matthew before he met the woman from Tyre? He mostly travels throughout Jewish Galilee, but sometimes crosses the lake to the other side, where both Jews and Gentiles live. Mark 6:53-56 and Matthew 14:34-36 include a trip to Gennesaret where Jesus’ fame brought “all who were sick to him,” and he apparently healed them all. But no individuals who are healed, such as the demoniac in Mark 5:1-20 or the Roman centurion’s slave in Matthew 8:5-13, are specifically identified as Gentiles.
However, after Jesus makes the shift toward Gentile inclusion in our pivotal story, we find him in Gentile territory to the north and east of Galilee, where he cures a deaf man and then feeds 4,000 people in a desert (Mark 7:31-8:10; Matthew 15:20-39). He is just as popular among Gentiles as he has been in Galilee!
In addition, the passage preceding our story in both Mark and Matthew cleverly prepares readers for the coming encounter with a non-observant, pagan woman. Even references to food link them together! Although Jesus has become wildly popular among the poor and sick of Galilee, he also has run into opposition. Just before he leaves for Tyre, both Mark 7:1-23 and Matthew 15:1-20 recount a purity challenge over food from some Jerusalem Pharisees and scribes. Daniel Boyarin’s book The Jewish Gospels has convinced me that eating kosher (foods allowed by the Torah) is not the issue here. Rather, the more recent oral “tradition of the elders” added purity regulations about washing hands and kitchen utensils before eating kosher foods (Mark 3-4)—something many poor people were unable to obey. Jesus’ rejection of oral traditions ends with a sharp retort that what really makes people dirty is not ritually impure food but evil intentions that come out of the human heart (7:17-23).
So when Jesus leaves Galilee for the region around Tyre to the north, is he fleeing his opponents or looking for some badly needed R&R? Or both? In any case, “he entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there” (Mark 7:24). In Matthew, after ignoring her shouting, Jesus scolds the woman with the same phrase he used earlier when sending his disciples out to preach: “I was sent ‘only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’” (Matthew 10:6, 15:24). In other words, “I can’t help someone like you!”
Within this literary context, we can now see that, rather than testing this Gentile woman,Jesus himself is being put to the test. Surprisingly, his statement supports the oral “tradition of the elders”: “It is not fair to take the children’s [clean] food and throw it to the [unclean] dogs” (Mark 7:27, Matthew 15:26). For those who insist that Jesus was perfect and never sinned, these are jarring words indeed!
Visiting Tyre
Although Mark 3:8 notes that Jesus’ fame had reached the region around Tyre and Sidon, Jesus has never been there until now. These cities were important and wealthy ports along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. In the surrounding region bordering Galilee, various ethnic groups coexisted, though often separated by social class.
Mark identifies this woman as Greek and of Syrophoenician origin (7:26). Phoenicia was part of Syria, which Alexander the Great had conquered in the late fourth century B.C.E., introducing Greek culture. After Alexander died, Seleucus, one of his generals, claimed rule over Syria, Persia, and Asia. This Seleucid dynasty continued spreading Greek religion and culture throughout the region, eventually including Palestine. (This was the cause of the Maccabean war of 167 B.C.E., when law-observant Jews revolted against encroaching Hellenist domination under the Syrian king Antiochus IV.)
Matthew calls this woman a Canaanite (verse 22), perhaps associating her with the original inhabitants of the land that Joshua was supposed to drive out. Either way, both authors identify this woman as thoroughly pagan, an idol-worshiper representing centuries of bad blood between Israel and her neighbors.
The gap between rich and poor
In first-century Palestine, rulers and other upper-class people lived in cities. Because of peasant debt, the upper classes were acquiring more and more land in the surrounding countryside, thus exploiting the perennially poor who were reduced to sharecropping. Some Jews lived in the region around Tyre, often lower-class farmers driven off their land in Galilee. So when Jesus comes here, probably to rest, the house that he enters (Mark 7:24) likely belongs to Jewish peasants like himself.
This background leads me to suspect that this Syrophoenician woman has a higher social status than that of Jesus. Normally she would have ignored him, but gossip travels fast. She hears of Jesus’ reputation and is desperate to get help for her daughter. Thus we overhear an unusual conversation between a male who is superior by gender and a female superior by class.
But Jesus also one-ups this woman because many Israelites understood themselves as better than their traditional enemies, the Syrophoenician Gentiles. In the same way that many white Americans try to pull rank over people of color, so many in Israel understood themselves as preferred by God above other nations and ethnic groups. Nevertheless, this nameless woman has a great need, and only this Jewish rabbi has the power to help her. Like Maya’s grandmother, she will beg and plead for her tormented daughter. She will do whatever it takes.
Gender, honor, and shame
Think over other accounts of Jesus and women in the gospels. Do women ever challenge Jesus in public? It was a role women did not play in that culture. They belonged in the private sphere of life, running their households and raising children. It was even shameful for a woman to speak to an unrelated man in public.
But for men, public verbal sparring was part of maintaining one’s honor in this honor/shame society. Men gained honor by silencing a rival in public argument. Throughout the gospels, men repeatedly challenge Jesus, hoping to humiliate and shame him. They set up traps such as, “Should we pay taxes to the emperor or not?” (Mark 12:13-17). But Jesus always has the perfect retort so that his questioners are “utterly amazed at him” (verse 17).
Thus this Gentile woman’s behavior is shocking. Though no woman should ever enter a house to meet an unrelated man—especially uninvited—in Mark she does exactly that (7:24-25). She bows politely, but immediately begs him to heal her daughter. In Matthew she creates a public scene in front of Jesus and his male disciples. “Send her away!” they say. Unlike the hemorrhaging woman in Mark 5:27, she does not silently sneak up to touch the fringes of his cloak. Even when rejected, she does not give up. She becomes the only person in the gospels, man or woman, who outwits Jesus in a public debate. Playing on his racist image of children and dogs, she turns it on its head much in the way that African Americans in the 1960s transformed the slur “black” into “black is beautiful.” “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs!”
As the loser in this exchange, Jesus does not get defensive. Rather, he concedes! “For saying that, you may go. The demon has left your daughter” (Mark 7:29). Here we have a clever woman who breaks convention and uses her wit to get what she wants. We have a man who does not let his ego get in the way of admitting that he has learned something vital from a woman. Many women should find this Jesus more approachable and admirable than one who never makes a mistake. And what a model he becomes for men—one who is humble and self-confident enough to graciously admit when he is outwitted!
Finally, we Gentiles owe a great debt to this unnamed woman who convinced Jesus that non-Jewish “dogs” can eat at the same table with the “lost sheep of Israel.”
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