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Monday, September 11, 2006
A Dog With A Bone
Mark 7:24-30; Psalm 125
Jesus never ceases to surprise us. Here he begins a miracle of kindness with an ethoncentric insult. He called a foreign woman a dog! Thanks to her dogged determination she got exactly what she wanted. And we get another lesson in God's amazing grace.
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The Bible never mentions Jesus laughing out loud, or even smiling silently.
But I'll bet good money he did at least the latter when this woman delivered her punchline.
She's a foreigner to Judaism, but it's Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, who's out of place this time. He and the disciples are up by Tyre, the Phoenician seaport, looking for some R&R. It's this woman's hometown.
Even so, from the Jewish perspective she's an outsider, "unclean," about as good as a dog.
Uh oh. To any dog lover reading this, please don't get me wrong. In fact, my one and only grandson is a silky terrier named Harry. Even so, I'll vote for people over dogs every time.
When the woman finds Jesus, she throws herself down at his feet and begs him to heal her daughter from the power of a demon (an "unclean" spirit). His answer is abrupt.
"It's not right to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." Ouch!
Reeling back a step, she shrugs off that racial right cross, braces herself, and leans back in.
"Fair enough. But no good person would keep a dog from snapping up the scraps that fall off the table."
That's when Jesus must have laughed.
"You're good! And so's your faith. Go on home and hug your daughter. She's all well now."
God doesn't seem to care one bit about who you are or where you're from.
This one story explodes any expectation that race, region, or religion ultimately matters on God's scale of values.
I wish the people behind TV's "Survivor" understood that. Instead, this new season will feature teams organized around ethnicity. The dumbed-down reality show's contests of physical strength and social sculduggery have been bad enough for too many seasons already. Now they're going to exploit bigotry in the name of team solidarity. Imagine the water cooler chatter about that.
On this fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I think this story speaks somehow to our national trauma about that horrible day. The terror that struck our psyches then still reverberates, creating a sort of spiritual camera-shake as we look out on the world. Through the blur, the easy thing is to let differences divide us.
I remember how embarrassed I felt in an airport check-in line a year or so after 9/11/01, watching darker-skinned passengers be pulled out of line for special examination, while I cooled my heels waiting my turn to slip my shoes onto the conveyor belt.
I remember how ashamed I felt when our government defied a world's worth of allies to wage pre-emptive warfare in Iraq with no hard evidence of a justifying cause. Our official words and actions ever since sound more often than not like fear of the "other," rather than reasoned, effectual international policies.
Bombs keep on exploding. Ours and theirs. People keep on dying. Us and them. Words upon words keep on flying. Very few minds really change.
What can today's story possibly say to these things?
At least this...
Neither Jesus nor the desperate woman believed that, in the end, it really matters who you are or where you're from. Then they got close enough to each other to prove it. Tough words gave way to winks, smiles, laughing out loud together, for God's sake. And for their own.
Mutual awareness. Acceptance. Growing understanding. Appreciation. Reconciliation. Peace.
Like the man said, "Go thou and do likewise."
posted by Jack Buckley at
10:30 AM
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