"Only Believe" - Jesus, the Little Girl and the Woman with the Issue of Blood

This double story appears in three of the four gospels.  Matthew's version (Matt. 9:18-26) is an abbreviated version.  Luke's version (Luke 8:40-56) and Mark's (Mark 5:21-43) are similar, but I will print Mark's here as it shows the most detail:

When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” So Jesus went with him.
A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher anymore?”
Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.”
He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them,“Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him.
After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Two females, one the privileged daughter of a prominent synagogue leader, the other an impoverished and ill woman who had spent all her money on doctors and whose impurity made her an outcast among her people.  The privileged girl takes no active part in the story; she is ill, and later she dies. When Jesus touches and speaks to her, she rises and is given back to her parents.  In keeping with the propriety of the day, the man to whom the girl belongs-- in this case, her father-- acts for her in public places.  Thus it is not just the girl who is juxtaposed to the hemorrhaging woman, but the girl's respected and influential father.

The woman, however, has no man to act for her.  She has been ritually unclean for so long that it is likely her husband divorced her long ago (see Lev. 18:19).  Where Jairus is at the center of the religious community, this woman has long been outcast from it. Jairus boldly and publicly calls on Jesus for aid on his daughter's behalf.  The woman must take action for herself, but she dares not do it openly. As I have shown earlier in this "Jesus and Women" series, respectable women did not cry out after rabbis on public streets.  Furthermore, unclean women were not supposed to push through crowds of people, as this article on Jewish Laws on Women's Purity in Jesus' Day explains:

According to the Bible, a woman is impure for seven days from the beginning of her menstrual flow (Lev. 12:2; 15:19). Anyone who touches a menstruous woman becomes unclean until evening (Lev. 15:19). Whoever touches her bed or anything she sits on during the week is unclean until evening and must wash his clothes and bathe with water (vss. 20-23). . .

Josephus states that women during the menstrual period were not permitted in any of the courts of the Temple (Against Apion 2:103-104; War 5:227). The social separation of women during their menses is further emphasized in the Talmud.

WomenintheBible.Net provides more detail:

Strictly speaking, she should not have been among other people. According to the laws of ritual purity, she should have been at home during her menstrual period, living quietly (see Leviticus 15:19-31). These laws worked very well for healthy women who had a menstrual period of five – seven days. It was a time out for them, when they were relieved of their normal duties and could rest.

But the woman in this story was not healthy. Her menstrual flow had lasted twelve years, so the purity laws had become an impossible burden for her. She could not go out, she could not touch members of her family, she could not enjoy a normal life, and she was constantly debilitated.

Jairus' daughter has been alive for roughly the same amount of time as the woman has been suffering: twelve years.  Twelve is a number representing completeness in the Bible; it is when a child comes of age, and here it brings a crisis and a turning point for both the young girl and the older woman. Though the two do not meet, their lives are intertwined by these events and by the way their narratives are told as an intercalcation.

This Biblewise article explains "intercalcation" as "a literary technique used by the gospel writers to enhance both stories, providing larger insights and lessons. The 'story within a story' is called an intercalation or a 'sandwiched' story."  The article's detailed comparisons are worth noting:

It becomes clear when they are told together that they belong together. There are too many verbal links to suggest otherwise. The daughter was twelve years old and on the brink of her womanhood. The woman had been hemorrhaging for twelve years and had become unclean and cast off because of her womanhood. The disparity in status and stature of the main characters cannot be overlooked. They are exact opposites. One was important and influential, a ruler in the synagogue; the other was an outcast with no standing in the community. Jairus was named; the woman was not. He had a family, a place in society; the woman had “lost all that she had.” (She’s probably homeless.) But there are some similarities, too. They both humbled themselves by falling at Jesus’ feet. They both had a great need. Jairus asked that Jesus come and lay his hands on his daughter; the woman wanted but to touch his clothes. They both believed that Jesus was the one to help them, but they came from opposite ends of the social spectrum. . . . 

Mark's version is significant not least because it gives us a very unusual glimpse into the inner life of this woman.  She thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed" -- and then she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.  In every way the reader is encouraged to see this woman, this silent social outcast, as a feeling, thinking human being.  Desperate for healing but mindful of the social mores, she intends to slip in and out of Jesus' life unnoticed by anyone.  In the process she becomes the only person who obtains healing outside of Christ's voluntary will.  The agency in her story is not His, but hers.

But when He feels power go out of Him, Jesus is determined to see and hear the invisible, voiceless recipient.  At this point the woman seems to become afraid that she has been too bold, but she is also brave.  She doesn't slip away in the crowd, but comes to Him and confesses.  "Daughter," He tells her (did she find it odd to be called so by a man who was at least her own age, if not younger than she?) "your faith has healed you."  The respect He gives her is as plain as His compassion.

During this exchange, the powerful and influential synagogue leader has had to stand and wait.  And while he waits, time runs out for his little girl.  He must have felt a kind of despairing impatience, waiting for Jesus to be finished with this interruption, but the texts do not record him as protesting.  If he thought his problem was more important than that of this lowly woman (who, though suffering, was not at the brink of death as his child was!) he doesn't say so.  I sincerely think I could not have been so patient in his place.

And it seems he's going to lose out because of it.  A messenger approaches to say it's too late.  His daughter has already died.

Jesus now allows Jairus' problem to interrupt his final interchange with the healed woman.  He is still speaking to her when the messenger comes, but He stops to hear what the messenger will say.  Then, with the same compassion He showed the woman, He tells the bereaved father not to be afraid, but only to believe.  And then He raises his daughter from the dead.

The Biblewise article interprets it like this:

In putting the stories together, Mark shows that there is no limit to the good that God can do. One is not healed at the expense of another. Those choices do not have to be made -- either/or, one wins/the other loses. Jesus demonstrated that God is present and caring for everyone – rich or poor. One is not more important than the other.

Most of us tend to err on one side or the other-- we give more weight to the concerns of the privileged and powerful, or we tend to despise them for their privilege while we focus on the marginalized.  But a sick child is a sick child, a bereaved father is a bereaved father, and a suffering woman is a suffering woman-- alike in their humanity no matter who they are. Jesus saw and cared about all three.

Now that she has died, Jairus' daughter is also unclean, and anyone who touched her would become unclean (Numbers 19:11), just as anyone who touched the hemorrhaging woman would become unclean.  Paula Fredricksen's article on Boston University's religion page shows that in general, Jesus as a practicing Jew would have followed the purity laws, and that the purity laws were about ritual cleanness for the worship of God; they were different from the moral laws about sin.  Being or becoming ritually unclean was not about sin, and of course people naturally incurred ritual uncleanness (through marital sex, childbirth, funerals and the like) in the course of their lives.  But uncleanness was something you'd generally incur through contact with family members and close friends; you didn't want to have to go to the time and trouble of undergoing a cleansing ritual for a stranger.

Jesus, however, touched unclean strangers frequently, in order to heal them.  And as David deSilva points out in his book Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity (pp. 284-285), something astonishing happened when Jesus touched an unclean person: rather than their uncleanness being transferred to Him, the person was healed by Him, thus becoming free of the source of the uncleanness:

The leper is perpetually unclean, but Jesus nevertheless touches him and makes him clean. . . The Gospels thus present Jesus encountering a stream of ritually impure and potentially polluting people, but in the encounter their contagion does not defile Jesus; rather his holiness purges their pollution, renders them clean and integrates them again into the mainstream of Jewish society where they can reclaim their birthright, as it were, among the people of God. 

The hemorrhaging woman and the dead daughter of Jairus thus both encounter Christ from the same place, regardless of the disparity in their social positions.  Both are unclean and thus outside of society.  Jesus' touching the girl and being touched by the woman restores both to the community. The purity laws, Jesus seems to be implying, should not be used as a justification for creating outcasts.

David deSilva elaborates:

Jesus' healings of the diseased and encounters with 'sinners' are immersed in issues of purity rules and pollution taboos in which we see Jesus consistently showing a willingness to cross the lines in order to bring the unclean ones back to a state of cleanness and integration into the community. . . [W]hen Pharisees, who seek to preserve purity through defensive strategies (abstaining from contact with the unclean or potentially unclean), challenge his eating with sinners and thus inviting pollution, he quotes Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice". . . The holiness God seeks, according to Jesus' understanding, entails reaching out in love and compassion. . . .

Mercy trumps sacrifice because (as I mentioned a few posts ago) people are more important than things.  The Christian faith as Jesus taught it was about inclusion not exclusion, not about keeping "pure" through ostracizing others, but about reaching out to others in love.  As Fred Clark at Slacktivist pointed out this week, if the end result was that we as Gentiles could be included in the people of God, who are we Gentiles to turn around and exclude one another? 

Jesus showed us the way through this story of a sick child, a desperate father and an I've-got-nothing-left-to-lose woman.  He didn't treat people as better-than or less-than.  He treated them all as people.  He didn't do us-vs.-them.  He only did "us."  And no one escaped His notice-- not even a woman who tried her best to do so. 

Christianity should be about going and doing likewise. 

Why I'm a Jesus Feminist

Jesus Feminist is the title of a new book by Christian writer, blogger and editor Sarah Bessey.  She is holding a synchroblog this week for people who, despite or perhaps because of their fears about using this potentially controversial name, still want to say "I'm a Jesus Feminist."

I'm a Jesus Feminist.

Because this quote from Sarah Bessey's book is nothing more nor less than what I have been saying on this blog for the last two years. (I'm sure her book says a lot more, though, and I really want to read it!)

Because neither Jesus nor feminism should be defined according to how they are represented by vocal extremes.

Because my Savior came to proclaim liberty to the captives.  Because feminism, when not defined by extremes, proclaims the simple truth that women and men are equal in humanity, equal in dignity, equal in worth.

Equal, Jesus feminism adds, in Imago Dei, the image of God.  Equal in the pouring out of God's Spirit on all flesh (Acts 2:17).  For the sake of the gospel of Christ, who said, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10), a woman must be free.

I became a Christian at the age of 15.  But I think I've always been a feminist.

In 1963 when I was born, men were still firmly in charge of everything.  I remember my mother trying hard to make everything just right for when my father came home.  She'd have his cocktail and slippers waiting, and dinner on the stove.  I grew up understanding housework as a woman's job, and earning money as a man's job.  I knew that because I was a girl, I would not be drafted if the Vietnam War or some other conflict was still raging when I came age-- and that my parents were profoundly grateful for that.   And I knew my father had the ultimate say at our house, though my mother usually got her way anyway.

Yet I also knew to the depths of my soul that I was as good as any boy.  I was smart.  Schoolwork came easy for me.  I knew I was a person, as valuable as any other person, male or female.  And despite the non-verbal messages they were giving me, my parents also told me that if I worked hard and developed my skills and talents, I could be anything I wanted.  No one ever said, "That is, if you were a boy. . . "

Until I became a Christian.

Not right away.  Not when I was still a "baby believer," figuring out what it meant to have been born again. But soon.

"You are a woman of God," the church told me.  "Learn to be a submissive wife to the husband you'll have someday.  Learn to be a homemaker and mother like the Proverbs 31 woman.  You can speak in church, and even be a leader, but only a leader of other women.  Embrace your calling, and don't sin by wanting something other than you were created to be."

Created to be led.  Created to be restricted.  Created to be subordinate.

Equal, but somehow less.

And I learned to embrace this because I thought it was the only way to be a Christian. I took comfort in the idea that Jesus submitted to the Father's authority even though He was equal to the Father.  That my subordination was by choice, something an equal could choose to do, which meant I remained an equal making a decision, not an inferior accepting the inevitable.

Even though subordination was presented as the only choice, if I really wanted to follow Christ and obey God.   Even though the leader-follower relationship between me and the man I married in 1988 often felt forced, even hypocritical, as if we were giving lip service to a hierarchy we somehow couldn't seem to actually bring off.

Even though there didn't really seem to be anything about the women I knew that made them less suited to be elders or pastors.

I lived with this cognitive dissonance for years and years.  And then in February 2008 a scholarly blogger friend of mine who called himself Metacrock introduced me to his friends at the Egalitarian Christian Alliance and their Equality Central Forum.

Only five years ago.   And yet it changed so many things.

It felt like walking from a darkened room into sunlight.

I found out that there was a different way to read the Bible, that spent more time exploring its historical and cultural context.  A way that focused on finding, as far as possible, the original author's intended communication, as it would have been understood by the original readers.  A way that stepped back from individual bits of text to view the grand sweep of the whole story of God's revelation to humanity.  A way that looked at the new creation and the kingdom of God as things both now and not yet-- culminations of the gospel which will one day finally end all injustice and inequity.

And it didn't seem to be about subordinating or limiting or restricting people, but about setting us all free.  Men and women alike, free of restricting roles (you must be the conqueror, you the nurturer; you must always be the leader, you always the follower) to become fully themselves, whoever and whatever they were created to be.  And this idea, this radical release from categories and their fetters, seemed to anticipate the fullness of God's kingdom and the new creation that is and is to come: "Neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not male and female."  Galatians 3:28.  Maybe we really could all be "one in Christ Jesus."   Maybe we really could stop viewing one another according to the flesh. (2 Corinthians 5:16).  Maybe instead of one leading and one following, a man and a woman could go where God sent them together, by mutual agreement, hand in hand.

And maybe this has always been meant to start here in this world, with Jesus and the way He treated people-- especially women-- as the first fruits.  Maybe that's why He chose women to announce His resurrection.  Maybe that's why He said, "The greatest among you shall be the servant.  For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."  Matthew 23:11-12.

In the end I embraced Jesus feminism because it was the only thing that made sense to me.  The way out of cognitive dissonance into a new phase of relationship with Him, dizzy with thankfulness and new-found freedom.  The way to rediscover what I had always, deep-down, been sure of.

Being female does not mean I am less.  That I'm "equal-but."  That I'm in the Imago Dei, but somehow not quite as much as if I were male.

No.  I was created in His image (Genesis 1:27) and recreated in Christ Jesus to do good works (Ephesians 2:10).  It is God's good pleasure to give me the kingdom (Luke 12:32) which we all enter in the same way-- as little children, without privilege or status greater than anyone else.

I'm still as good as any boy.  I wasn't born to be restricted and subordinated and led. And my sisters and I must be free.

For the Bible-- and my Jesus-- tell me so.

"One Who Is Forgiven Much, Loves Much" - Jesus and the "Sinful Woman"

This amazing story of how Jesus treated a social outcast appears in Luke 7:36-50:

When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”
Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”
“Tell me, teacher,” he said.
“Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.
Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

This story is sometimes conflated with the story of the woman (John's Gospel says it was Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, John 12:1-8) who broke an alabaster jar of perfume over Jesus' head just before He went to His death in Jerusalem.  But that story is set at the home of Simon the Leper, not Simon the Pharisee.  (Matthew. 26:6-13 and Mark. 14:3-9 also tell the Mary story but don't name her). "Simon" was an exceedingly common name in 1st-century Palestine, so the different modifiers would be used to identify different people.

Other differences:  Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, is never identified as a "sinful woman"  (i.e., a prostitute).   The perfume in Luke's story is never identified as being costly, as Mary's perfume was (its cost, not her reputation, was the source of the dispute in the Mary story). And Luke's story apparently takes place near the beginning of Jesus' ministry rather than near the end of His life.  Also, while the Mary story is explicitly set in Bethany (in Judea), this one appears to take place in Galilee, in a town called Nain. (Luke 7:11).  So I think it's pretty clear that this story in Luke is not about Mary and is unique to Luke's gospel.

However, the blurring together of gospel women is a well-established church practice, dating from the fourth century after Christ.  A Smithsonian.com article on Mary Magdalene (though it assumes-- erroneously in my opinion-- that there can have been only one woman in Jesus' life who anointed His head with perfume) details how Pope Gregory I (AD. 540-604) retold the stories in such a way that Mary Magdalene became the "sinful woman," effectively decommissioning her as a venerated, authoritative figure in the early church:

Cutting through the exegetes’ careful distinctions—the various Marys, the sinful women—that had made a bald combining of the figures difficult to sustain, Gregory, standing on his own authority, offered his decoding of the relevant Gospel texts. He established the context within which their meaning was measured from then on:

She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? 

There it was—the woman of the “alabaster jar” named by the pope himself as Mary of Magdala. . .  

Thus Mary of Magdala, who began as a powerful woman at Jesus’ side, “became,” in Haskins’ summary, “the redeemed whore and Christianity’s model of repentance, a manageable, controllable figure, and effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex.”

Despite this, it seems clear from the texts that the "sinful woman" of Luke 7 is not Mary Magdalene, nor is she Mary of Bethany. She is a nameless woman, outcast from society, who has her own remarkable encounter with Jesus. That encounter is what I am going to examine today.

I'm indebted for much of this to Kenneth Bailey, Th.D., and his book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, and David A. deSilva, Ph.D., and his book Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture.

The first thing to be aware of when reading stories like this is the fact that Israel, like most of the rest of the first-century Roman world, was a patronage culture, as succinctly explained by Truth or Tradition:

Ancient biblical societies functioned on a patron-client basis. As such, there was great inequality between the “Haves” and the “Have-nots.” The inequality existed in substance (possessions) and power and influence. As a result, the client needed the resources that the patron could offer. The patron needed (or found useful) the loyalty and honor that the client could give him.

A prostitute in that society was very much a "Have-not."  Jesus, even though He was a wandering preacher dependent on others to provide for Him, functioned towards the people in the role of a patron-- one who freely gave others what they needed, and who was to be given honor and loyalty as a result.  God was considered the ultimate Patron, and the recipients of His power in forgiveness, healing, provision and favor were the beneficiaries.  According to deSilva's book linked above, Jesus acted as the mediator of God's favor for the benefit of the people:

Jesus' ability to confer benefits of such kind derives from his relationship with God, specifically as the mediator of favors that reside in the province of God's power. . . The response to Jesus during his earthly ministry bears the stamp of responses typical of beneficiaries to their benefactors. (p. 134)

Whenever Jesus healed people, when He miraculously fed large groups of them, and when He declared sins forgiven, He was acting in the role of mediator-patron of God's blessings. The actions of the "sinful woman" towards Jesus in Luke 7 typify a beneficiary's response to a patron.  She had clearly encountered Him prior to this incident, because she deliberately brings with her the flask of perfume in order to honor Jesus by anointing Him with it.  In that honor-shame culture, the public honoring of patrons was the chief means by which their beneficiaries could return thanks.

Who knows exactly what their first encounter was like?  Just a few chapters earlier, in Luke 5:29, Jesus is seen eating and drinking with a large group of "tax collectors and sinners."  This woman may have been among them.  Her prostitution was probably her only means of supporting herself-- she could have been an orphan, a widow with no sons, or a divorced wife (women could be divorced by their husbands for pretty much any reason, even for burning food).  Though our instinct is to hold the men who took advantage of her situation responsible for her shame, she would not have seen it that way.

Jesus must have been different than any man she was used to encountering.

He must have treated her as neither an object of scorn nor as an object of self-gratification, but as a human being, a "daughter of Abraham" worthy of consideration and even respect.  When He saw that she wanted forgiveness and redemption, He may even have offered her a way out of her despised life. Perhaps He told her she could travel with His group and be supported out of their means.  Perhaps He connected her with another person who could help her to some other means of self-support allowable for a woman.  In any event, her biblical story begins with her appearance in Simon the Pharisee's home, knowing that Jesus has already considered her sins forgiven, and ready to do her Benefactor honor.

The rudeness of Simon the Pharisee, then, stands in stark contrast.

Kenneth Bailey's book linked above explains the cultural meanings that would have been understood by the original audience, which we tend to miss:

1.  The Pharisees had probably decided to invite Jesus to one of their homes in order to correct and mold Him, as a young rabbi who badly needed their wisdom and advice. They had already communicated (as I stated earlier) that they didn't like Him doing such things as eating with "sinners." The point of this dinner party was to shame Jesus into better behavior.

2.  Just as there are certain courtesies guests in our own homes expect, guests in homes of that day would have expected certain courtesies by way of welcome:  a kiss of greeting, then water and olive oil to wash and anoint their hands and feet before reclining at the low table to eat.  Simon offered Jesus none of these.  It was the same as if we were to open the door to a guest and then (in front of the other guests) turn away without a word, leaving the door hanging open for them to let themselves in, then ignore them when they speak to us and go on chatting with the other guests, making no room or offer for them to sit anywhere, and passing the refreshment trays over their heads without offering them any.  Jesus was quite deliberately being insulted.

3.  Jesus' response to this rudeness is to immediately go and recline at the table, without waiting for any older guests to recline first.  This was a probably a way of saying, non-verbally, something along the lines of "This is petty, childish behavior, so I'm assuming I'm the most mature person here."

4.  As is still traditional at Middle-Eastern meals, the lowliest members of the community are allowed to enter the room while the guests are being fed.  They can thus be beneficiaries of the host's patronage in feeding them, which accrues to his honor as a benefactor.  The woman would have entered as one of these persons, and would have been sitting against the wall when Jesus came in. She sees the way He is now being mistreated, and she is so upset that she begins to weep-- not for herself, but for Him.

5.  Her original intention was probably to anoint His hands and head after He had been washed and before He reclined.  This would have been an appropriate way to honor Him.  She did not plan to wash His feet (she brought neither water nor a towel).  But since (having been denied the washing) Jesus immediately reclines, His head and hands are now out of reach.  The woman determines to make up for the rudeness Jesus has just suffered, by washing His feet herself with the only means available-- her tears. By then kissing His feet, she is also offering an act of devotion so extravagant as to be a form of worship.

6.  Having no towel, the woman lets down her hair to dry Jesus' feet, thus willingly entering into the shame and public humiliation Jesus has just experienced by uncovering her own hair in public.  This mimics the behavior of a bride on her wedding night, which is a declaration of the ultimate loyalty to this man.  She thus opens herself to yet another rejection-- from Christ.

7.  What the woman has done is a blatant, non-verbal rebuke towards Simon and the other Pharisees.  By performing the washing ritual expected of the host, and by doing public honor to a person Simon wished to shame, she has turned the shame and dishonor back on the host (which was not how a lowly community outcast, there to receive food, was supposed to act!) and also has opened herself to attack from Simon and his Pharisee friends.

How does Jesus respond?  According to Kenneth Bailey:

Jesus accepted the woman's extraordinary demonstration, and in that acceptance confirmed her judgment regarding who he was-- the divine presence of God among his people. . . But Simon either could not see or perhaps could not accept any of this.  So Jesus turned to him (and through him to the entire assembly). . . The phrase "I have something to say to you" is a classic Middle-Eastern idiom that introduces a blunt speech that the listener may not want to hear.

 Jesus then tells a short parable in which the woman is identified with a sinner whom God forgives much, and Simon with a sinner whom God forgives little.  He thus reminds Simon that he, too, is a sinner, and ends up equating Himself with God the forgiver.  But the most extraordinary thing that Jesus does is this:  He verbally attacks the host for the same rudeness the woman has non-verbally (and very bravely) confronted.  Prior to the woman's involvement, Jesus was quite willing to simply convey His displeasure non-verbally as well, by reclining out of turn.  But now, as Bailey puts it:

Jesus shifts the hostility of the assembled guests from the woman to himself. . . Never in my life, in any culture, anywhere in the world have I participated in a banquet where the guest attacked the quality of the hospitality! . . . Jesus attacks Simon in public in his own home.  He is not a fool and must have a very good reason for launching such a public attack. . . By aggressively defending the woman, Jesus endorses her willingness to get hurt for him. . . (pp. 256-257) 

Jesus at last speaks to the woman, reconfirming her forgiveness by saying, "Your sins have been forgiven."  A rabbi was strictly warned again and again not to talk to a woman in any public place, not even to his own wife.  Jesus violates that dictum as he speaks to the woman with his word of reassurance. . . Simon and his friends refuse to follow Jesus' lead and shift their focus from the sin of this woman to her response to grace.  Simon focused on the woman's mistakes.  Now the invited guests focus on Jesus' "mistakes." . . . For Jesus, true prophethood involved getting hurt for sinners by confronting their attackers.  As the story ends, Simon is under the glass and is challenged to accept offered forgiveness, respond with love and revise the default setting of his outlook on the world. (pp. 258-259)

This is a story of a very courageous, faith-filled woman, and Jesus' final words to her, "Your faith has saved you. Go in peace," are a tremendous affirmation of her dignity and worth.  His championing of the woman even goes so far as to deflect to Himself the anger she has incurred.  It is in more ways than one that He suffers on our behalf.

I myself have never been a prostitute, but I know what it is to be rejected and shamed by a roomful of people.  This story has resonated deep in my heart since I first heard it as a young, socially awkward high school girl.  Jesus' willingness to come to the defense of a social outcast-- His determination to enter into solidarity with her through unacceptable social behavior of His own--- reveal His willingness to come to my defense and His lack of concern with the social norms that labeled me an outcast.   As the Smithsonian.com article goes on to say:

Jesus’ attitude toward women . . . was one of the things that set him apart from other teachers of the time. Not only was Jesus remembered as treating women with respect, as equals in his circle; not only did he refuse to reduce them to their sexuality; Jesus was expressly portrayed as a man who loved women, and whom women loved.

Singer-songwriter Don Franciso probably said it best, retelling this story in a way that still makes me choke up whenever I hear the song:

Her sins were red as scarlet
But now they're washed away
The love and faith she's shown
Is all the price she has to pay
For the depth of God's forgiveness
Is more than you can see
And in spite of what you think of her
She's beautiful to Me.

I hope that wherever there is rejection, I too can learn to follow my Savior in championing the rejected and bringing them acceptance like this.

"Sir, I Perceive You are a Prophet" - Jesus and the Woman at the Well

I have decided to turn my blog post Even the Dogs Eat the Crumbs: Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman into the first of a series I will be calling "Jesus and Women."  It will feature a number of women in the Gospels with whom Jesus interacted, because Jesus' relations with women universally elevated them, challenging the repressive honor-shame social mores of his day.  Today's post, then, is second in this new series.

The text is John 4:1-42, and since it's such a long one, I'll just summarize it.  Jesus passes through Samaria and sits down at the well, while his disciples go into town to get food.  A Samaritan woman approaches to draw water, and Jesus asks her for a drink.  She is surprised that he would be speaking to her, a Samaritan and a woman, and asks him about it.  Jesus replies, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."  She immediately becomes a little indignant and asks him who he thinks he is.  "You are not greater than our father Jacob, are you, who gave us this well, and drank of it himself?"  The source of friction between Samaritans and Jews is here apparent, because the Jews denied that the Samaritans had Jacob for their father.  Jesus sidesteps this to continue his metaphor of water as eternal life from God:  "Whoever drinks the water that I shall give him shall never thirst."  But the woman misunderstands.  She's tired of coming to draw water every day and, practically, thinks this "living water" sounds like the perfect solution.

Jesus asks her to bring her husband.  Since she is female, this woman probably has little to no education and thus is probably completely unused to thinking metaphorically.  Jesus may be asking for her to bring her husband because of this.  Or, of course, he may simply be communicating in this way that his intentions are innocent.  Or both.  "I have no husband," she replies.  Jesus then says she has told the truth, for "You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband."  By this the woman recognizes that Jesus is a prophet.  So (playing, as it were, the game of "what one thing would you ask a Jewish prophet if you had a chance?") she brings up the burning issue for Samaritans in her day: the conflict with the Jews over the proper place to worship.  Jesus then tells her, "The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshiper shall worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers."

The woman then expresses hope in the Messiah, and Jesus explicitly reveals to her that he is the Messiah.  She runs back to the village to tell everyone.  Jesus ends up staying two days, and "many more believed because of his word." 

The Women In the Bible website provides some historical background:

There had been a long-running conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans. Samaria had been the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel during the period of the divided kingdoms. In 721BC Assyria conquered Israel, and sent most of its people to live in Assyria. The Assyrians replaced the original people with five alien tribes who resettled the area (for information on this event, see 2 Kings 17:13-34).

Eventually many of the original population returned and intermarried with the five alien tribes. By the time of Jesus, Jews thought that the people who lived in Samaria were not true descendants of the great Jewish ancestors, and that their religion was not true Judaism but a mixture of beliefs. . .

[T]he temple on nearby Mount Gerizim had been the central place of worship for the Samaritans, rivaling the Temple in Jerusalem. Samaritans and Jews always argued over which of the two temples was the true place to worship. . .

Inclusion of the Samaritans among those whom Jesus favored was revolutionary, since there was bitter enmity between the Jewish and Samaritan peoples. 

David A. deSilva, in his work on the cultures of the New Testament, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity, talks about this passage as being primarily about "sacred space" -- which and what kind of places are to be considered holy.

"The early Christians radically changed Jewish maps of sacred space, largely depicting the replacement of the Jerusalem temple as sacred space with new configurations of sacred space located in the individual believer, the community of Christians and the presently unseen realms of God.  .  .

In John's gospel. . . Jesus sets aside limited locales of sacred space (the fixed centers both of Jerusalem and Mount Gerazim, the sacred site for Samaritans) in favor of sacred space that opens up wherever people worship God "in spirit and truth" (John 4:21-23)."  (pp. 291-292).

This is why the Gospel of John, which tends to organize the story of Jesus thematically rather than chronologically, places the cleansing of the temple midway through what is now Chapter 2.  This thematic arc operates like this:

• It begins with Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple, in a kind of prophetic indictment against that sacred space (deSilva, Ibid).
• It continues through the conversation with religious leader Nicodemus, to whom Jesus speaks of "everyone who is born of the Spirit" as being like the Spirit in having no fixed place of origin or dwelling.
• It concludes with this story of the woman at the well-- in which Jesus' includes the Samaritans among those who are able to learn to "worship in spirit and truth" rather than in a temple.

Kenneth E. Bailey, in his book Jesus Through Middle-Eastern Eyes, points out that in the Gospel of John the nighttime usually symbolizes spiritual darkness while the day represents spiritual light.  These are contrasted in this arc.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, while the Samaritan woman speaks with Jesus in the broad light of day.  Thus the respected religious leader is compared with the despised foreigner in one of the "last shall be first" reversals which are so common in the Gospels.

Bailey also notes that this woman is an outcast even among her own people, for the customary time for women to draw water was in the early morning or at sundown, and they generally come in groups to help one another with the heavy water jars.  This woman comes alone at the "sixth hour," which is around noon.  Tradition has it that this was an immoral woman whom Jesus then "catches" in her sin.*  But author David Lose, in his March 2011 article in the Huffington Post, Misogyny, Moralism and the Woman at the Well, points out that Jesus' words about "five husbands" need not be construed as implying that she was necessarily a woman of loose morals:

"Jesus at no point invites repentance or, for that matter, speaks of sin at all. She very easily could have been widowed or have been abandoned or divorced (which in the ancient world was pretty much the same thing for a woman). Five times would be heartbreaking, but not impossible. Further, she could now be living with someone that she was dependent on, or be in what's called a Levirate marriage (where a childless woman is married to her deceased husband's brother in order to produce an heir yet is not always technically considered the brother's wife). There are any number of ways, in fact, that one might imagine this woman's story as tragic rather than scandalous."

Women were not allowed no-cause divorces, as men were.  Nor could a rejected woman support herself without finding another man.  The fact that this woman had had five husbands and was now with a man who wasn't her husband was really more of an indictment on the unjust divorce practices** of her time than any fault of the woman's.  But the fact remains that the stigma of this fell much more on the woman than on the men who had put her in this position.  Jesus doesn't worry, however, about the fact that she has come to the well without friends, at a time when she would not have to face other women.  He simply asks her for a drink.

Kenneth Bailey points out (Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, p. 202) that wells in that area did not have buckets attached to them.  Travelers always carried soft leather "buckets" to draw water-- and Jesus apparently had let the disciples take it with them into town.  Bailey states:

"By deliberately sitting on the well without a bucket, Jesus placed himself strategically to be in need of whomever appeared with the necessary equipment.  The woman approached.  On seeing her Jesus was expected to courteously withdraw to a distance of at least twenty feet, indicating that it was both safe and culturally appropriate for her to approach the well. . . Jesus did not move as she approached. She decided to draw near anyway.  Then comes the surprise.

Jesus asks for a drink.  By making this request Jesus does four things:

1.  He breaks the social taboo against talking to a woman. . . In village society, a strange man does not even make eye contact with a woman in a public place. . . 

2.  Jesus ignored the five-hundred-year-old hostility that had developed between Jews and Samaritans. . . [Bailey later explains that Jews and Samaritans did not even drink out of the same vessels, so Jesus could have been considered defiled by drinking from her bucket]

3.  Jesus so totally humbles himself that he needs her services.  Jesus does not establish his initial relationship with her by explaining how she needs him and his message.  That will come later.  Rather, his opening line means, "I am weak and need help! Can you help me?" . . .

4.  Jesus elevates the woman's self worth.  Only the strong are able to give to others.  The woman's dignity is affirmed by being asked to help Jesus out of her available resources."

But Jesus does more than just speak to this woman and increase her dignity by asking her help.  He deliberately moves the conversation from the every-day (give me some water) to the spiritual: (the gift I bring is living water).  He converses with her on the same level as he has just a few verses before conversed with Nicodemus-- as an equal.  There is no real difference in his eyes between a scholarly, male Jewish religious leader and an outcast, lowly foreign woman.  When she fails to grasp his first teaching, he asks her to bring her husband-- but the lack of appearance of a husband does not cause him to shut the conversation down.  Jesus allows her to ask him the kind of question a woman in her position would want to ask a prophet. 

Then, by opening "sacred space" to include anyone who worships in spirit and truth, Jesus proclaims  the eternal kingdom open to Samaritans-- and not only that, but by referring to God as "the Father," Jesus implies that God can be Father to Samaritans as well as Jews.  As deSilva puts it (Honor, p. 197):

"The possibility of becoming part of God's family provides the basis for the alternative kinship group that Jesus begins to create within his own ministry.  The most well-known passage in this regard is Matthew 12:46-50. . . in which he redefines his own kin not as those born into his father Joseph's household but rather as 'whoever does the will of my Father in heaven,' that is, whoever is born into his heavenly Father's household."   

The language of being "born" anew into this family is also used by Jesus to Nicodemus in the passage just prior to the Samaritan woman passage.  "New sacred space" and "new alternative kinship" thus are interwoven into the message of Jesus being highlighted in this section of John's Gospel.  It is a spiritual kinship where the place of worship is no longer a physical place, but within every member of the family-- a kinship in which distinctions of Jew and Samaritan, male and female, become irrelevant, and the lowly outcast "gets it" more clearly than the privileged leader.

As author David Lose points out:

"[T]his story is not about immorality; it's about identity. In the previous scene, Jesus was encountered by a male Jewish religious authority who could not comprehend who or what Jesus was. In this scene, he encounters the polar opposite, and perhaps precisely because she is at the other end of the power spectrum, she recognizes not just who Jesus is but what he offers --dignity. Jesus invites her to not be defined by her circumstances and offers her an identity that lifts her above her tragedy. And she accepts, playing a unique role in Jesus' ministry as she is the first character in John's gospel to seek out others to tell them about Jesus."

When Jesus' disciples returned from their food-buying expedition, they didn't know what to think.  They'd expected Jesus might have to talk with the Samaritans (hard to avoid), but publicly talking with a woman?  Unheard of!  But though Jesus always cared about doing good, he rarely cared what people thought.  "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me, and accomplish His work," Jesus said.  In other words, "I know you came back with food for me, and I know you don't like the way I've been using my time while you were gone.  But this is what's really important.  I'm doing God's will, despite what you think."

In other words, "Let go of your traditions and let's make this about people and who they are in God's eyes."

Advice we would all do well to follow.

------------

*The "Women in the Bible" site linked at the beginning of my post speculates that Jesus was actually not talking about this woman's literal husbands at all, but speaking symbolically of the Samaritans as having "five husbands" because of the five "alien tribes" they intermarried with-- but given that the woman has just misunderstood Jesus' symbolic reference to "living water," I think it's unlikely that he would speak symbolically again, or that she would  have understood him if he did.  I believe it's much more likely that the woman actually had been married five times, as Jesus said.  However, the repetition of that number five does serve to make the Samaritan woman representative of her people in this passage. 

**For more on divorce practices in Jesus' day, see my blog post What About Divorce?

It's All About Jesus-- Isn't It?

When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  Paul the Apostle, 1 Corinthians 2:1-2.

Paul preached and taught that Christianity is all about Jesus.  And Jesus's teachings are centered around the "kingdom of God" with Himself as its inauguration.  When Jesus first came preaching the gospel at the beginning of Mark, He said, “The time has come, [and] the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” Mark 1:14-15. 

"The time has come" was shorthand in Israel for "The Messiah has arrived."  Jesus was saying that He was the Messiah, and because He had arrived, the kingdom ruled by God, rather than men, was near us, right here on earth.  This was the good news that people were to believe.  In Luke 4:14-19 He proclaimed in the synagogue that the verses about God's anointed coming with good news for the poor, healing for the blind and freedom for the oppressed, were fulfilled right then and there.

As N. T. Wright puts it in Simply Jesus:

Jesus behaves from the start both with the sovereign authority of one who knows himself charged with the responsibility to inaugurate God's kingdom and with the recognition that this task will only be completed through his suffering and death.   [Emphasis in original.]

And in the next chapter he says that after the Resurrection:

A new power is let loose in the world, the power to remake what was broken, to heal what was diseased, to restore what was lost. . . Jesus's risen person-- body, mind, heart and soul-- is the prototype of the new creation. . . The thing about the new creation is that it simply overflows with the power of love. . . [t]his love is strong, powerful, life-changing, life directing.  New creation has begun; and its motivating power is love.  [Emphasis in original.]

In Christian churches everywhere this weekend, the death and resurrection of Christ will be celebrated, because Christ is the center of Christianity. 

Isn't He?

Why does it seem so often like Christ is only the center of Christianity on Easter weekend?

Certainly if you asked average people on the street what Christianity was, what Christians were all about, "A bunch of people following Christ" would probably not be what they would say.  They'd be more likely to talk about stopping gays from marrying and women from having abortions, fighting for prayer and against evolution in the schools, and trying to keep crosses, manger scenes and copies of the Ten Commandments on display in public places.

Most people have no quarrel with Jesus-- in fact, they rather admire Him.  But a large number of people have real problems with the way we Christians talk and act.  And maybe it's because Jesus really doesn't seem to be at the heart of our religion at all.

The old creation lives by pride and retribution: I stand up for myself, and if someone gets in my way I try to get even.  We've been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it.  Now there is a completely different way to live, a way of love and reconciliation and healing and hope.  It's a way . . . that is as unthinkable to most human beings and societies as-- well, as resurrection itself.  That's the point.  Welcome to Jesus's new world.  N. T. Wright, Simply Jesus.

I think Dr. Wright is right (no pun intended) that the way Jesus lived, the way He taught us to live, is "unthinkable to most human beings and societies."  Maybe that's why we're so bad at living it.  Maybe that's why it seems so much easier to fight culture wars.  Maybe that's why it's easier to think of ourselves as "Bible-believing Christians" than "Jesus-following Christians."  The Bible is concrete: a book we can hold in our hands.  We can look inside its pages for instructions on how we and everyone else are supposed to behave and think, and we can try to enforce that in our world.

But Jesus said to the Pharisees, "You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." John 5:39.

The Bible was meant to point us to Jesus.  We Christians often act as if we think it's the other way around.

And we turn the New Testament-- a set of books made up of narratives, prophecies, explanations to Gentiles of what "the time is come and the kingdom of God is near" means in their own mindset, and letters of encouragement and advice to young churches, into a book of rules and new law.  And then we try to get our governments to enforce it.

I want to dedicate my Easter this year to returning to Jesus as the center of my faith.  I want to learn once again to follow Him, and no merely human agenda-- not even that of a church or churches in my country.

I want to recognize that trying to impose my morality on others from the government down (instead of trying to love them and come underneath them to lift them up, to meet their spiritual and physical needs), isn't what Jesus was talking about when He said "Follow Me."  I want to understand that it's not about just living my life as usual, either-- just going to work and coming home and cooking dinner and watching TV.  I don't know exactly how He wants me to do as He did-- I don't know exactly what that is going to look like in my life-- but I want to do what that beautiful song by Gene MacLellan from the early 1970s said:

Put your hand in the hand of the man

Who stilled the water . . .

Put your hand in the hand of the man

Who calmed the sea . . .

Take a look at yourself,

And you can look at others differently,

By puttin’ your hand in the hand of the man

From Galilee!

This Easter I want to fall in love all over again with the One who said "Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom."  Luke 12:32.  The One who said, "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." John 3:17.

Fellow Christians, I'm coming to realize that before we can change the world, our own world has got to change.  We have to abide in the Vine first, for apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:4).  And if we do change the world, what we change it into needs to look a lot more like Him and a lot less like us.  And we need to do it according to His way of doing things, not ours.

And to my readers who aren't Christians-- I'm sorry.  I'm sorry that what you've been feeling from us has had so very little to do with what Jesus came to bring.

Maybe lately it hasn't been all about Jesus, for a lot of us.

But maybe it can be.

For I believe He is Risen.  He is Risen indeed.

Even the Dogs Eat the Crumbs: Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician Woman

Matthew 15:21-28 tells this story:


Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel."  The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.  He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”  “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

For years I didn't know what to think of this story.  It looked like Jesus was first ignoring, and then insulting, a poor, desperate woman-- for no other reason than that she was a Gentile.  It looked like she obtained healing for her daughter only after submitting to humiliation by agreeing that she and her people were little more than "dogs."  If Jesus is really the compassionate Savior of all mankind, how could He be so racist and cruel?  

But one of my general principles of Bible interpretation is to read passages like this in light of passages that are easy to understand.  Jesus is consistently portrayed elsewhere in the Gospels as ready to help any sufferer who came to Him, including Roman soldiers, tax collectors, and lepers.  When something doesn't seem to fit, the key is to look deeper.

As I discussed in my earlier post Assumptions Make You-Know-Whats Out of You and Me, the reason some Bible passages seem jarring and out of place, is that we come from a different cultural context.  Things the original writers and readers took for granted and felt no need to explain are mysteries to us, which can make us completely misunderstand what is actually going on.

So, in looking deeper, I found three aspects of Ancient Near East (ANE) culture that shed significant light on what Jesus and the woman He encountered were actually doing.

1.  Community.

Kenneth Bailey's book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes examines this story in Chapter 16.   He says:

"A critical component in both the parables of Jesus and the dramatic stories about him is the ever-present community.  In much current reflection on many of these texts, the community is ignored.  Contemporary Western society is highly individualistic.   Most of the societies in the majority world still function as tightly knit communities. . . That community gives identity and profoundly influences both attitude and lifestyle. In the stories about Jesus, the surrounding community (on- or offstage) is a critical component in all that takes place and its presence must be factored into any interpretive effort."

Bailey points out that this story is not simply about an interaction between Jesus and a foreign woman.  The disciples are the audience, and Jesus' words and actions must also be interpreted in light of whatever lesson He intended to impart to them.   (The listeners/readers of this story both as it was told and written down were also part of the tellers'/writers' intended audience.)   Bailey points out that both to the disciples and to the original hearers of the story, Jesus' interaction with this woman (who came out to him herself and was therefore probably a poor widow with no one to send in her place) would raise parallels with the story of Elijah and the starving widow of Sidon (1 Kings 7:7-16).  Jesus had spoken of this Elijah story in the synagogue when He announced Himself at the beginning of his ministry, in Luke 4:25-27: "And I can assure you that there were many widows in Israel during Elijah’s time, when it did not rain for three and a half years and there was a great food shortage in the land.Yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to a widow in the city of Zarephath in the region of Sidon."  Jesus intended that His ministry be compared with that of Elijah, and that is just what the disciples would have done.

The initial response of Jesus to this foreign woman-- not answering her a word-- was entirely in accordance with the norms of the day, and the disciples knew it, which was why they asked Jesus to do the expected thing and send her away.  But Bailey points out that in the presence of this woman's suffering, and with their understanding of Jesus as a prophet, "such ethnocentric views were inevitably uncomfortable."  By interacting with this woman first within the social norms, and then by stepping outside them, Jesus was teaching His followers a new way to respond to foreigners-- and to women.

2.  Socio-Economics. 

Jane E. Hick's online article in the Lutheran magazine Word and World, entitled Moral Agency at the Borders: Rereading the Story of the Syrophoenician Woman, points out:

"Tyre was a well-known commercial center with significant trade relations along the Mediterranean. . . Tyre would have owned surrounding territories and could have claimed agricultural proceeds from these, but it would also have used its considerable clout and wealth to acquire surplus from Jewish villages, sometimes leaving less than enough for those who actually worked the land. One can imagine that the exploitative situation was exacerbated during times of drought and famine; urban centers likely took their allotment of food first, leaving shortages of food in the countryside."

Even if she was poor, the Syro-Phoenician woman was a still a member of a Hellenized (Greek-cultured) group which was known for exploiting the nearby Jewish community.  Hicks goes on to say, "Given these underlying power dynamics, Jesus’ household metaphor in which the bread goes first to the children of Israel would be understood by early listeners as a reversal of the reigning order."

Hellenized cultures such as this woman's would be well-versed in the teachings of Aristotle, to whom all others were barbarians, socially on a par with slaves.  Though the Gospel of Matthew reflects Jewish contempt of the woman as a "Canaanite," a descendant of the peoples originally displaced by the Jews, the fact remains that the contempt between these two people-groups would have been mutual.  The Syro-Phoenicians would have viewed the Jews as "dogs," and here in Syro-Phoenician territory, Jesus might very well have been ironically turning the prevailing attitude on its head for the woman to see and acknowledge.  His lesson in racism would thus not have been just for the disciples, but for her.

3.  Honor and Shame.

David A. deSilva's book Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture states in Chapter 1, Honor & Shame:

"The culture of the first-century world was built on the foundational social values of honor and dishonor. . . Those living or reared in Asiatic, Latin American, Mediterranean or Islamic countries have considerable advantage in their reading of the New Testament in this regard, since many of those cultures place a prominent emphasis on honor and shame. Readers living in the United States or Western Europe may recognize immediately that we live at some distance from the honor culture of the first-century Greco-Roman world (including the Semitic peoples in the East). In our culture the bottom line for decision-making is not always (indeed, perhaps rarely) identifying the honorable thing to do. In the corporate world, for example, the “profitable” frequently acts as the central value. Considerations of right and wrong are also prominent, but these are based on internalized values or norms rather than values enforced by overt approval or disapproval by the larger society. Typically we do not talk about honor and shame much. . . ." pp. 23, 25-26.

In the cultures of both the Jews and the Syro-Phoenicians, males and females gained honor in different ways.  Males gained honor by deeds of courage or generosity in the community, while women gained honor by maintaining the integrity of their privacy within the home and family.  DeSilva states:

In the ancient world, as in many traditional cultures today, women and men have different arenas for the preservation and acquisition of honor, and different standards for honorable activity. Men occupy the public spaces, while women are generally directed toward the private spaces of home and hearth. When they leave the home, they are careful to avoid conversation with other men. The places they go are frequented mainly by women (the village well, the market for food) and so become something of an extension of “private” space. In the fifth century B.C., Thucydides wrote that the most honorable woman is the one least talked about by men (Hist. 2.45.2). Six hundred years later Plutarch will say much the same thing: a woman should be seen when she is with her husband, but stay hidden at home when he is away (“Advice on Marriage” 9). Both her body and her words should not be “public property” but instead guarded from strangers." p. 33

Kenneth Bailey points out in Jesus Through Middle-Eastern Eyes that, just as no self-respecting woman would speak to a strange man in public, no self-respecting rabbi would speak to a woman in public (p. 221).  Jesus quite frequently ignored this prohibition: discussing theology with the woman at the well in John 4:1-42; assuring the woman who washed His feet with her tears that her sins were forgiven in Luke 7:36-50.  Here He seems at first to obey the social barrier, and then breaks it.  Why?

Bailey reminds us that in calling out to Jesus using the title "Lord, Son of David," this woman is using a Messianic title for Jesus-- very unexpected in a Gentile.  In spite of being a Syro-Phoenician, then, this woman believes that Jesus is more than an itinerant Jewish preacher.  She also opens with the beggar's standard cry, "Have mercy on me!"  This woman is so desperate for help that she deliberately lets go of  her honor by following and calling out to a man in public, and by using a beggar's words.  Socially, she has no reason to expect this Jewish rabbi to answer her-- but she believes He is more than a rabbi.   So she perseveres in the face of His silence-- but she does not (as we tend to do) read His silence as insult or cruelty.  Like the woman who touched the hem of His garment (Luke 8:40-48), she knows there are barriers to overcome and sets herself boldly to overcome them.

When the disciples, upset that Jesus has not already sent this shameful woman away, ask Him to go ahead and do it, Jesus instead gives a response clearly intended for the woman to hear: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel."  This is not an answer to the disciples' request.  Instead it is a rhetorical statement of something the disciples and the woman both know,* but it functions as a challenge to the woman:  "Tell me why I should help you."  Instead of sending her away, Jesus engages Himself in the interaction.  She then is encouraged enough to come right up to him and kneel, switching from the beggar's standard plea to the simple words, "Lord, help me."

And here is what is truly astonishing.  DeSilva tells us that a challenge of the sort Jesus offers was a common social interaction in ANE honor-shame cultures-- but only for men.  He explains:

"[H]onor can be won and lost in what has been called the social game of challenge and riposte. It is this “game,” still observable in the modern Mediterranean, that has caused cultural anthropologists to label the culture as “agonistic,” from the Greek word for “contest”.  The challenge-riposte is essentially an attempt to gain honor at someone else’s expense by publicly posing a challenge that cannot be answered. When a challenge has been posed, the challenged must make some sort of response (and no response is also considered a response). It falls to the bystanders to decide whether or not the challenged person successfully defended his (and, indeed, usually “his”) own honor. The Gospels are full of these exchanges, mainly posed by Pharisees, Sadducees or other religious officials at Jesus, whom they regarded as an upstart threatening to steal their place in the esteem of the people." p. 29, emphasis added. 

The rest of the exchange between Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman is just this sort of challenge-riposte.  Jesus says, "It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."  He uses a diminutive word for "dogs," (Bailey, p. 224), which slightly softens the challenge.  But he flings up to her the attitude of her people towards the Jews, as well as their attitude towards her people.  She (perhaps wryly acknowledging that the tables are turned between them, a Hellenized woman in her own territory and a lowly Jew) answers with a pithy response-- which Jesus then acknowledges as having bested Him in the challenge!  

The challenge-riposte, if offered to a man, would be an attempt to gain honor at his expense.  But Jesus offers it to a woman who, according to every social convention of both their cultures, has already forfeited her honor in this situation.  In doing so He raises her to the status of an equal.  And in acknowledging her win, he restores her honor in the sight of the audience.

By understanding this story in terms of community, socio-economics, and honor/shame, we see that what is really going on is that Jesus has:

Echoed the mercy and miracle-working of Elijah;

Showed a foreign woman and His disciples their mutual prejudice;

Restored a woman's lost honor (at His own expense!);

Taught His followers what "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" really looks like; 

Answered a desperate mother's prayer for the healing of her child. 

And for us, of course, it illustrates again how we need to learn what things the original writers and readers took for granted and felt no need to explain, in order to keep from totally misunderstanding a Bible text. 

If Jesus had simply done as we in the modern West expect, and healed the woman's child, all the underlying dynamics would have gone unaddressed.   Instead, He used silence, followed by challenge-riposte, to deal with the full situation.  Seeing this, I have gone from embarrassment at this text and a wish to avoid it, to an even greater love and admiration for my Savior and a desire to tell this story on my blog as it it deserves to be told.

Jesus acted in concern for the whole person and the whole situation with which He was confronted.  He didn't apply bandaids, but spoke right to the heart of the matter.  And He healed more than just the child He was asked to heal.

So how do we apply this story to our own lives?

I think that for us today, this story is about how social and religious conventions can perpetuate racial and gender oppression.  Oppression hurts more than just those on the receiving end.  It hurts the perpetrators too-- and we as human beings often find ourselves in both positions.  If Jesus went against religious and social convention to set people free from attitudes that restrict and bind themselves and others, shouldn't His followers do the same?

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*Note:  Jesus' initial mission was to the house of Israel; it was to His followers, after the Resurrection, that the mission to the Gentiles would fall-- which renders a lesson to them like this one especially important.