The Syrophoenician Woman and the Hardest Line (2 of 4)

This is the most uncomfortable exchange in the Gospels and the discomfort should be left in place.

A Gentile woman asks for her daughter. He answers that it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. Attempts to soften that by pointing at the diminutive form of the word do not remove the sting, and the reading that makes the passage work does not depend on softening it.

What Happens in the Syrophoenician Woman’s Exchange?

She comes about a demonised daughter and he initially does not answer.

The disciples want her sent away because she keeps shouting after them. He says he was sent to the lost sheep of Israel. She kneels and asks again. Then the line about the dogs.

Her reply is the sharpest thing anyone says to him in any Gospel. Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.

She accepts his frame entirely and turns it inside it. She does not dispute the priority of Israel or argue that she deserves equal standing. She works within his own image and finds the space he left in it.

He tells her that for such a reply she may go, and that the demon has left her daughter.

Is Jesus Being Cruel?

Bailey reads it as an examination, and offers an image worth carrying.

A good coach honours a good runner by putting her in the toughest race. On that reading the difficulty of the exchange is a compliment paid to someone he expected to clear it.

That is not a complete answer and it should not be presented as one. The words are hard, they land on a woman in distress about her child, and the text does not gloss them.

What the reading has going for it is the outcome. He does not merely relent. He praises her, in Matthew’s version calling her faith great, which is a word he uses about almost nobody.

Who Else Is in the Room?

The disciples, and Bailey argues they are part of the point.

His principle is that evil cannot be redeemed until it is exposed. The dialogue surfaces prejudices sitting in the hearts of the men watching, prejudices they had probably never heard spoken aloud and would not have recognised as prejudice.

He says the thing they were thinking. Then a Gentile woman demolishes it in one sentence, in front of them.

They remembered the exchange, which is why we have it. Bailey’s question is whether this was a hinge in their own journey toward a mission that eventually went to the nations. The men who watched a Gentile woman out-argue their teacher about whether Gentiles counted are the same men who later took the message to Gentiles.

Does This Connect to Anything Earlier?

Directly to the sermon that nearly got him killed.

At Nazareth he had held up two Gentiles as models of faith, the widow of Sidon and Naaman the Syrian, and the crowd tried to throw him off a cliff for it.

Here he does the same thing in real life rather than in a sermon. A Gentile declares him Lord and Son of David, and he praises her faith.

Sidon is also where this happens. He has walked into the region of Tyre and Sidon, which is the exact territory of the widow he cited at Nazareth.

What Barriers Does the Exchange Cross?

Two, and both were serious.

He speaks with a woman in public, which his disciples find noteworthy elsewhere in the Gospels.

And he heals a Gentile, which crosses a racial line his own movement had not yet worked out how to handle and would argue about for decades afterward in Acts.

The woman crosses both from the other direction, and she does it while asking for something rather than while making a point. Her daughter is the reason she is there and she never loses sight of it.

What Is Her Faith Actually In?

Two things, and Bailey separates them usefully.

That he has the power of God to heal. And that he cares about people outside Israel, particularly those who are suffering.

The second is the one the exchange tests, because the first was never in doubt for her. She had heard enough to come looking.

What she holds under pressure is the conviction that his compassion is not bounded by the category he has just invoked. She turns out to be right, and she is told so.

Part of a series on Jesus and women, following Bailey’s treatment. See also the woman caught in adultery.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 16. Supports the reading of the exchange as an examination, the coach and runner image, the argument that the dialogue exposes the disciples’ prejudice in order to redeem it, the connection to the Nazareth sermon, and the analysis of the content of the woman’s faith. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 15:21-28, Mark 7:24-30, Luke 4:24-30, and John 4:27.

Where the sourcing stops: the exchange has been read in several ways, including as a genuine change of mind on Jesus’s part, and Bailey’s examination reading is one option among them rather than a consensus. The post follows it while noting that the words themselves are not softened by it.

Footnotes

1. The diminutive form of the word for dogs is often produced as though it settles the difficulty, on the grounds that it means household pets rather than scavengers. It does not settle it. Being called a household dog by a stranger, while asking him to help your child, is not a warm experience, and the woman’s reply shows she heard it plainly.
2. That the disciples preserved this story is the strongest internal evidence for Bailey’s reading of its purpose. It does not flatter them and it does not obviously flatter their teacher. Something about it mattered enough to keep.