Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen
“Let the children
be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to
the dogs.”
There are some
statements of Jesus that just seem out of character.
This is one of
them.
An immediate
response is to hear Jesus calling this woman, a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin,
a dog, and to find this offensive. I don’t
know if being called a dog, in Jesus’ day, was as much as a put down as it is
in our day, but I suspect it was.
Did Jesus put her
down because she was a woman? Or a
Gentile? Or Both.
“And really,
Jesus,” we ask, “couldn’t you be nicer?”
A few words of background.
Jesus had withdrawn
into the Region of Tyre hoping that nobody would know he was there, and apparently
seeking some down time, a time to rest from all that he was doing.
But even there,
in the region to the north of Israel, in today’s Lebanon, Jesus is known and he
could not escape notice.
This woman was
one of the locals.
The second thing,
is that the word Jesus uses for ‘dog’ is actually diminutive, which would mean,
likely, puppy.
I don’t know if
that lessens the impact of what Jesus was saying, namely that the children get
fed first and then, the puppies, but it definitely sounds better than Jesus
calling this woman a dog.
But beyond our
concern that Jesus would call this woman a dog, there is an image of something
any dog owner has seen, time and time again.
We have a dog,
Kinzie, a very lively labradoodle.
And we have our
grandson, Jasper, a delightful little child, the joy of our life.
One of the things
about children and dogs is they have a special relationship at the table.
The dog’s
favorite place is at the children’s feet.
Every crumb that
falls is quickly gobbled up.
And then,
children delight in this, often throwing morsels of food to the puppy, much to
the chagrin of their parents. And of
course, the dog delights in this even more than the child.
Jesus sounds like
the mother, here. “No, don’t throw your
food to the dog. That’s for you! Eat it.”
But we all know,
children will drop the crumbs off their plate for the dogs, and the dogs will
eagerly eat every morsel that falls their way.
We’ve all seen
that played out, time and time again.
That’s the image
I’d like for you to consider, this morning.
Not that Jesus is
referring to a woman, or a Greek, as a dog, but the relationship of sheer
delight between the child and the dog in this scenario.
Pure grace.
I say that
because the dog, in this example, knows, really knows, that they are getting
something that they are not supposed to.
In our own house,
there is a certain irritation that no matter how hard we try, Kinzie, the dog,
will not go away. Given the chance, she
will always be right there lapping up the crumbs.
Grace: receiving a gift that we don’t deserve, but which
comes to us, nevertheless.
“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the
children’s crumbs.”
It is reported
that Martin Luther’s last words were “We are beggars, this is true.”
All of us are
like dogs, begging for any morsel of food that might fall our way from the
master’s table. And if we’re lucky,
there’s a child at the table willingly dropping those crumbs for us.
At the risk of
pushing this metaphor too far, what if Jesus is not the master in the tale, but
the child?
The child who
delights in throwing those morsels and crumbs to the dogs eagerly waiting
below.
”Then he said to her, “For saying that, you
may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child
lying on the bed, and the demon gone.”
From that place,
in the Region of Tyre, Jesus went on to the Decapolis, another Greek region,
and there too he healed, this time a deaf person with an impediment in his speech,
as most deaf people do.
More crumbs from
the Master’s table.
Grace.
And then in the
next passage in Mark’s Gospel Jesus is at it again, feeding 4,000 people with a
few loaves of bread, seven loaves Mark says, and after everyone had eaten, they
gathered up seven baskets full of crumbs.
More crumbs from
the Master’s table.
An abundance of
crumbs.
There’s one other
thing I think about this image of children, crumbs, and the dogs below.
No child has ever
starved to death, because of the crumbs that fell to the dogs below.
There is an
abundance of grace.
Now if you listen
to the parents, and how they chastise the child for throwing their food to the
dogs, you’d think that there is simply not enough food for both. But, there is always enough.
We have this
tendency to live with a mindset of scarcity.
Our sinful side
tends to believe that if we don’t hoard what we have, we won’t have enough.
That’s not how
grace works.
Grace is about
God’s abundance.
One of my
memories from childhood is about hoboes.
These men,
homeless, would travel from community to community, and would come to the back
door of a home, knock, and ask if they could have anything to eat. Often, they’d even offer to do some task to
earn the meal.
Noone ever
starved because they shared a meal with a hobo.
One of the things
hoboes did was to mark houses.
Somewhere, visible from the alleys they traveled down, they’d put a mark
indicating that this was a house where they had received a meal. Then, other hoboes would know that they would
also be able to get a meal there.
Grace is about
abundance.
Grace is “one
beggar telling another where to find bread.”
What is this
story about Jesus really about?
Is it about Jesus
being uncharacteristically rude, and politically incorrect, calling this
Gentile woman a dog?
Or is it about
grace, and each of us being beggars dependent on the crumbs that fall from the
Master’s table?
I think the
latter.
And I love the
thought that Jesus, as God’s son, is like the child who delights in dropping
morsels of food to the dogs below.
And then there is
the image of communion.
A little bread, a
crumb.
A few drops of
wine.
This is my body,
this is my blood, given and shed for you.
And we like
puppies, kneel below the table eagerly waiting for the morsels to fall from the
Master’s table.
Martin Luther, in
his small catechism explains that all that is required to receive communion is
a simple faith that these words, ‘for you’, mean us.
This is my body,
this is my blood, given and shed “for you” for the remission of sins.
Do you believe
that indeed, Christ’s gifts are for you?
As I think more
about this image of dogs at their master’s table, I think about faith, and a
dog’s understanding of ‘for you’.
One of the
unwritten rules that governs this scene of dog’s eating the crumbs that fall
from the Master’s table is that the food that falls to the dogs on the floor is
‘for them’.
Our dog knows
that the food on the table is not free for the taking. And she’s been good about that.
But food on the
floor is for her, whether it’s in her dish, or below Jasper’s chair.
A dog understands
“for you”.
Crumbs from the
master’s table.
Given and shed “for
you”.
It’s a simple
concept, but one we get so wrong so much of the time.
Going back to the
story of Jesus and this woman, one of the immediate ways of interpreting it is
that Jesus sees his mission as being to the children of Israel, and not to
foreigners, or possibly, not even to women.
That’s our human
sinfulness.
We like to make
rules about who is worthy of God’s grace.
Who is welcome at
the Lord’s Table?
When we do that,
we tend to think of ourselves as the honored guests with a place at the table.
And in our human
sinfulness we look at other’s as being unworthy, and not welcome.
I will leave you
with another image.
If we are
actually like dogs devouring the crumbs from our Master’s table, what dog is
not welcome??
The thing about
grace is that there is more than enough for all.
Race doesn’t
matter.
Gender doesn’t
matter.
Sexuality doesn’t
matter.
It doesn’t matter
if you’re rich or poor.
It doesn’t matter
whether you’ve been a ‘faithful’ one all your life, or if your story is like
the prodigal Son.
It doesn’t matter
who you are.
It doesn’t matter
how much you know.
It doesn’t matter
how good you are.
We are all dogs
below the Master’s table, eating the crumbs that fall from the Child’s plate.
That’s grace.
Amen
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