Readings:
Isaiah 35: 4-7a;
Psalm 146;
James 2: 1-10 (11-13) 14-17;
Mark 7: 24-end

Collect:
Merciful God
your Son came to save us
and bore our sins on the cross:
may we trust in your mercy and know your love
rejoicing in the righteousness that is ours through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Reflection

Our gospel story this week – the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman – is a strange one. What’s going on here? Is Jesus trying to catch this woman out? Is he being mean to her? Is she teaching Jesus something he didn’t already know? All of these have been suggested by commentators as possible interpretations, but none of them quite ring true to me.

I think Jesus already knew perfectly well, knew all along, that there was a place for this woman at God’s table, as there is for us all. In saying this provocative thing about “throwing the children’s food to the dogs”, seeming to compare her to a dog (which would have sounded even ruder to Jesus’ contemporaries than it does to us) Jesus is provoking the woman into realising for herself an important truth: that she is worth more than this.

When this woman, whose name we don’t even know, stands up for herself, and demands more of Jesus, he responds. He does not give her only the crumbs she asks for, but the complete healing and freedom she needs, for her child and for herself. In this strange and dramatic encounter, the point has been made far more forcefully than it would have been if Jesus had merely stated it: everyone – even those who are considered, by themselves or others, the lowest of the low – everyone is held within the scope of the extraordinary grace generosity of God. In God’s eyes, we are all worth so much more than the crumbs from somebody else’s table.

We – whoever we are – do not earn our place at God’s table because of who we are or what we do. We are given it because of who God is and what God has already done for us.

Some commentators point to this passage as an argument for inclusion, which perhaps it is, but there is also something far more radical than that going on here. In conventional models of inclusion, those with the power and privilege choose to include those without. But that is not what is going on here. Jesus is not just choosing to include this woman in his pre-conceived plans and ideas. Rather, she she is choosing to draw him into her worldview, and he is allowing himself to   become – at least to some extent – receptive to that. In this passage, as so often in the gospels, Jesus turns upside down our notions of hospitality, of who is the host and who is the guest, who holds the power and who is on the receiving end of it. 

There is perhaps a challenge here for each of us. What do we mean when we speak about being an inclusive church? Are we able to go beyond including others in our plans, and allow ourselves to be interrupted and changed by people very different to us, as Jesus is in this story? That can feel like a risky and unsettling thing to do, but we do it secure in the knowledge that we and all whom we meet are held in the great love of God who knows and responds to our needs. 

Ruth Harley