A gentile Woman's Story

A Gentile Woman's Story

Sharon H. Ringe
From Feminist Interpretation of Scripture
Editor Letty M. Russell
Westminster Press. Philadelphia 1985

The church has trouble with uppity women. Such women are co-opted, ridiculed, ignored, condemned—one way or another gotten out of the way of the important business of the church and of theology. The Gentile woman whose story is told in Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:20-28 has been dealt with in all these ways at various times in the church's history and in modern critical and theological interpretation. This study is presented in memoriam(1)—in memory of her and of her fate and for the encouragement of her sisters.

The church has trouble with uppity women. Like the woman in this story, they have shown a knack for confronting pretense, predictability, and easy solutions when these are presented as a way of domesticating the offense and liberating the power of the gospel. This study is presented in celebration of the gifts and ministry of this woman and for the encouragement of her sisters.

The anonymous woman in this story comes across at first and second glance as an uppity woman. She is depicted as interrupting Jesus' rest (Mark) and annoying the disciples (Matthew). She is shown pursuing her request for help from Jesus by a verbal sparring match worthy of the craftiest of teachers (a role explicitly denied to women in Jesus' society). She even wins the argument and is said in the short run to have obtained the healing of her daughter and in the long run to have opened the way for Jesus' (and the church's) mission beyond the Jewish community.

The longer I spent with this story, coming to know and to befriend the woman in the context of the church that continues to tell her story, the more perplexed I became. I found myself cheering the woman for her gutsiness, wit, and self-possession, and at the sametime I was offended at the picture of Jesus that the story presents. I wanted to know where such a scandalous story came from, how it found its way into the Gospels, and what point it made for those who told and retold the story and for those who heard it in the church.

The disciplines of biblical criticism have taught me to approach those questions by working backward through the stories as they are presented in the Gospels, much like peeling away the layers of an onion. The problem I met, however, was that working through the disciplines of source, form, and redaction criticism led to treating the text like an onion, whose bite and flavor is in the layers but which has no core, as Katharine Sakenfeld points out in chapter 4. I learned from those layers, and from the process of examining them, how the church has adapted the story to its ecclesiastical needs and, more generally, how we who are the insiders of the church and the privileged of society work to domesticate the gospel to our point of view and to protect the Christ who is familiar and safe from the Christ who offends us. But the formal disciplines of biblical criticism left me on my own just when the only place to move was into the crucible of the story, where its power to confront and to transform could begin to work.

I invite you to journey with me, through the church's struggle to find a place for this story in its gospel and across the bridge of those questions that traditional disciplines and church interpretation leave unanswered. Finally, I invite you to enter with me into the woman's story, there to learn from her about the Christ and so also about God and about ourselves.

The Evangelists' Agenda: The Critical Task

Matthew and Mark set their similar versions of this story in or near the Gentile territory around Tyre and Sidon.(2) The two accounts differ in the point of view from which the story is told and in the relative emphasis given to the healing of the woman's daughter and to the dialogue between the woman and Jesus. In Mark a narrator sets the stage and tells us of the daughter's illness, the mother's request for Jesus to perform an exorcism, and the woman's witnessing of the successful cure. The sharp exchange between them ends in a blessing (of sorts) for the woman and in Jesus' recognition of the daughter's healing. In Matthew we are led into the event by an extended dialogue, instead of being informed about it by a narrator's report. Although Matthew uses both additions to and adaptions of the brief dialogue in Mark's account to develop his interpretation of the incident (such as by portraying the woman's reply to Jesus as less direct and perhaps more submissive),(3) the impression we get is that we are learning about the incident from the woman, the disciples, and Jesus directly. The result is that in Matthew there is less emphasis on the exorcism itself and more on the interaction of the characters.

Several details suggest that Matthew's account has been influenced by other portions of the gospel tradition and represents a reworking of the Markan story. First of all, this story and the story of the healing of the centurion's servant (Matt. 8:5-13; Luke 7: 1-10) have several points in common. Both stories have to do with Gentiles, both depict Jesus at a distance from the person who is healed, and both mention the "faith" of one of the characters. In both stories, Matthew's versions present more extended dialogues than are found in the parallel accounts, and in both cases the dialogues have to do with participation in the reign of God. Matthew's story of the healing of two blind men (Matt. 20:29-34), which parallels the story of Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46-52, may also have influenced Matthew's version of the story of the Gentile woman, since both stories tell of a rebuke of the petitioners by onlookers, and in both the petitioners address Jesus as kyrios (which carries the double meaning of a polite "sir" and the confessional title "Lord" or "Sovereign") and as "Son of David."

Figuring out the form of the story, and consequently the role it played in the church before being incorporated into the Gospel, presents several difficulties. On the surface it appears to be a story of an exorcism, expanded by a controversy dialogue. Thus, following Mark's account, we are told of the severity of the child's illness (v. 25a) and of the earnestness of the mother's efforts to obtain help for her (vs. 25b, 26b) and the fact that the exorcism has indeed taken place (v. 30). The dialogue between Jesus and the mother comes at the place where we expect the means of healing to be disclosed. The absence of that detail (which Matthew supplies in v. 28b of his account), plus the coherence of the Markan story as a dramatic setting for the exchange between Jesus and the woman,(4) lead some scholars to suggest that this is therefore primarily a "pronouncement story" and specifically (with Bultmann) a "controversy dialogue," built around the sayings in verses 27-28. (5) However, that suggestion too presents a problem, because the exchange between Jesus and the woman reverses the pattern usually found in such stories. Usually a situation or event provokes a hostile question from some onlooker to Jesus, to which Jesus responds with a correcting or reproving question and then drives home his point by a concluding statement which the opponent would be hard put to deny. In this story, however, it is Jesus who provides the hostile saying and the woman whose retort trips him up and corrects him. It is hard to imagine why the church at any stage of its development would want to present the Christ it confesses in such a light!

Many scholars rely on Mark's editorial placement of this story in the Gospel, supported by the fact that there is indeed evidence that in Jewish tradition Gentiles were called "dogs,"(6) to account for the existence of this story in the church's lore about Jesus and even to legitimate the portrait of Jesus it presents. These scholars suggest that the story is to be understood in the context of the early church's struggle to comprehend the Gentile mission and subsequent relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the church and in God's agenda of salvation. This story would address such an ecclesiastical situation by grounding the solution to these problems in the remembered ministry of Jesus. Indeed, the place where Mark has incorporated this story into the Gospel does suggest that he intended it to address the expansion of the limits of the community of faith. The episodes in Mark 6:45—8:26 portray Jesus not only in and around Gentile territory and encountering Gentile people but also dealing with the principal issue in Jewish-Gentile relations: namely, the issue of defilement (Mark 7:1-23). These stories mirror many earlier episodes of Jesus' ministry reportedly carried out in Jewish territory.(7) Following the cycle of stories among the Gentiles is the story of the incident at Caesarea Philippi, which appears to seal Jesus' fate and to propel the Gospel to its inevitable conclusion in Jerusalem. In this context, the story of the Gentile woman appears to be part of the authentication by Jesus of the Gentile mission which took place later in the church. As the woman's perception of Jesus contrasts with the exclusive concerns of those closest to Jesus (with whom Mark's community would doubtless identify), Mark seems to be addressing both what may have been his church's claim to have an inside track on faithfulness and what may have been lingering concerns in that community about how to understand the Gentile presence.

Without the larger gospel context and the saying in verse 27, however, the Jewish-Gentile reference within Mark's version of this story is not clear. The picture underlying the exchange between Jesus and the woman is a simple one of a poor Palestinian household, in which family and pets shared the single room. In fact, the word translated "dogs" might better be translated as "puppies" or "house dogs." Thus one might hear Jesus' observation to mean, "Scarce bread needed for the children is not given to the family's pets." "But what the children drop," responds the woman, "the dogs will take." The logic is primarily that of the household and only secondarily that of salvation history.(8)

The Text Out of Context: The Questions Are Sharpened

To recognize that this story was elaborated in a way that brings into focus questions of Jewish-Gentile relations in the early church is still not to suggest that the story was composed by the church in order to address those concerns. To begin with, the earliest discernible form of the story need not be read as addressingJewish-Gentile relations at all. Second, even if the saying in Mark's verse 27 is understood to be a proverb, and even if it was a metaphorical way of referring to the fact that the petitioner in this case is a Gentile, that saying addressed to the woman is offensive in the extreme. Metaphor or not, Jesus is depicted as comparing the woman and her daughter to dogs! No churchly or scholarly gymnastics are able to get around that problem. To note that the Greek word is a diminutive, meaning "puppies" or "little dogs," does not soften the saying, for, as Burkill points out, "As in English, so in other languages, to call a woman 'a little bitch' is no less abusive than to call her 'a bitch' without qualification."(9)

Jesus' flippant, even cruel, response to the woman defies justification. Try as we might, we really cannot see in this story a cozy domestic scene with family and pets happily coexisting under one roof and under the leadership of a benevolent householder (who becomes the stand-in for the Sovereign Christ in an inclusive church). We also do not find Jesus simply testing the woman's faith by an initially contrived and only apparent rejection.(10) Equally hard to recognize here is Taylor's claim to find in this story a glimpse of an incident in Jesus' life, but even more a glimpse into Jesus' psyche, showing that at this point in his life there was "tension in the mind of Jesus concerning the scope of his ministry." "He is speaking to Himself as well as to the woman," Taylor concludes (wishfully, I think). "Her reply shows that she is quick to perceive this."(11) Appar ently (though Taylor does not draw this conclusion), it would then have been her tolerance of Jesus' indecision that allowed her to swallow the insult.

The shocking quality of the portrait of Jesus, plus the indications of internal development in the story, suggest to me that instead of composing this story to address contemporary church problems, the early church—at least from Mark's day on—made the best of a bizarre tradition about Jesus which it received. The very strangeness and the offensiveness of the story's portrayal of Jesus may suggest that the core of the story was indeed remembered as an incident in Jesus' life when even he was caught with his compassion down. I would suggest further that the story was originally remembered and retold in the community not for its ecclesiastical significance but primarily because of its christological significance. It tells us something about Jesus as the Christ, and only consequently something about us as the church.

In order to explore the christological significance of this story, and perhaps to hear afresh a word through the text to our own day, we will need to consider the account by itself, outside the framework that Mark provides. We will need to hear it as a story, a story-within-a-larger-story, drawing us into itself through its characters and their interaction. Obviously the leading character in the larger Gospel story is Jesus, but in this particular episode the protagonist is the Gentile woman.

On Gifts and Ministries: The Woman's Story

We know at once very little and a lot about her. She is a resident of the Gentile region including the cities of Tyre and Sidon. She was thus a foreigner to Jesus in an ethnic sense; she was a woman, and in fact a woman alone.(12) She may have been a widow, or divorced, or never married. In any event, she appears to be totally isolated from family support, for if there had been any male relative in her family (or among her in-laws if she had been married), he would have had the responsibility of caring for her and her daughter and of interceding on their behalf. Perhaps these family members, if there were any, lived at a great distance. Or perhaps for some reason they chose no longer to acknowledge the woman as part of their circle. She may have had sons somewhere, but if she were widowed or divorced they would probably have been taken over by her in-laws.

When we meet her, she is left with a daughter. In her society's terms that is a further liability, for daughters were not greatly valued. Sons were the focus of one's hopes and one's longing. Daughters usually cost money (at least for a dowry) and were often regarded as troublesome pieces of property weighing on their families until they could be safely married off to a suitable husband. In addition, we know that according to the customs of first-century Palestinian society, this woman should have been invisible. No Jewish man, especially one with a religious task or vocation, expected to be approached by a woman (Jew or Gentile), except perhaps by one of the many lone women reduced to prostitution to support themselves.

But we know some other things about the particular woman in this story. Apparently she did not accept the low esteem in which her society held her daughter, or its restrictions on her own behavior. She did not hesitate to approach Jesus, and even actively to importune him. And she valued her daughter, this one fundamentally like her who was still with her, who was suffering, and whose life was precious enough to demand healing and transformation, liberation from the alien forces that appeared to have taken her over. For the sake of her daughter, the woman broke custom, went after what she needed, and stood up to this visiting rabbi and miracle worker of whom so many stories had doubtless been told. And she bested him in an argument. Finally, she got what she wanted: Her daughter was healed.

Insofar as this is a story about a ministry, it is traditionally seen as an account of Jesus' healing ministry to this woman and her daughter. Hearing the story with ears tuned to women's experience, we might also point to the woman's intercessory ministry on behalf of her daughter. But there are two other dimensions of ministry suggested in both the Markan and Matthean accounts. First, there is the woman's ministry in a general sense as a witness to Jesus. In Mark her witness is primarily to him as miracle worker, but also to him as one whose attention and help could be won by persistence. Matthew helps us to recognize this witnessing ministry of the woman most clearly by the way he tells the story. We are led into the incident by the woman herself; we see it from her point of view. We are with her at the edge of the company around Jesus. We hear her words, and we hear and feel the response she gets. This greater use of direct discourse underlines the fact that this woman belongs in the company of others who by their active importuning (which is called by Matthew "faith," here and elsewhere) proclaim who Jesus is.

The second additional dimension of ministry present in the story is the woman's ministry to Jesus by her "faith"—a faith that is no doctrinal confession of his messianic identity, and no flattery of his apparently miraculous powers, but rather an act of trust, of engagement, risking everything. That act has the effect, as the story is told, of enabling Jesus to see the situation in a different way. That new perspective appears to free Jesus to respond, to heal, to become again the channel of God's redeeming presence in that situation. Whatever provoked the initial response attributed to Jesus (whether we should conclude that he was tired, or in a bad mood, or even that he appears to have participated in the racism and sexism that characterized his society), it is the Gentile woman who is said to have called his bluff. In so doing, she seems to have enabled him to act in a way apparently blocked to him before. Her wit, her sharp retort, was indeed her gift to Jesus—a gift that enabled his gift of healing in turn, her ministry that opened up the possibility of his. Her gift was not the submission or obedience seen as appropriate for women in her society, but rather the gift of sharp insight—the particular insight of the poor and outcast who can see through a situation because they have few illusions to defend. Her gift was also the gift of courage—the courage of those who have little more to lose and therefore can act in commitment and from faith on behalf of others, for the sake of life, wholeness, and liberation. Indeed, these highly political and encouraging words describe the quality of Jesus' ministry to this woman and to her daughter.

Thus, behind whatever ecclesiastical significance the church has found in this story, there appears to be a christological point: It sets forth who Jesus is as the Christ of God. The hallmarks of that identity, here as elsewhere in the gospel tradition, are qualities and actions of life and freedom, made known in painful human interaction. Elsewhere those who see themselves as the privileged people in social or religious terms are shown struggling to comprehend this Christ who so often offends them, while the "poor"—the economically poor and socially outcast, the sick, the oppressed, the rejected —respond joyfully to the good news of God's reign. Here Jesus himself must learn about being that sort of Christ from one of the poorest of the poor and most despised of the outcast—a Gentile woman on her own before God and humankind. Her gifts and her ministry become the vehicle of the gospel to Jesus and to us. And we who hear and tell her story say, "So be it."

Notes

1. Trible, "Feminist Hermeneutics and Biblical Studies"; Fiorenza, In Memory of Her.

2. Luke does not tell the woman's story at all. If he knew the story from Mark's Gospel, he apparently chose not to repeat it. In fact, Luke's Gospel does not contain a series of accounts clustered at this point in Mark (Mark 6:45—7:26), all of which deal with Jesus' relationship to Gentiles. Thus it may be that the omission of this story was part of a broader decision.

3. In Matthew the woman speaks of dogs receiving crumbs from "the master's table," whereas in Mark she responds in a way more directly parallel to Jesus' words to her (Jesus: Children's bread not thrown to dogs; woman: Dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs [Ringe]). The saying in verse 27 of Mark ("Let the children first be fed") appears to be an editorial addition to the story, since there is no suggestion in the narrative that the woman has forced herself onto Jesus' agenda ahead of anyone else. Note also similar sayings in Romans 1:6 and 2:10.

4. That coherence is evident despite some variation in wording in the account. The cause of the daughter's distress is called an "unclean spirit" in verse 25 but a "demon" elsewhere. It must be noted that the different word occurs only in the setting, which was probably supplied by Mark. That same introductory verse also contains the only instance where the daughter is called by the diminutive word "little daughter"; elsewhere she is called "daughter," except in the concluding verse, where she is called a "child." That last term echoes the one used in the woman's reply to Jesus in verse 28. In a sense, then, the variations interweave even more tightly the components of the story.

5. Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (Harper & Row, 1963), p. 38. This view is held by many scholars, including Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According to Mark (John Knox Press, 1970), p. 151; Vincent Taylor, The Gospel According to St. Mark (Macmillan Co., 1957), p. 347; Willi Marxsen, Mark the Evangelist (Abingdon Press, 1969), p. 60.

6. Taylor, The Gospel According to St. Mark, p. 350.

7. Howard Clark Kee, Community of the New Age (Westminster Press, 1977), p. 83.

8. The conclusion that the issue of Jewish-Gentile relations represents a later interpretation of the story is further supported by details in Matthew's version. First, there the woman is identified not by the political or geographic designation of "Greek" or "Syrophoenician" but rather as a "Canaanite," the term common in Hebrew scriptures to refer to those most clearly not part of the chosen people. Second, Jesus' initial response to the woman's request sets her apart from the "lost sheep of the house of Israel" to whom he has been sent. Finally, Matthew breaks the homely metaphor of the Markan account, so that the "dogs" no longer simply get to eat up the crumbs that the children drop but rather are entitled to the leftovers from the master's table.

9. T. A. Burkill, "The Story of the Syrophoenician Woman," Novum Testamentum 9:173 (1967).

10. J.D.M. Derett ("Law in the New Testament: The Syrophoenician Woman and the Centurion of Capernaum," Novum Testamentum 15:162 [1973] ) points out that this is a common resolution by both the church and the scholarly community to the unacceptable portrait of Jesus that is presented here.

11. Taylor, The Gospel According to St. Mark, p. 350.

12. See the discussion of laws and customs affecting women in first-century Palestine in Chapter XVIII ("Appendix: The Social Position of Women") of Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (Fortress Press, 1969), pp. 359-376.

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