A woman comes to Jesus seeking deliverance for her daughter from an unclean spirit. Jesus responds by talking about food. Why?
Why would Jesus turn the woman’s request for liberation for her daughter into a meal scenario? What do food and demons have to do with one another?
In the chapters preceding this story in Mark’s gospel, food and demons show up repeatedly. Jesus casts numerous unclean spirits out of people as he travels and empowers his disciples to do the same. The first disciples he calls fish for a living, an occupation centered on acquiring and supplying food. He tells parables about planting and growing grain as he teaches and gets in more than one conflict with religious leaders over eating. And he feeds and eats with people, making sure that the hungry are fed and the outcast don’t have to eat alone.
Mark presents a Jesus who pays attention to demons and food. In his context of Roman imperial occupation, in which Jesus was surrounded by more people who were impoverished than not through economic and political exploitation, what else would you call the systems of oppression that have left your people powerless, vulnerable, suffering, and lacking adequate food and other basic needs but demonic? [1] They actively work against the life that God calls God’s people to embody together. Under their control, the very humanity of people is wrested from them, undone as oppressive forces grip every corner of their lives.
Jesus won’t have it. A vision of God’s social, political, economic, and ecological order has caught him. Plenty of good soil that provides more than enough food (4:3-8, 14-20). [2] Tables where none are excluded and all share meals together (2:15-17). A community that looks small and powerless becoming a place of steady support and shelter (4:30-32). People enjoying health and restoration after suffering without care and resources for so long (5:25-34). Forces that would oppress and dehumanize being silenced and cast out of people’s lives for good (1:23-26, 5:1-20).
Throngs of people get caught up in his vision too. The picture of God that he shows them is not quite like any they have conceived before. For some, the contrast is the news they have been longing to hear. For others, it is too much to handle, too hard to entertain.
After dealing with yet another wave of accusatory questioning about how unfaithful he and his disciples are, Jesus leaves the area and goes north to a predominantly gentile coastal city on the shores of the Mediterranean. Apparently his goal is to hide for a few days.
But a gentile woman finds him. Forces that can only be called demonic have taken hold of her daughter, and she is convinced that this Jewish man from Galilee whom she heard some people in her city talking about can set her daughter free. So she pleads for his help.
And what does he say in response? “Allow the children to eat till they’re satisfied first, because it is not good to take the bread for the children and throw it to the dogs” (7:27, my translation).
He could have just said no. Why such an indirect, figurative reply that also suggests an ethnically discriminatory insult? Why start talking about a meal when the woman was talking about a demon? Why imply that the woman’s child is like a dog at this meal? And why describe a scene that stands at odds in significant ways with the actual moment in which this woman and Jesus have met?
Let’s start with the topic shift. Jesus’s turn to food in response to the woman’s request for deliverance from a demon is more than an incidental analogy. The use of meal imagery to talk about exorcism gives voice to a deep truth about human life that liberation theologians have heralded: Liberation from oppressive powers is as basic and essential for human beings as food. Being stuck in oppression may not only mean literally having nothing to eat; it is also like having nothing to eat. People need liberation from oppression as much as they need food. If readers of Mark have not yet discerned this message between the lines of the preceding stories, Jesus’s words put it in bold type here. [3]
The meal arrangement that Jesus describes is also peculiar to me because it does not seem to align with the hierarchical first-century Greco-Roman meal practice norms. In that context, as New Testament scholars describe it, where you sat and how much food you received revolved around your level of social status, and children, who were positioned at the bottom of the social hierarchy, would have presumably been last in line for food behind adults, not first. [4] And in that context of great economic disparity, in which huge numbers of people were poor or becoming impoverished, ample food may have been a luxury that a lot of the people that Jesus met could not afford. [5] A table set with enough food for children to eat until their stomachs are satisfied, then, is a socially and economically subversive table. It is a table that humanizes those dehumanized by social, economic, and political systems of domination. It is a table where vulnerable people are welcomed and honored rather than subjected to reminders of their vulnerability through the meal.
A third puzzling detail in Jesus’s reply is his initial petition, “Allow.” The word suggests a request to grant permission or opportunity for the children to be at this table and eat until they are no longer hungry before those who are not the children eat. In the Greek language of the first century, there is a simpler way to phrase Jesus’s response that does not require the verb “allow” to be included. With his choice of phrase, I think Jesus’s words emphasize the request with a force that exceeds “let” (the NRSV translation). What is striking to me about his petition is the power it attributes to the woman who has come to Jesus for help, as if he perceives her as holding the keys to whether the children that Jesus seems to be endeavoring to feed will have their time at the table or not. It’s like Jesus is saying to her, Don’t ask me to neglect my people, who have struggled and been disempowered for too long. I’ve got to take care of them. [6]
Jesus’s response to the woman frames a scene in which liberation is vital, a subversive table is set, and this woman and her daughter, from his perspective, are potentially standing between Jesus and his empowering work in the lives of his people. Yet his portrait of the situation clashes with the story the gospel writer is telling. The woman has not caught Jesus off guard in the middle of feeding Jewish communities or exorcising demons in Galilee. He’s the one who traveled all the way to her neighborhood. He’s not currently busy doing any work. The only child mentioned and in need of attention at this point in the narrative is the woman’s daughter.
The irony is telling. As Jesus invokes the animal “dog” to characterize the human beings seeking his help while talking about what counts as “good” and “not good,” his own words betray him. They not only subject the woman and her daughter to shaming insult, but also expose a vulnerability behind his offensive statement. What would it mean for the humanization and liberation of his people to come at the expense of this gentile woman’s and her daughter’s humanity and liberation? What would it mean to call the boundary line he is drawing here good?
Now the woman won’t have it. She could have just walked away after hearing such a derogatory insult about her daughter. But she speaks up and challenges his portrait of the situation:
“Lord, even the ‘dogs’ under the table eat from the crumbs of the children” (7:28, my translation).
These words show a woman bold enough to fight for her daughter and to not allow Jesus’s account to stand. Instead of accommodating to Jesus’s table arrangement, this woman changes the scene. Her words, as I hear them, describe a different table. This is not a table of divine kingdom reversal, where the hungry are filled, but of Roman imperial rule, where the rulers have more than enough and those they rule are struggling to survive. I think she is saying something like this:
Your people are hungry, like children not served enough at the table? Guess what? My people are hungry too, subsisting on crumbs when that’s not enough for anyone. Those you call dogs are starving beneath the table. Nothing about this is good or right either. So be who I am saying you are by not requiring my daughter and me to be who you say we are. Be the exorcist who doesn’t position my child as a dog but who liberates my child too. Because right now none of us are feasting. Because freedom is as essential as food for my people and yours. Because “nobody’s free until everybody’s free” (as Fannie Lou Hamer put it). [7]
Her words stir Jesus. He does not refuse her again. He chooses to liberate her daughter from the grip of demonic powers. And he exhibits incredible power in casting out the woman’s daughter’s demon without talking to the demon or even being in the same room with the girl. The exorcism is immediate. Her daughter shares in the liberation feast.
The woman goes home and finds Jesus’s words to be true. Her daughter is free. Their life is free.
And Jesus? He heals, drives out demons, and feeds more people in need, not only among Jews but gentiles too.
What I am curious about is why the writer of Mark was compelled to tell this story about Jesus and this woman of Syrophoenician descent. Why include an episode that shows Jesus subjecting another person to a derogatory, dehumanizing characterization in a book labeled “good news” about him?
Jesus isn’t modeling how to love our neighbors, nor would it make sense for readers to conclude that he is giving a definitive account of God’s view of this mother and daughter. The woman’s retort and Jesus’s change of course shine critical light on—rather than baptizing—his initial words to her.
Maybe the writer is challenging communities of faith that first read this book to end their own possible ethnic or cultural biases and imagine a bigger, profoundly more inclusive table than they had dared to conceive before. Maybe the writer is trying to encourage these communities on the social margins to take the risk of solidarity across cultural differences with people who are also experiencing oppression under Caesar.
Or maybe the writer is providing their initial readers persons with whom they can identify in this woman and her daughter. Perhaps the writer is seeking to show through a powerful work of liberation that the kingdom of God that Jesus announced is for them too. It is for the marginalized, dehumanized, subjugated, and oppressed. If ever a doubt flickered through readers’ minds that they may not belong—because of their ethnic identity, gender, or social status—the exchange between the woman and Jesus settles it. No one is a dog here.
Whatever the author’s aim may be, this story says something revolutionary about the gospel. It tells readers that God chooses the kind of liberation that does not set some free and abandon others to oppression. God chooses liberation that ends oppressive forces in people’s lives wherever they may show up. God will pay attention to demons and food among all people “until everybody’s free.”
The question before contemporary Christian readers is: Will we?
Updated September 6, 2021
Notes & References
A piece about Mark 7:24-37, one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for Sunday, September 5, 2021
1. On the historical context of social, economic, and political inequity, see Ekkehard Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century, trans. O. C. Dean, Jr. (Bloomsbury Academic, 1999). I am also drawing upon the work of Musa Dube in its attention to the imperial context in which Matthew’s gospel was shaped, which also applies to the historical context of Mark’s gospel. See Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Chalice, 2000).
2. Two works that have helped me perceive more clearly the ecological dimensions of the Parable of the Sower are Fred Bahnson and Norman Wirzba, Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation (InterVarsity, 2012); and Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
3. Two theologians whose works have illuminated this point for me are M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Fortress, 2010); and Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Orbis, 1988).
4. Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary (Westminster John Knox, 2011), 194. On the social “marginalization” (as Dowd says) and vulnerability of children, see Stegemann and Stegemann, The Jesus Movement, 16, 59, 86, 134, 204-205; and Sharyn Down, Reading Mark: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Second Gospel (Smyth & Helwys, 2000), 96-97.
5. See Stegemann and Stegemann, The Jesus Movement, 89, 99-100, 112.
6. Here I am drawing upon Love Sechrest’s interpretation of the Matthew 15 account of this story because her perspective on Matthew’s characterization of Jesus in that scene resonates with how Mark seems to be portraying Jesus in this passage. As Sechrest notes, “Matthew’s record of Jesus’ posture toward the Canaanite does not represent that of a privileged interlocutor who withholds mercy from the only marginalized person in sight. Rather, it is the portrait of one who is himself the leader of a defeated and humbled people; it is a portrait of a leader who recognizes that he has much work to do in serving among the marginalized close to home before turning and reaching out to remote others on the margins among the nations” (299). Love L. Sechrest, “Humbled among the Nations: Matthew 15:21-28 in Antiracist Womanist Missiological Engagement” in Can “White” People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission, eds. Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramirez, and Amos Yong (InterVarsity Academic, 2018), 276-299.
7. The title of a speech that Fannie Lou Hamer gave at the Founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington, DC on July 10, 1971. See https://mississippi.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.14325/mississippi/9781604738223.001.0001/upso-9781604738223-chapter-17
Featured image of “Bread” is by Alex Block on the Unsplash website, www.unsplash.com
