A sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, originally published by RadicalDiscipleship.net.
And he said to her, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” (Mk 7:27)
Note, right up front, how rapidly the subject shifts topic in this Marcan vignette. It goes from unclean spirit to bread to puppies and argues about priorities. Pretty easy for somebody eclectic like me to open up, in response, a fire hydrant of ideas without any hoses attached. So, my title is an attempt to organize the flow a bit. We begin (ha!) with the word “first.”
The sacred Jewish writing known as the Talmud (Brachot 40a) asserts: “It is forbidden for people to eat before they give food to their animals as it says (Dvarim 11:15), ‘I will provide grass in your field for your cattle’ and only then does the verse state ‘and you will eat and be satisfied’” (Rav Yehuda, teaching in the name of Rav, quoted by Halickman)[1]
But, but then in the Gospel of Mark today (as we read), Rabbi Jesus says: “Let the children first be fed; it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Mk 7: 27).
And those “buts” (plus a bunch more) will be central in the riff to follow here—one thing going one way, and then suddenly the same thing going another way, or even a line of anatomy curving around against itself and in “cheeky” fashion, doing so twice. There are buts and then there are “butts.” As we shall note.
But in any case, we will first go deep into the question of the title and quest for human-to-human justice here. And then go round a second time—against the grain—to ask about dogs and destinies more-than-human and ultimate.
But we start in the middle. Mark’s gospel has two parts corresponding to two geographies. Jesus’ early ministry begins in his home region of Galilee, where he preaches and teaches, heals and exorcizes (with an “o” though he also exercises with an “e” given that he is walking everywhere). All kinds of power gets exhibited, illness remedied, bodies restored, spirits cleared, even seas walked! But nobody understands—not his enemies, not his hometown relatives, not his movement followers, not even his inner circle. He commits cultural trespass already in chapter one; he does civil disobedience in crossing the line legally in chapter two; by chapter three the plotting on his life begins, and quickly he is under surveillance by the authorities (Palestine’s own green light system).
When we get to the other end of Mark’s tale, we will find Jesus has relocated his activities to the Jerusalem Temple, beginning with his movement followers poaching on the annual Passover pilgrimage, as he rides donkey-back into Jerusalem. Next day, he will invade the Temple, overturn the banking apparatus in the courtyard, and begin engaging in daily “free-style battle raps” in the temple precincts with his political interrogators, until finally they can’t stand it anymore and arrest him in prep for his public execution.
So, in this second half of Mark, we encounter a lot of high-stakes verbiage. But no healings. No exorcisms (except the Temple grounds itself, in terms of overturned tables and cord-whipped moneychangers driven out). No water-walking (though he does precipitate a thunderstorm at one point, but that’s another sermon). And then crucifixion and an earthquake.
But how did this shift take place? It took place when he got out of Dodge (that is, Galilee) because the surveillance had become so heavy-handed and bellicose, he went “underground,” on the run from the police and the Christian Nationalists (well, maybe the precursors to the Christian nationalists). In Mark chapter 7, he goes out of Israel proper, away from Herod’s jurisdiction, towards the northern seacoast and the Gentile cities of Tyre and Sidon. With a few of his closest male disciples, he seeks to be closeted in hiding.
But rumor unearths him. A woman of the region hears of him and comes knock-knock-knocking at his door. And we need to pause and be sure we “get it” at this point. He has been traipsing around his watershed, stirring up trouble and interest until it gets too damm messy. He bolts straight out of the muddle north to unfamiliar terrain, has an unwanted encounter there, then bolts straight back into Israel proper, with face set to Jerusalem for the high-noon showdown with the Powers that be, pretty clear he won’t come out the other side. Operating with a completely different vision. Completely different consciousness. Completely different mission. Going for the jugular. What happened to flip him?
This encounter we just read in Mark. It is the most provocative and scandalous text in the entire New Testament if read closely. Matthew is the only other place we read about the encounter, and he is so put off by Mark’s rendition, he has to completely change it up. But in any case, it begins with an interruption that Jesus’ front desk can’t manage to screen out. A woman comes into his hideout and throws herself at his feet. And we need to register the situation.
Who is who in this meddlesome altercation? This is Tyre—everywhere else in the gospel witness, an urban Power on the order of Sodom. Hated by the Jewish authors. And with good reason. Historically, gentile Tyre, bolstered by wealth from its purple-dye commerce, had regularly aggressed on northern Israel whenever it wanted to flex muscle, take over more resources, coerce more labor. Most Galilean families had experienced its blunt and bloody violence at some point in the past. But now, Jesus is seeking to “disappear” into its urban anonymity, lick his chops a bit, incognito, ducking out on Herod’s Roman-backed Galilean control. And this woman shows up!
Who has power with respect to whom here? He is a Jewish male healer, with growing renown, surrounded by a little cadre of fellow Jewish males, who are mostly rough-cut fisherfolk. He doesn’t need or particularly want her attention. But she wants his! She is, we are told, Syro-Phoenician, descended from both in-land farming folk and cunning sea-faring traders. And a little detail at the end of the tale, the word for “bed”—that her daughter will rise up off of—is actually indicative of wealth; it is a luxury bed, not a peasant pallet. She is a woman of means, on her own turf, sharing ethnicity and culture with the urban power-elites who run that show.
But she is also . . . suspect. In neither gentile nor Jewish culture of the time did women by themselves seek out males in the abode of the latter . . . unless they were on prowl for business. The presumption in the eyes of anyone watching would be that she was “red-lighting,” a hooker looking for clientele. And even if not that, a woman without a male in her life—husband, brother, uncle, etc.—that she could send with her request. Thus desperate, at some level. So, the situation is quite complex in terms of power relations.
She keeps asking. And he keeps refusing, finally setting a temporal priority (children first) and, without blinking, “dogs her.” Seemingly names her a cur. And we think, “Whoa! I thought this was the Messiah. God’s best Rep! And he’s cutting her with a slur?”
But a little reflection might temper the offense. How do Native folk on Turtle Island respond when white people try to crash their sweat-lodge ceremonies, saying, “Oh, Native ceremony? Us too!! We want, we want, we want!! To be able to tack the experience onto our mall-centered lifestyle as a bit of extra embroidery, sump’in to talk about next cocktail party!” Lotta Native folk might understandably think, “Damn, they have killed off 95 % of us, taken 98 % of our land, entirely eclipsed us from concern, and now they want our spirituality as well??!! Want us to heal them of their malaise??!!” And stick up a certain finger at the attempt. Is JC doing the equivalent here?
Could be. And if so, with warrant. But there is subtlety in the mix. We got to pay mind to the culture—and it is not our own. He actually is refusing her in the name of a particular value. Littleness. “Children,” whose bread he wants to secure. He will even at one point in his ministry name “the least” as stewards of eternal life for everyone else, in his Last Judgement parable. As gatekeepers to eternity! And he is their champion.
But this is not a woman to be trifled with as if she herself is insignificant, of “little account.” She is savvy and knows her game. She is playing herself “as” little by showing up kneeling. But she wields shame like a big weapon. She corners him, exactly in his Jewish male pride and insistence on honor.
The diss rap “spitting contest” is indeed about littleness. He has refused her by asserting he defends the priority of children, in the process hinting she is but a Gentile dog, seeking recourse for her own “little puppy” daughter. In the Greek of the text, he has used the diminutive version of that latter word to sharpen the put down, casting her and her daughter as a pack of scavenger puppies on prowl for garbage in the alley.
She comes back at him three-fold. She is indeed advocating on behalf of her own child—not a “movement cause” in general, but a particular little one who is her own flesh-and-blood. But she knows how to do the dozens! Literally, in the Greek she says: “Yes, sir, yet even the little dogs [his diminutive] eat the little crumbs that fall from the little kids’ plates [her diminutives]. You’re refusing me in the name of ‘littleness’??? I say back to you: ‘Littleness, littleness, littleness!!!’” Three times. To his one. And he is verbally cornered. Boxed in. In the battle of diminutives, she has spoken such that he dare not refuse her or he compromises the very thing he is supposedly championing! She is a savvy woman who knows how to play herself as small in order to spring a big trap. And gets what she needs.
How does he respond? Exactly as he should. He commends her. For speaking as she has. The Greek is unequivocal. She has spoken logos to him. The very thing he himself supposedly “is,” according to John. The Word, the Logos, of God, incarnate. But here it has leapt track and come back at him from without. Spoken by a woman who is a single female head of house and not even a Jew! A “pagan woman”!
And it gets even deeper, as he further says, “Already gone is the demon from your daughter.” Past tense. Not because of anything he is doing. And thus, the question: whose word delivered her daughter? Presumably . . . her own! There is no other candidate. Her saying, her “logos,” delivered her daughter. And arguably, “exorcized” any incipient ethno-centric patriarchal exclusion he may have been channeling or tempted to impose from his culture. Was he on the verge of being possessed by such? After all he is “fully human” (according to the early church 300-years down the road at Nicaea) and indeed is subject to temptation according to the gospels themselves. Did her word also “deliver” him? How do you read?![2] In any case, it is the only example we have of Jesus being bested in argumentation in the entire biblical corpus. By a pagan! Who was a woman!
Matthew can’t stand it. He has to change up Mark’s narration, so the woman is commended not for her “backtalk” joust, reducing Jesus to a corner, but more typically for her humbly-kneeling “faith.” In him. And Matthew changes the tense of deliverance to the present, so it is clearly his word effecting the exorcism, not hers. But he also introduces a new word to the mix. He calls her “Canaanite.”
And here we get into a much bigger frame. This is the Season of Creation, so now I will wax a bit wanton and wild, with suggestions that can only hint and invite, not pin down. So far, we’ve been thinking of “dogs” as metaphors for despised humans and cultural differences. But what if we let the dogs be real for a minute and focus on the more-than-human world? Unlike some other neighboring peoples of the region, Israel considered dogs unclean, not even worthy of being kept as pets in the house, much less brought into the cult as divine consorts like the ritual practices of Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Babylonians.
And yet.
Set aside our Christian supremacy and go on a little excursion through other religious practices with me for a minute. Yes, “pagan.” But also, more indigenous.
All the way up to today, there is a canine species called in Hebrew Kelef Kanani (“Canaan dog”), who are described in the Jewish literature[3] as very athletic but not hyperactive, intelligent, adept, quick, possessed of phenomenal memory, unable to be bought off with affection, attention, or food, but only via mutual respect, as if embodying (I would ad lib) a kind of gift-economy morality. Animals teaching “gift-economy” respect! They are also renowned as remarkable mothers who will care for their pups indefinitely. Who actually go feral, during Roman occupation, refusing imperial domination, if you will, but keeping themselves intact in their character in the arid grasslands alongside Bedouin herders, among whom they are especially treasured as hunting companions and watchdogs. Matthew likely intends the moniker as a disparaging putdown. But some of the references of the word rebound with hints otherwise . . .
And then there is the fact that there are dogs lurking around in 1st century Palestine itself, who are, for instance, a “solace to Lazarus,” in the parable of the rich man that Luke tells, licking his wounds. And now it gets even spicier—as dog-saliva in ancient understanding (and even some modern analysis), had curative properties, and some Gentile shrines in the area “employed” and even “paid” (with bread and other foods) dogs to roam their precincts and offer “tongue-services” to those seeking healing or guidance through dreams.
Indeed, in some temples, puppies, in particular, were used as “scapegoat surrogates” for those suffering possession, being held up and passed over the bodies of the sufferers to attract the unclean spirit and then either killed outright or released to unsettled terrain carrying away the unwanted daimon with them.
And lurking back in the history of Mediterranean seacoast town, Tyre, especially, is the mythology of the patron deity of the city, Herakles-Melqart, walking his revered dog on the beach one day, who bites a tidally-marooned Murex shell and then grins at his master, bright-lipped with a purple color, destined to make the city famous for its sought-after dyes, that end up, down the road, commercialized and commodified by royal monopoly. In Roman times, it will even become a crime punishable by death for commoners to dare ever wear Tyrean purple! Even though ironically—and in keeping with how I began this circumambulation—it is “chiefly distilled from a dehydrated mucous gland of mollusks that lies just behind the rectum: the bottom of the bottom-feeders,” as says one reporter on the phenomenon.[4] There are indeed, many “butts” in this sermon!
But in its founding myth, the dog serves the deity who presents the winsome color to the goddess-nymph with whom he is ambling, like so many other remarkable offerings of the wild, first taken up, in human storytelling, to be fashioned into a gift given back to the Holy in nature in a manner not granting human benefit, but giving due wonder and acknowledgement to the Big Mystery that brought all of this into being in the first place. Herakles and the nymph may not exactly be exemplifying that old posture, but they still carry a penumbra, a shadow, of that orientation. A human-hero giving a divine goddess a wild-gift discovered and made available by a dog.
So yes, “don’t give the children’s bread to the little puppies” checked by the rejoinder, “yet even the little puppies under the table eat the little crumbs of the little kids.” And it turns out there were even some little whelps in some ancient world palaces (Hittite in particular) who were called the “puppies of the table,” who were employed “apotropaically”—big word for a loud or fierce-appearing figure put on public protective display—to guard the abode against strangers, evil words, and unclean spirits cast out in exorcism rites. Those protector-puppies were typically fed “table scraps.”
And we have to wonder: is Jesus subtly pillorying this Gentile practice as well? And is she—the “Canaan-Dog” Woman—pushing right back on him?
So, thus! Much to ponder! I will not bother to try to orchestrate all of this into some kind of tidy coherence, but let it sit there in suggestiveness, signifying as it might . . . Enough to conclude here, dogs were the very first species humans ever domesticated—maybe as early as 30,000 years ago—long, long before ever we turned “domestication” into a wholesale program of enslavement of every plant, animal, metal, fossil, liquid, gas, and each other in order to be redeployed as mere tools of elite aggression, entertainment, comfort, and abuse until ultimately discarded as “toxified” garbage.
The Syro-Phoenician woman’s comeback to Jesus suggests the compelling import: puppies may need to be understood alongside “kids” (human children) as of equal worth. (You’ve heard me enough times up here to know I love to speak modern blasphemies. And yes, if the Christian nationalists win in November, I may end up in deep trouble someday if somebody is recording this sermon!). But yes, kids and puppies—both worthy of feeding! And yes—a human companion, full of loyalty and affection! But also—quite capable of going it alone in the wild, when such a human program of control and exploitation gets self-deluded and obscenely rapacious.
The real implication may well be that everything deserves to eat from the same table we do—since we eat at the table of everything else, with wanton disregard and extractive-ness and stupidity! High time we stop saying, “We’re first! Everything else—be content with scraps after the fact and please clean up our garbage!” High time we recognize, instead, in the current line-up on the planet, almost everything and everyone else came before we humans did. They are our elders and teachers and companions. But many of them also have teeth. And we too are finally destined to become food. The only real question is, “will we be good to eat?” And that will depend on how we have lived and treated everyone else! Especially our elders. Beginning with those closest to us, begging at our tables! “Yes, let the children be fed.” But, butt, but, everyone else as well!
[1] Sharona Margolin Halickman, “The Animals Eat First,” https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-animals-eat-first/
[2] As he himself will insist in his own argument with a testy lawyer, recounted in Luke (Lk 10:26).
[3] Avi Kumar. 2021. “Canaan Dog – The Breed Mentioned In The Bible And Quran,” TheJ.CA (1/8/21), https://www.thej.ca/2021/01/08/canaan-dog-the-breed-mentioned-in-the-bible-and-quran/
[4] Grovier, Kelly. 2018. “Tyrian Purple: The Disgusting Origins of the Colour Purple,” BBC (8/1/18), https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180801-tyrian-purple-the-regal-colour-taken-from-mollusc-mucus
Dr. James W. Perkinson 