Thursday in the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time, February 11, 2021

Mark 7:24-30

Jesus went to the district of Tyre. He entered a house and wanted no one to know about it, but he could not escape notice. Soon a woman whose daughter had an unclean spirit heard about him. She came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged him to drive the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first. For it is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” She replied and said to him, “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.” Then he said to her, “For saying this, you may go. The demon has gone out of your daughter.” When the woman went home, she found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.

St. Matthew also recounts this episode in his Gospel (15, 22-28).  From his account, the woman began by following the Lord on the road and calling after him.  It seems, from St. Mark’s version, that she followed him to the house in which he was staying at the time, and spoke to him there.  

Mark prefaces his account by saying that “[the Lord] entered a house and wanted no one to know about it, but he could not escape notice.”  It is noteworthy that he (1) went up to Tyre, which was gentile territory, and (2) was staying at “a house”.  Matthew says that he “withdrew” or “departed” to this country, but he does not explain why anymore than Mark does.  At the same time, he must have stayed at the house of a fellow Jew.  Because he “wanted no one to know” that he was there, he does not seem to have preached in any synagogues in the area, so he would not have met any fellow Jews who might have invited him to stay with him.

Despite the Lord’s desire for anonymity, “he could not escape notice”.  News of the Jew who performed miracles and drove out demons had gone out far and wide.  We read in Matthew 4, 24 that even in his early ministry, “his fame went throughout all Syria.”  This would have included the land of Tyre and Sidon.  Perhaps some who had come to Galilee from this foreign land to be cured by him told about him when they returned to their homes, and then recognized him on the streets when he arrived there and pointed him out to others.  Perhaps the lesson the Lord meant to teach his Apostles here was that with the beginning of their preaching after Pentecost, the Faith he was handing on to them would spread like wildfire throughout the world, and that they would enter a region for the first time and find that believers already existed there.  This is a result of “casting seed”: the farmer casts it in all directions and harvests it wherever it grows.  

“Soon a woman whose daughter had an unclean spirit heard about him.”  We know from previous accounts in Mark that wherever the Lord went in Galilee, crowds gathered quickly with their sick — even anticipating his arrival in places.  No tendency to reticence prevented anyone from bringing their sick or otherwise afflicted relatives and friends to him.  People even came together to carry the lame to him.  A single sighting of the Lord proved sufficient to throw a whole area into upheaval as folks rushed to him from all sides.  The same might have been expected in this gentile land as well, but even if the Lord’s reputation had become known this far from home, only this woman approached him for help.  

Mark does not tell us, as Matthew does, that the Apostles attempted to have the Lord send her away.  His interest is simply in what transpired between the Lord and this woman and so he streamlines his account.  Now, we notice here that the woman came by herself.  Like the centurion who came to Jesus on behalf of his slave, who was sick, or Jairus, who went to him for his daughter, this woman comes for one who cannot come herself, so terrible is her condition.  Perhaps this girl is tied up as the man possessed by Legion had been, though it had not lasted long in his case.  Binding a demon-possessed person or a lunatic was in those days the last-ditch method of preventing their harming themselves or others.  It was an ancient form of the sedation through drugs we use today.  “She came and fell at his feet.”  She, the heir of the proud Phoenician culture, humbled herself before a Jew from the hinterland, and begged for his help.  Her posture is one adopted before the eastern kings who were acclaimed as semi-divine, or as a slave before her master.  She offered true homage to him as had not been offered anywhere else he had gone.  We do not see the people of Capernaum doing this before him.  Jesus tested her homage, not because he doubted it, but to make this point to his Apostles: “Let the children be fed first. For it is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”  The woman, remaining on the ground before him and covering her head, as was the practice, accepted his calling her a “dog”, for as she had humbled herself as a slave, she showed that she was willing to be addressed as such, if only he would deign to speak to her at all.

  She bravely replied, “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.”  Jesus did not keep her in suspense.  “For saying this, you may go. The demon has gone out of your daughter.”  He dismisses her, with her request granted.  She comes to him as a slave, believing that all, including the demons, were likewise his slaves.  He need not render himself unclean by entering her house to help her daughter; he need only give the command, even from afar, and it would be carried out.  

And then she went home, backing out of the house from before Jesus because one never showed one’s back to a king or a master.  Hurrying home at all speed, “she found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.”  Jesus had rewarded her faith.  And it was true faith, greater than anyone that had been shown the Lord to this point in Israel, for this is the first time in the Gospel of St. Mark that anyone had addressed Jesus as “Lord”.