Thursday in the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time, February 10, 2022

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.

The ancient city of Tyre was set about forty miles northwest of Nazareth on the Mediterranean coast.  During our Lord’s lifetime, it flourished as a regional capital and port within the Roman Empire.  Its citizens were the proud heirs of a very rich ancient culture which had invented the alphabet, colonized faraway lands, and extended trade throughout the Mediterranean world.   Despite its greatness, there seemed little reason for the Lord Jesus to visit it.  According to the historian Josephus, the Tyrians were “bitter enemies” of the Jews, and from this we know that Jews did live in the city, but St. Mark tells us that while the Lord stayed there “he wanted know one to know about it”, and so it seems that he did not go there to preach to or to encourage the Jewish population.  In fact, the one action we are told the Lord performed there involved not the Jews but Gentile natives of the place.

We can benefit from comparing the earlier visit of the Lord to the Gentile land of the Gerasenes on the opposite side of the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum.  That visit is represented to us as impulsive and urgent.  The Lord exposes his Apostles to a violent sea storm in order to get there.  Once he arrived, a man possessed by a legion of demons came running up to him, as though he had been summoned.  Once the Lord exorcised the demons, he departed again, with the frightened pleas of the local inhabitants ringing in his ears.  This journey to Tyre also seems impulsive.  It was a sharp turn from the Lord’s restless, driven life dedicated to preaching the Gospel to the Jews.  Likewise, the great deed he performed in both places was an exorcism, in this case that of a demon possessing a young girl.  As the exorcism in the land of the Gerasenes amounted to a promise that grace would come to the Gentiles one day, so it seems the exorcism in Tyre does this as well.  With both the Lord also teaches that “You adore that which you know not: we adore that which we know. For salvation is from the Jews” (John 4, 22).  This was not an easy lesson for the Gentiles to learn, but the Lord insists on it, referring to the Jews as the “masters” and the Gentiles as the despised scavengers the “dogs” in speaking with the Tyrian woman.  Yet her need for the help only the Lord could provide conquered her pride and opened the way for her daughter to be freed from the devil.

As we go among today’s Gentiles we ought to keep in mind that it is largely their pride that keeps them from Jesus.  They think of themselves as masters though indeed they are but dogs, taking as food only what others have left behind.  We do not despise them for this, but recognize the truth of it.  But by our charitable deeds we draw them to seek only what our Lord may give them — freedom from the devils that lead them on to their self-destruction.