Jesus had gone into the Gentile lands on purpose. He didn’t have to go there; he could have stayed in Galilee, or gone back toward Jerusalem. Unless he intended to extend his ministry of healing and of the good news of the kingdom of heaven beyond his own borders, it made little sense for him to be in Tyre.

He knew, too, that what was said about bread and crumbs was nonsense. He had just fed five thousand people with a few loaves and fish. There was no question of anybody going hungry.

When Matthew tells this story (Matthew 15:21-28), it is the disciples who petition Jesus to send the woman away, because she is bothering them. Perhaps it is for their benefit that he holds up a mirror to their bias and prejudice, before breaking it open, healing the child and reassuring the mother.

As if to reinforce the lesson, he next comes across a man who can neither hear nor speak the good news, and sets him free, opens him up to the gospel, so that everyone across that heathen, Gentile region can hear about it.

Reams of words, oceans of ink have been written to try to explain why Jesus was so rude to the Syro-Phoenician woman who had come to him begging healing for her sick child. Was it a test, and she passed with flying colours, and otherwise what would have happened to her child? Was it a test of Jesus: was he biased, and she cured him of his xenophobia? That has been posited, in the past and probably in pulpits today.

Yet we are told, and we proclaim, that he was without sin, and the scriptures that we read today surround us with the message that bias, prejudice, treating one human being as inherently better than another, is sinful. So what was going on here?

Perhaps it is our bias, and prejudice, and selfishness, that Jesus is confronting, and breaking open, transgressing as he is wont to do the customs and boundaries that we have set up.

It is sinful to treat one person, any person, as less than human. We encounter the temptation on a daily basis, mostly because we humans have a tendency to act in inhumane ways on the regular. We see online calls for summary executions of those who commit acts of violence – and trust me, I am as angry as anyone about those. We hear gross generalizations about people who vote one way or another, people who like cats, people who like guns. We see on the news whole peoples corralled into camps, and we make our own judgements about the people with the power to control their water, shelter, blood, and about the people they control.

We find ourselves in a moral haze, unsure what it means to respect the dignity of every human being when some of them, some of us, refuse to respect the dignity of the image of God within us; when others seem to pretend that they are God.

Jesus goes to the lands where the Gentiles live. He is presumably doing the same work, preaching the same message, as he was south of the border, since his fame is spreading here, too, and he is easy to find. When a woman comes to him, out of time and out of bounds, begging for her child, he at first gives the conventional, acceptable response. But this woman has heard of the mercy of God, that it is not only for the chosen few, but that the creator of world hates nothing and no one that God has made. She is in on the secret. She shares it with Jesus.

The man of Sidon, who hears no evil and speaks no evil, but sees everything; he sees Jesus looking up to heaven, and finds himself opened to the glory of God. Life, from now on, is going to be in some ways easier, but a whole lot more complicated. Still, he knows that God’s mercy is a gift, and that there is no one who deserves it less, or more, than any other.

Look, says James, there is no point in saying you love your neighbour if you are not prepared to act like it. The Spirit might whisper, the same goes for your enemy, remember. There is no grace in acting superior and failing to serve the sinner standing before you. That is not how God serves the poor in spirit, the depleted in dignity, even the morally bemused. Jesus serves them all with the same word: repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. The kingdom in which there will be no rich or poor, Jew or Gentile, them or us, but only the richness of God’s mercy, the poverty of true humility, the knowledge that all that we are and all that we will be depends upon God alone, God who will not forsake those who make their boast of God’s mercy.

This is not a call to lawlessness – far from it. It is not a call to suspend judgement of wickedness, to do what we are able without sin to drive out violence and oppression from among us. It is a call, in the meantime, in the fallen time, not to lose sight of the love of God working among the least expected of all. Remember Saul, who held the coats of those who martyred Stephen (Acts 7:54-60), whom God nevertheless converted into the foremost apostle to the Gentiles.

It is a call not to lose sight of the humanity of Jesus at work in the most difficult situations, even among the demons.

It is a call not to lose heart, and not to lose our hearts, not to let them stray from the mercy of the living God, to share with Jesus the secret of the love of God, who has done everything well; in whose image we each last one of us is made.

Amen. 

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23, Psalm 125, James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17, Mark 7:24-37