On the Syrophoenician Woman

How our exegesis goes awry and how the Articles can set us right

Last Sunday, the story of the Syrophoenician woman came up in the Revised Common Lectionary, in the version from Matthew 15. Here’s the story if you’re unfamiliar with it:

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.

My corner of the Episcopal/Anglican world gets frustrated whenever this story comes up in the lectionary, because over the last few years an interpretation has become popular that suggests that in this passage, Jesus sins or at least hugely misunderstands his mission and needs to be corrected by the Syrophoenician woman. The exegesis goes something like this: before he met the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus thought that his mission was only to the Jews, and he shared the anti-Gentile prejudices of his Jewish milieu. That’s why he calls her a dog. But the woman forced him to realize that he was wrong, that his mission was to the Gentiles as well, that he should overcome his native prejudice and extend grace to her. And so, from Jesus, we learn how to respond when we are confronted with the despised other. Jesus is a model for us in learning to change our minds and be more inclusive. Mainline sermons on this text are bad enough that I know people who specifically avoid mainline church contexts on ‘Syrophoenician woman Sunday.’ Every time this story shows up, I get messages from laypeople upset and frustrated about what their clergy are preaching.

Now, I think this exegesis is hugely wrong. To say that Jesus was racist is (I imagine most of us would agree!) to say that Jesus sinned. And to say that Jesus sinned explicitly contradicts Scripture (2 Corinthians 5:21, Hebrews 4:15, 1 Peter 2:22, 1 John 3:5). Moreover, to say that Jesus sinned is to say that Jesus is not God incarnate, because God cannot sin (James 1:13 if you want a quick Scripture citation, but this is just basic to a Christian understanding of God). It also – and relatedly – casts into doubt the reality of our redemption, which required a perfect sacrifice by a sinless high priest (thus Hebrews 7-10). To say that Jesus seriously misunderstood the scope of his mission is less obviously wrong. The question of how divine omnipotence relates to the God-man Jesus’ self-understanding is an interesting one that requires careful thought. But Jesus was clear both that his ministry was first to the Jews and also that it ultimately extended beyond the Jewish people to all people (Luke 4, say, or John 4 and John 12). What’s more, even though Jesus saw his ministry as focused on the Jews, he was willing to heal non-Jews, including before his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman (Matthew 8, Luke 17). And indeed, such a fundamental misunderstanding of his mission would be hard to square with Jesus’ relationship to his Father, particular as portrayed in John but throughout the Gospels as a whole. Jesus did not sin, and Jesus did not need to learn about the scope of his saving mission. (There are also, I might add, real problems with the implicit picture of Judaism as particularly bigoted in this exegesis.) This exegesis is mistaken.

But I want to say more than just that this exegesis is wrong. I want to ask a further question: what are the conditions of possibility for this exegetical move? Why does it happen? One possibility would be that our clergy who preach this way are actually all Ebionites at best, that they do not believe in Jesus’ divinity or his redemptive sacrifice but see him instead as a good (but flawed) human teacher about God and right living. But I don’t actually think this is the case. I expect the truth is a little stranger, but also better from the perspective of our church’s fidelity to the Gospel: I think that the vast majority of the clergy who preached a ‘Jesus sinned/was mistaken and needed correction’ sermon yesterday would also tell you that they confess Jesus’ divinity. So what’s going on? How do our clergy find themselves simultaneously confessing Christ’s divinity but preaching sermons with the clear – indeed, necessary – implication that Christ is not divine?

This, I think, is the heart of the matter: many of our clergy are not taught to exegete passages of Scripture from the perspective of a more-or-less systematic biblical theology which draws upon Scripture as a whole and is centered upon Christ, what is often called canonical interpretation. Quite the opposite: I was taught in my Bible classes in seminary that to norm my exegesis of Scripture using passages drawn from other parts of Scripture by other (human) authors was shoddy scholarship, a matter of violently imposing an ideological uniformity upon a messy, contradictory, heterogenous text. You shouldn’t, for example, look for a coherent picture of Jesus in the Gospels and the Epistles; you can talk about Mark’s Jesus and Luke’s Jesus and Paul’s Jesus and so on, but to assume that they all together give an accurate, compatible portrait of a person was poor reading. Or so I was told.

And what does this mean when applied to a sermon? Well, it means that when one is exegeting Matthew 15, you don’t look at 2 Corinthians or Hebrews or 1 Peter or 1 John and say “well, we know that Jesus is without sin from these passages, so whatever Jesus is up to in Matthew 15 cannot be sinful.” Instead, you start by taking the text and saying “well, seems like Jesus is being a prejudiced jerk at first, but then does the healing.” Of course, this isolated exegesis (in the case of Matthew 15, isolated even from earlier passages in Matthew which describe Jesus healing Gentiles) doesn’t function well as a sermon by itself. And so to turn it into a sermon, preachers are often forced to go beyond their Bible classes and turn to what is in fact a sort of canonical interpretation (although not understood as such), asking the question “what does this passage say about working for social justice?” In this case, the preacher looks for an interpretation relevant to the social location of his/her mostly white upper-middle-class listeners and preaches something like “Jesus teaches us how to repent of our prejudice and do better.” And without meaning to deny Jesus’ divinity, the sermon ends up having as its logical conclusion that Jesus is not God and cannot be the final and perfect sacrifice for our sins. This is what can happen when exegesis is governed by the view that each text must be left to speak by itself and then integrated through social justice-oriented interpretation (an interpretation which rightly sees God’s heart for justice but wrongly misses the bigger picture).

From the perspective of the history of Christian preaching and exegesis, this is all absolutely bizarre. And here I think the Articles of Religion might help us find a healthier way of reading Scripture, one more in line with the Christian tradition and less likely to lead us into interpretive disaster. Article VII tells us what Scripture is fundamentally concerned with: in Scripture as a whole, in both Testaments, “everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man.” Article XX, Of the Authority of the Church, helps us understand how to exegete Scripture in line with this principle. It declares that the church, “a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ,” may not “so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” And these two articles together, I think, point us to the heart of the historic Christian understanding of Scripture: Scripture is a unity pointing us towards Jesus Christ as our savior, and we must exegete individual texts of Scripture as pointing us towards that truth. And the church has developed exegetical tools to help us with this project. One important one, dating at least back to Augustine, is that we interpret the more difficult passages of Scripture in terms of clearer ones. And so Jesus’ language in Matthew 15 – language which is at first glance quite difficult indeed! – must be interpreted in terms of some of the very clear pictures we get of who Jesus is elsewhere in Scripture. And if you do this, if you assume that Scripture is a whole which together gives us Christ, you will avoid interpretive issues that lead to accidentally denying our Lord’s divinity.

Now don’t get me wrong: I think that some things are gained by spending time with, say, an individual Biblical author’s portrayal of Jesus or grace or what have you. I’m enough of a creature of the modern study of Scripture to say that earlier interpretive models did sometimes preemptively smooth out rough edges and difficulties in the text. But studying ‘Matthew’s Jesus’ is, for the Christian church, only worthwhile if it is aimed not at a fragmentation of Scripture’s message but rather a deeper synthesis, a richer portrayal of the truth that the Scriptures points us to our faithful savior Jesus Christ.

And so let’s turn back to Matthew 15. If one embraces a hermeneutic like the one I’m talking about, one which refuses to pit Scripture passages against each other and is grounded in a Christocentric Biblical theology drawn from Scripture as a whole, how might one read the text? It remains a challenging one, but I think there are a few options. Perhaps Jesus is using this moment as a teaching tool for his disciples about the overabundance of God’s grace. Perhaps the Syrophoenician woman is someone like Rahab or Ruth, someone whose earnest desire for God’s goodness brings her inclusion into the covenant people even before the full inclusion of the Gentiles as God’s people. Undoubtedly her combination of acknowledgement of her unworthiness and yet repeated demands in the face of an apparent ‘no’ from God is an example for us in our Christian life. These are all rich interpretations with much to teach us about how to relate to our neighbors and our God – and we can provide them without making a mess of our Christology or doctrine of the atonement!

In the end, as far as interpreting this passage for us goes, I don’t think we can do any better than the Prayer of Humble Access from the Book of Common Prayer, the language of which is drawn from this story:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.