Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent
Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table.
Little dogs. Dogs are not much mentioned in the Scriptures and rarely in a positive light. We hear of sinners being like dogs returning to their vomit and of dogs licking the blood of Jezebel, hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog in the Old Testament was to suggest that they were worthless; in short, an insult. In the New Testament such as in Revelation or as in Philippians we are told: “Look out for the dogs … for the evil-workers.” Dogs, it seems, are evil. Don’t ask about cats, let alone ‘snakes, shamrocks and shillelaghs’, not to mention green beer. St. Patrick? Well that is another matter, yet one which has to do with perseverance, attention, and insight as in this Gospel. And so with dogs, too, perhaps.
Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10), criticizing the watchmen, the leaders of Israel. Yet more than a thousand years later that phrase was turned about to become an image for dogs as preachers, meaning dogs that dobark and, indeed, bark incessantly against “foxes and wolves”, the heretics that threaten “the sheep”, the faithful, as Gregory the Great imagines. Preaching as barking! Just saying.
Several centuries later after him, it became an image for the Ordo Praedicatorum, St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers, later known as Dominicans. And no, the term Dominicans cannot be punned or played with as the Domini Canes, the dogs of the Lord; that is just bad Latin and not historical, just another one of those latter day myths. There is, however, nothing mythical about the dog with the flaming torch as the symbol of the Order of St. Dominic. And scripturally, at least in terms of one of “the other Books (as Hierome saith) [which] the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine”, as the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles puts it, there is the Old Testament Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Book of Tobias or Tobit, which mentions in a kindly fashion, Tobias’ dog. This provides the sole biblical instance of the long-standing view of dogs as faithful and loyal companions much like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey. He alone recognises his master, though disguised as a beggar in his return to reclaim Ithaca, and then dies but without betraying him. Seeing Argos brings tears to Odysseus’ eyes. It is a touching scene. As Homer beautifully puts it, “Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years”.
In the New Testament, there are the dogs that are the companions of Lazarus who lies at the gate of Dives, the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores”. That, too, is a touching image of compassion and care. No doubt, they, too, desired to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. And then there is this story, a most powerful and yet disturbing story in which rejection, and silence, and even insult give place, finally and heartbreakingly, to mercy and grace. The breakthrough moment is this remarkable women’s last statement to Jesus: “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”. Little dogs.
