KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 March
Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table
For the most part, dogs get rather bad press in the Scriptures. Dogs returning to their vomit, dogs licking up the blood of Jezebel; these are hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog is an insult. On the other hand, in the Book of Tobit, for example, we have the lovely image of Tobias’ dog which captures something of the sense of the dog as man’s best friend and loyal companion, not unlike Odysseus’s dog, Argos, who sees his master in disguise after twenty years and doesn’t betray him but “passes into the darkness,” as Homer says, his destiny fulfilled. Elsewhere in the New Testament, there are the dogs that lick the sores of Lazarus lying at the gate of the rich man, destitute and in want, the dogs that show compassion and care in the face of our indifference and neglect of one another.
And then there is this story which opens us out to a whole other tradition and way of thinking about dogs in relation to our humanity. It is a powerful and, in a way, a disturbing story. A Canaanite woman comes to Jesus seeking the healing of her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil,” disturbed in her mind, we might say. She is a non-Israelite. And yet she embodies most completely what it truly means to be an Israelite, namely, one who strives with God. Her exchange with Jesus is amazing for one simple reason. She, like the blind man by the wayside, won’t give up. She has a hold of something, an insight into the nature of God, of which she she won’t let go. She perseveres in the face of intimidating set-backs: silence, rebuke, and insult. Yet she, to put it bluntly, sticks with it.
To be an Israelite is to strive with God. Jacob becomes Israel precisely through that idea and experience. Here this Canaanite woman strives with God in Christ, seeing in him the healing power of God which alone can heal her daughter. We can say she is being put to the test and yet it is really the disciples whom Jesus is putting to the test. God cannot be simply the God of one group at the expense of others. At the same time Jesus draws out of the woman the deep truth and insight of her faith. The climax of the exchange is about little dogs. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs,” Jesus says, in what can only be received as a kind of insult. “Truth, Lord,” she replies, “yet even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Exquisite and profound. It captures her insight into the radical nature of Christ and what God wants from us, namely, our active engagement with his will and purpose for our humanity.