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.
Isaiah had criticized the leadership of Israel as “dogs that do not bark.” In the sixth century, Gregory the Great turned that around to dogs that do bark against foxes and wolves, meaning preachers who bark against heretics. Preaching as barking! Now there’s a thought. Six centuries later, the Dominicans would use the dog with a flaming torch as their symbol. (But no, Dominicans does not mean the dogs of the Lord – that is just bad Latin and another myth).
To my mind, it is Vittore Carpaccio who best captures the symbolic significance of dogs in the Christian imaginary. His 1502 painting, now known as the Vision of St. Augustine, portrays Augustine in a late 15th century Venetian scholar’s study surrounded by all of the panoply of learning, especially books, with pen in hand and looking up at the beams of supernatural light streaming down upon him. Part of a series dealing with the life of Jerome, it is Augustine’s vision of the death of Jerome with whom he had been corresponding. But in the foreground of the painting there is a little shaggy dog, a curly-haired Maltese terrier, to be precise, who is looking along the same sight-line as Augustine. The dog symbolises prophetic insight or intellectus, that grasp of the whole, of that which has meaning and constitutes understanding.
“I no longer strive to strive towards such things,” T.S. Eliot says somewhat despairingly in his poem, Ash Wednesday, and yet the poem ends in prayer. “And let my cry come unto me,” not unlike the Canaanite woman. She is one who strives to strive towards the truth with tenacity and perseverance, with prophetic insight and intellectual understanding. She will not give up on the truth which she perceives in Christ. She exemplifies the whole idea of working together with the grace of God no matter what the obstacles, no matter what the circumstances.
“Dogs,” as Colin Dayan suggests “bear the burden of revelation,” of a kind of insight into what is and has meaning. The exchange is extraordinary. “Truth, Lord, even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” That insight is profound and prophetic, intellectual, we might say. And it is enough, more than enough. It is the break-through moment that signals the making known of the truth of our hearts. “O woman, great is thy faith,” Jesus says. “And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.” God wants us to break into his heart of love. There has to be the striving. There is no cheap grace. There can only be the striving to strive with what God seeks for us: our good and the good of one another. Even the crumbs which fall from our master’s table are more than enough to sustain us in the journey of our souls. The little dogs get it, do we?
(Rev’d) David Curry,
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy