Context

Sometimes when you read the Bible, it’s like God’s speaking directly to you. The message is clear, simple, straightforward. But sometimes it’s not so easy. You wrestle with the text. Its meaning and message remains a stubborn mystery.

Today’s Gospel passage about the Syrophoenician woman is one that falls into that second, more difficult category—at least for me. Because it sounds like Jesus is being rude, even cruel. And that doesn’t fit what I know of Jesus. How do we deal with that?

As we reflect on today’s Gospel, I’d like to revisit something I talked about last week: the idea that it’s important to pay attention to context when we read the Bible.

By context I mean this: what was the world of biblical times like, and how did that world differ from our own?

The Bible isn’t a single book. It’s more of a library—a collection of texts written in three original languages, over more than a thousand years, in locations spanning well over a thousand miles.

We need to pay attention to that history—to that context—not to change the Bible’s meaning, but to understand it more clearly.

I’d like to build on some of the things I said last week, so let me quickly recap last Sunday’s sermon.

In last Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus criticized a group of religious leaders for making a big deal about hand washing before meals. He called hand washing an empty tradition and said, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile.”

I would guess that if I asked you why you wash your hands before a meal, you’d say something about germs—viruses, bacteria, and other assorted microscopic nasties that can make you sick. That’s our context.

But it was different in Jesus’s time. They didn’t know about bacteria and viruses. In Jesus’s time, hand washing was about tradition—not hygiene. That was their context.

If we don’t know that, we might get distracted by our own hangups and miss Jesus’s point. When Jesus said not to worry so much about hand washing, he wasn’t giving advice about fighting disease. He was saying that we should pay more attention to the state of our hearts than to what rules and tradition tell us to do.

Context is just as important to today’s Gospel passage about the Syrophoenician woman as it is to the passage about hand washing, but it might be a bit harder to spot than it was last week.

It starts with how we see human relationship.

When we think about how social interactions ought to work, we tend to take our own context for granted.

If you were to print out a map of the United States and balance it on the point of a pin, the center would be pretty close to where we are right now. American ideals are in the air we breathe. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Those words aren’t from the Bible, but they’re almost holy writ to most Americans.

We’re in a college town, so we expect people to come and go. It’s normal to meet someone from a different country or culture.

And then there are the customs that are so much a part of how we live that we don’t even notice them. “Kansas nice” is a thing. Most people who live here are polite to a fault, non-confrontational. We don’t want to make waves or cause trouble. We live in a world where men and women are mostly equal, a world where we try to build bridges with people different than ourselves. We don’t always get it right. But we try.

That’s our context. That’s our culture.

The context of the writer of today’s Gospel was very different than our own.

The Gospel of Mark was written in Greek, somewhere in the Roman Empire, maybe in Rome itself.

In that time and place, men and women had different roles in society, and they didn’t often interact outside of family life. Different ethnic groups also didn’t mix much. Society was hierarchical and siloed. Romans were at the top of the pecking order. Jews, like Jesus and his followers, were not. The gentiles of the region of Tyre weren’t at the top either. But they also weren’t at the bottom. It’s entirely possible that the Syrophoenician woman in today’s Gospel had a higher social status than Jesus did. But whatever her place in society, it would have been very much taboo for her to approach him. And no one in that time and place would have expected Jesus’s mission to extend beyond his own immediate community.

That was their context. That was their culture.

When you know all that, do you read today’s Gospel differently?

Knowing the context allows me to notice that Jesus agreed to talk with a woman from a different religion and ethnic group. That he let her get the best of him in a debate. That he chose to heal her child. He didn’t force her to leave her home or to convert to Judaism. He saw her faith—and her humility—and he did as she asked.

Knowing the context allows me to notice that Jesus is always expanding his circle outward. He helps those within his own community. But then he helps those outside. He crosses boundaries, ignores social norms—all in the interest of mercy.

The writer of the Gospel of Mark was writing to gentiles living far from Jerusalem and Galilee. They needed to hear that Jesus’s message was for them as well. They wouldn’t have been bothered (as we are) by the boundaries between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. They would have expected those boundaries. For them, the radical message of today’s Gospel would have been that such rigid boundaries could fall.

Knowing the context of today’s Gospel helps me to understand its key message as this: God’s love isn’t limited to insiders—and our love shouldn’t be either.

Context doesn’t give us all the answers. But context helps.