By Eddie Lombard
27 Jesus told her, “First let the children eat all they want, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” 28 “Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” 30 She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. Mark 7:27-30
Jesus is in Tyra, a Gentile area. He meets a woman that falls before Jesus desperate for her little girl to be healed. She is described as Gentile by birth and in culture. Mark deliberately does this to highlight her nationality and draw our attention to tensions that existed between Jew and Gentile in Jesus’ day (vs 26). You can imagine Jesus’ Jewish companions thinking to themselves: what is she thinking coming to Jesus? Does she not know that Jesus came for the Jew? What will Jesus do, will He really help our enemies who don’t deserve God?
As Jesus answers her, He deliberately highlights this tension between Jew and Gentile by telling her that the “bread was first for the children then for the dogs”. At first it looks like Jesus shows favoritism toward the Jews, but like most of Jesus’ teaching there is more than what meets the eye. The conversation happens on two levels: she is concerned for her daughter but Jesus uses this opportunity to show that God’s priority to the Jews has never excluded the Gentiles, and that both Jew and Gentile need to respond appropriately to Him.
Jesus could have used a very different, less confrontational story to make His point but He tells the ”bread and dogs” story (vs 27). He did this deliberately to remind us of His feeding miracles. This section of Jesus’ teaching is deliberately sandwiched between Mark 6, where Jesus fed the 5000 Jews in a Jewish area, and Mark 7 where He feeds the 4000 Gentiles in the Gentile area. It is in this context that Jesus tells the “bread and dogs” parable. Jesus offers both Jew and Gentile “the bread of life” and in both cases “they ate their full” and there was food left over. Jesus clearly shows that He came first for the Jews but that did not mean He did not come for the Gentiles too. This would have been very offensive to the Jews of Jesus’ time. The big question Jesus highlights in this interaction with the woman was her response. In vs 29 Jesus commended the women’s response because she responds exactly how Israel should have responded but didn’t. She responds in humility and obedience before the Lord, unlike the Jews who refused to humble themselves before God, as seen in the other section of Jesus’ teaching sandwiched between the two feedings, Mark 7:1-23. The result is that she went home and found her daughter healed.
This passage gives us a great warning. God has no favorites. You are not in His family because of anything special God saw in us. We are in the family because we came humbly to Christ with great guilt for our sin and begged Him for His mercy. It is only by grace we have been saved.
Prayer point:
Ask God to open our eyes to see our great guilt for our sin
Ask God to show us His great mercy for us in Jesus