NOTES for Mar 7:14-24

The very fact that the disciples ask Him to explain what the Lord said to the people and the Pharisees about defilement is striking: "Nothing that enters a person from outside can defile him; but what comes out of him, that defiles a person." The point is that the understanding of sin as filth or dirt, common in many religions and also ordinary in the Old Testament, starts from the idea that the source of this dirt is outside the person. By coming into contact, bodily or morally, with this dirt that exists apart from you, you become soiled and unpleasant in God's eyes. The very vivid image of a stinking, unwashed person became permanently linked in human consciousness with the violation of God's design.

This idea of an external source of the evil that defiles a person is important because it greatly reduces the measure of our responsibility. Indeed, can we condemn a person who has stepped in a cow patty? We can only feel sorry for him. The option of laughing at him is, of course, not being considered. Yet the Lord says that the source of the evil that defiles a person is in the person's heart. Therefore we ourselves bear full responsibility for the evil that we, and only we, let into this world, and for the fact that God sees us in such a repulsive state.

The story of the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter sometimes strikes the reader by the apparent harshness of the Savior's words addressed to the healed girl's mother. The comparison with a dog, unworthy of attention, really looks at least excessively harsh. Meanwhile, the woman's own reaction to this seeming harshness is quite calm.

Traditional exegesis explains what happens by the woman's deep repentance, her readiness to acknowledge any sin in herself if such acknowledgment will help her daughter. On closer examination, however, the dialogue between Jesus and the woman who turned to Him with a request for her daughter's healing resembles a parable more than anything else, a parable the woman understands and in whose language she answers the Savior. It may also be noted that the image of a dog as a symbol of uncleanness occurs in the Gospel text fairly often. This is not surprising: the Torah really does include the dog, like the pig, among unclean animals, and among all such animals these two were the ones Jesus' interlocutors and listeners most often saw.

Then Jesus' question takes on a definite meaning: does the clean person have the right to the Kingdom, while the unclean person, for example the same Gentile, does not? And the Syrophoenician woman was undoubtedly a Gentile. Can someone who has never known either purity or sanctification share in the Kingdom opened to the children of God, and all who belonged to the people of God were such children? And the woman, understanding the Savior perfectly, speaks of the crumbs that fall from the table. In essence, she accepts both Jesus Himself and the Kingdom He brought into the world. She accepts it while understanding that she herself has no right at all to this Kingdom that has come into the world. But she does not claim much either. She asks only for the smallest thing; the faintest reflection of the Kingdom's light is enough for her, enough for her daughter's healing. And she receives what she asks, receives it as an undeserved gift that she could not have expected in any way.

Thus the question of the people of God and the Gentiles is resolved in relation to the Kingdom. The one who asserts his rights to this Kingdom will have to prove the rights he has asserted; he will have to correspond to what he has claimed. But to the one who claims nothing, understanding that he has no rights to anything, the Kingdom will be given freely, on one condition: his humility must be genuine. It can only be, to use philosophical language, an existential choice for the one asking, and not at all a tribute to politeness, even religious politeness. Thus the Kingdom reconciles all: both those who feel their own strength and those who feel weak and unworthy of what they seek. It reconciles them by the love that both the strong and the weak need equally.

The words Christ spoke to the Syrophoenician woman sound very troubling: "...it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." As if He were supporting xenophobia and superiority over people of another faith as second-class people. But let us put ourselves in this woman's place. Suppose we are asking Christ for some mercy, and He answers us: "I have no time; I am busy distributing deserved mercies to the lawful children of God, and you are a dog; you are not allowed to eat from the master's table." Most of us would be indignant and would answer that "these children of Yours are no better than I am, and as for my being a dog, name-calling is rude." But this woman, with astonishing humility, agrees and says: "You may think of me whatever You consider necessary; I really am a sinner. But could not even crumbs of Your mercy fall to me?"

Crumbs, because from her point of view, the healing of her daughter is such a small thing for the Almighty that it would hardly impoverish the children showered with the Creator's endless mercies. And such humility before Christ does not remain unanswered.

And one more important point: Christ does not refuse to help her, a pagan woman, but in order for this to become possible, she needs to agree that the truth is contained in faith in the one God. The Jews, as monotheists, accept this truth, while pagans do not. After all, if the Syrophoenician woman does not agree that this is truly so, then who is Jesus for her?

Jesus' words, His answer to the request of a pagan woman to free her daughter from the power of dark forces, may seem too harsh, even cruel. Yet there was no cruelty in them. There was only the statement of a simple fact, obvious to everyone then: the world is divided into Jews and pagans, into the people of God and all other peoples. This is a fundamental distinction that could not be ignored.

"Dog" in this case is not an insult, but only a symbol of uncleanness: for a Jew, every pagan was unclean by definition, regardless of what kind of life he led and even regardless of whether he believed in the God of Israel. God cleanses a person. To be clean, one must belong to the people of God, which, as the sages of the Second Temple period taught, is a spiritual unity, a kind of single spiritual body. No one can be clean without belonging to the people of God. Pagans, of course, viewed the matter differently, but the woman mentioned in the Gospel story was turning to a Jew, hoping in the power and mercy of the God of Israel, and therefore her opinions and views were not important in this case.

By comparing pagans with dogs, with unclean animals, Jesus thus dots every i. The people of God really are the people of God; purity really is important; and paganism really is lower than Yahwism, as much lower as any pagan religion, whatever may stand behind it, is lower than the faith of Abraham and Moses. The coming of Christ did not mean the blurring of all boundaries and the erasing of all differences. As such, they remained unchanged. Something else changed: the common order of things, which, while preserving differences and even boundaries where they are appropriate, decisively destroyed every wall and barrier. In the fallen world, the impassability of a boundary often becomes the only guarantee of its reliability.

In the Kingdom it is not so. There are no boundaries and differences there that are impassable and insurmountable. Nevertheless, the differences themselves do not disappear. They only acquire a new quality, ceasing to be hostile to one another. These are the differences Jesus offers the pagan woman to accept, and at the same time to accept her own spiritual and existential quality as a given. Otherwise, without accepting oneself in one's own quality and condition, one cannot enter the Kingdom.

Of course, there could be no question of any rights this woman had to her daughter's healing. But in the Kingdom there is no talk of rights at all. Talk of rights begins only when all relationships have been destroyed and each person who once participated in them is now feverishly trying to preserve the remnants of what he once lived in naturally and freely in its fullness. And the woman accepts the rules of life in the Kingdom. She claims nothing. She only asks Jesus to enter her life and the life of her daughter. Then He enters, for such trust opens to Him doors that, for the one who opens them, become the doors of the Kingdom.

When we read in the Gospel that this woman was Syrophoenician, this does not mean that she was "second class," or of the wrong origin, or had displeased Jesus in some other way. We know that Jesus is always ready to help and heal the poor, the sinful, and the rejected. The point is that she is a real pagan, that is, she believes in pagan gods, worships them, and offers sacrifices to them. This is precisely why the Lord subjects her to such a test of faith: to help her understand for herself why she is turning to Him for help and not to her own gods.

Here a line is drawn, as it were, between a person's pagan ideas and turning to Jesus, that is, prayer. Prayer to Christ (and to the Father in Christ) is incompatible with paganism, and paganism is not necessarily belief in other gods, but also the quite ordinary Christian tendency to place hope not in the one God, but in something else: in money, in one's abilities, in one's party, in "it will work out somehow," and so on.

Paganism is when we live not for God, but for someone else (for example, for ourselves). If, being such pagans, we want to ask Christ for something, to turn to Him in prayer, we will need, together with this Canaanite woman, to go through a complete reappraisal of our faith, to understand why we have turned to Christ and not to our idols...

In this story it is very interesting why Mark decided to preserve the Aramaic word "ephphatha." Usually the evangelist gives Aramaic words either when they were well known to his listeners, or when they said a great deal to them and to him personally. In particular, Mark preserves not only the Lord Jesus' address to the Father, "Abba," and His words of God-forsakenness on the cross, but also His words addressed to those whom He healed: for example, to Jairus's daughter, "talitha, cumi," and today, to the deaf man. Why was the word "ephphatha" so precious to the evangelist? Perhaps he felt that it was, in some measure, addressed not only to the deaf man, but also to everyone who recognizes his own deafness, the closedness of his heart and spiritual hearing, and his inability to hear and understand the Word addressed to him. This means that today the Lord, in His native language, addresses all who want healing, all who want to live His life and follow His way, and says: "Ephphatha, be opened..."

Jesus clearly distinguishes between Tradition and traditions. His disciples are accused of eating bread without first performing the prescribed ritual washing of hands, although the Torah itself does not require such washing: it was only a tribute to tradition, and a late tradition at that, rooted in the practice of certain Pharisaic teachers.

Meanwhile, such late, purely human traditions, which gratified the religious pride of those who kept them, sometimes became the cause of an actual violation of the commandment, the destruction of the genuine Tradition. Formally, of course, such a violation was entirely justified: the first commandment is greater than the fifth, and the one who strives to keep the first commandment in its fullness is sometimes forced to violate the fifth commandment.

But in this case the issue is plainly something else: using the primacy of the first commandment as a basis for in fact refusing to help elderly parents. Of course, it often turned out to be easier to put a certain sum into the temple treasury than to care for one's parents, and such donations were profitable for the temple leadership as well. It is no surprise that eventually an "adequate" justification was found for this practice, which in essence contradicted the Torah.

But Jesus, of course, sees perfectly all the deceitfulness of the proposed justifications. And He connects it with the very attitude toward Tradition, treating it not as a guide on the path of righteousness that leads into the Kingdom, but as a manual for arranging one's life in moral and religious comfort. He expresses the distinctive feature of such an attitude in two phrases: what defiles a person is not what enters the mouth, but what comes out of the mouth. The external, religious side of life has no relation to spiritual purity. But what happens in the heart does have a relation to it. The most direct and immediate relation.

Today's reading brings us back again to a question that kept arising in Jesus' conversations with the Pharisees: the question of revelation and religious tradition. It concerns the norms and rules of ritual purity accepted among a certain part of the Pharisees. The washings mentioned in the text of the passage are undoubtedly connected with rules mentioned in the Old Testament, for example in Leviticus, but judging by the evangelist's description, their number had increased substantially compared with the Old Testament prescriptions. This exaggerated attention to questions of ritual purity was apparently connected with the fact that, for the Pharisees who followed these rules, ritual purity was the chief condition of a full spiritual life. At the same time, exaggerated attention to the observance of some norms could quite well be combined with neglect of others, and this neglect found its theological justifications even when a direct violation of one of God's Ten Commandments was involved (vv. 9-13). Here Jesus evidently encounters a phenomenon that is, sadly, characteristic of any religious tradition: as these traditions develop and become more complex, over time they often begin to obscure the core connected with their birth and original formation. In the end it can even happen that the truth revealed by God is pushed into the background by theological concepts created by inventive theologians. Jesus Himself answers the question about purity by pointing to the human person: whether a person is clean or not depends precisely on that person's spiritual condition, or, in biblical language, on the condition of his heart (vv. 18-23). Here, of course, the matter is no longer external, ritual purity, but inner purity, which determines the quality of spiritual life. And if a person's heart is clean, then nothing from outside can defile him.

Jesus turns the dispute about tradition, about handed-down practice, in a completely unexpected direction. The washings mentioned in the text were one of those expanded interpretations of the norms and rules of ritual purity, of which many appeared in the Second Temple period. A cleansing washing, even of the hands alone after returning from the marketplace, was one of these newly established rules.

There was a desire here for a kind of "super-purity": anything could happen in the marketplace, all kinds of people are encountered there, and there is enough uncleanness of every sort. So it was better, just in case, to perform a washing, even a partial one, even only of the hands, before sitting down at the table where one would have to break, and therefore bless, the bread. Meanwhile all these traditions, as Jesus testifies, could not prevent essential distortions connected with spiritual life, with such fundamental things as keeping the commandments. The Savior Himself gives an example of such a violation: promise to donate to the Temple what is needed to help elderly parents, and you no longer have to help them, since God is more important.

Formally everything is correct and pious, but in substance it is a violation of the fifth commandment. How is that possible? Jesus gives the answer immediately, reducing it to an aphoristic formulation: a person is defiled not by what enters him, but by what comes out of him. Other Gospels speak directly of a person's mouth. The point is evidently, on the one hand, the food that enters a person and, on the other hand, words. Of course, behind words there are always intentions, and it is those intentions that defile a person. In the Kingdom this is really so, because the fallen world and its elements no longer have their former power over a person.

Why, then, do people so often shift the emphases of spiritual life from what is primary to what is secondary? Jesus answers this question too. He says that what a person eats does not defile him. On the contrary, if a person lives a normal, full spiritual life, he is able to sanctify any food that enters his body. As for what comes out of the body, the intentions and words, that is exactly where the question is decided: will a person preserve purity or be defiled? This is understandable. Physically, a person is what he eats, but only physically; spiritually, he is what his soul desires and strives for. Where the treasure is, there the heart is also. If a person does not have a normal spiritual life, then of course every kind of uncleanness will cling to him. In that case, however, no cleansings will help, just as no medicines help someone who has no immunity at all. Jesus reminds the people listening to Him of all this as of things fundamental to spiritual life.