It was a Sabbath afternoon in the Belleville parsonage. I had been trying
for two years to preach, but to me the Christian life had been nothing
but a struggle. I sat down at the table, took up my Bible, and asked for
divine illumination; and it poured like sunlight upon my soul through the
story of the Syro-Phenician woman.
This woman was a mother, and she had an afflicted daughter. The child had
a virulent, exasperating and convulsive disease, called the possession of
the devil.
The mother was just like other mothers; she had no peace as long as
her child was sick. She was a Gentile, and the Jews had such a perfect
contempt for the Gentiles that they called them dogs. Nevertheless, she
comes to Christ, and asks Him to help her in her family troubles. Christ
makes no answer. The people become afraid there is going to be a “scene”
enacted, and they try to get the woman out of Christ’s presence; but He
forbids her expulsion. Then she falls down and repeats her request.
Christ, to rally her earnestness, and to make His mercy finally more
conspicuous, addresses her, saying: “It is not meet to take the
children’s bread [that is, the salvation appointed for the Jews] and cast
it to dogs”--the Gentiles. Christ did not mean to characterize that woman
as a dog. That would have been most unlike Him, who from the cross said:
“Behold thy mother.”
His whole life was so gentle and so loving, He could not have given it
out as His opinion that that was what she ought to be called; but He
was only employing the ordinary parlance of the Jews in regard to the
Gentiles. Yet that mother was not to be put off, pleading as she was for
the life of her daughter. She was not to be rebuffed; she was not to be
discouraged. She says:
“Yea, Lord, I acknowledge I am a Gentile dog; but I remember that even
the dogs have some privileges, and when the door is open they slink in
and crawl under the table. When the bread or the meat sifts through the
cracks of the table or falls off the edge of it, they pick it up, and
the master of the house is not angry with them. I do not ask for a big
loaf; I do not ask even for a big slice; I only ask for that which drops
down through the chinks of the table--the dogs’ portion. I ask only the
crumbs.”
Christ felt the wit and the earnestness and the stratagem and the faith
of that woman. He turns upon her and says:
“You have conquered Me. Your daughter is well now. Go home, mother; but
before you get there she will come down, skipping out to meet you.”
There I see the mother going. She feels full twenty years younger now.
She is getting on in life, but she goes with a half run. Amid an outburst
of hysterical laughter and tears they meet. The mother breaks down every
time she tries to tell it. The daughter is before her, with cheeks as
rosy as before she fell in the first fit. The doctors of the village
prophesy that the cure will not last, because it was not according to
their prescription. But I read in the oldest medical journal in the
world: “The daughter was made whole from that very hour.”
This story shows you Jesus with His back turned. That woman came to Him
and said: “Lord, spare the life of my child; it will not cost You any
thing.” Jesus turned His back. He threw positive discouragement on her
petition. Jesus stood with His face to blind Bartimeus, to the foaming
demoniac, to the limping paralytic, to the sea when He hushed it, and to
the grave when He broke it; but now He turns His back.
I asked an artist if he ever saw a representation of Jesus Christ with
His back turned. He said no. And it is a fact that you may go through all
the picture galleries of London, Dresden, Rome, Florence and Naples, and
you will find Christ with full face and profile, but never with His back
turned. Yet here, in this passage, He turned away from the woman.