This coming Sunday we celebrate the 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time. The withdrawal of Jesus to the district of Tyre may have been for a rest (Mark 7:24), but he soon moved onward to Sidon and, by way of the Sea of Galilee, to the Decapolis. Jesus has moved from Jewish territory to the land of the Gentiles. This movement follows immediately upon the conflict with the Pharisees in which Jesus declared all foods are “clean” and do not defile – and now Jesus moves into contact with the Gentile people, who under some interpretations, are themselves unclean. Thus, to have contact with them renders one unclean.

If in the preceding passage Jesus “declared all foods clean” (7:19), then the thrust of the stories of Mark 7 seems to be that Jesus is declaring all persons clean, whether a Gentile woman in a pagan city or a man of indeterminate race in the unclean territory of the Decapolis. The stories are two examples of the sample principle: both advance Jesus’ repudiation of taboos and misinformed “tradition of the elders.”

Although not part of the Sunday gospels in Year B, Mark’s encounter of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman (which precedes our periscope) is worth noting as regards traditions that are being overturned. Joachim Jeremias in Jerusalem in the time of Christ [360] describes the taboos associated with the interaction between men and women: “… a woman was expected to remain unobserved in public. There is a recorded saying of one of the oldest scribes we know, Jose b. Johanan of Jerusalem (c. 150 BC): ‘Talk not much with womankind’, to which was added, ‘They said this of a man’s own wife: how much more of his fellow’s wife!’ rules of propriety forbade a man to be alone with a woman, to look at a married woman, or even to give her a greeting. It was disgraceful for a scholar to speak with a woman in the street. A woman who conversed with everyone in the street could, … be divorced without the payment prescribed in the marriage settlement.” An encounter between this woman and a scribe or Pharisee would be hard to imagine in the “tradition of the elders.”

The woman’s request of Jesus is that he drive an unclean spirit out of his daughter (7:25). As Stoffregen notes, while Jesus has just declared all foods clean (v.19), that does not mean that everything is clean. There are still unclean and evil powers in the world – but this Gentile woman is not among them. What is unclean is the demon that is driven out – “what comes out.” Perhaps this narrative is also meant to linguistically point back to Jesus’ declaration, “But what comes out of a person, that is what defiles.” (v.20) even as “what comes out” from Jesus is the healing power of the divine.

When one considers the miracle of the healing of the deaf-mute, one should also note that the healing of the man changed “what came out” of his mouth from “speech impediment” (v.32) to “speaking plainly.” (v.35).  In the Greek the change is from mogilalos (lit. “difficult speaking”) to elalei orthos (lit. “was speaking correctly”).  In both the healing of the man and the woman, Jesus changes what comes out of a person.

A nod to geography also seems in order. The Phoenician republic of Sidon was located on the coast some twenty miles north of Tyre. Jesus seems to have journeyed northward to the district of Sidon and then turned southeastward through Philip’s territory toward a point on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee within the region of the Decapolis. While the way is not specific there are no natural topological reasons why for a journey using this route, but it may have been designed to preclude the necessity of entering Galilee. Jesus remained in territory with strong Gentile associations. Yet Decapolis had sizable colonies of Jews in nearly all of the cities. It is difficult from the text to determine whether the crowd that approached Jesus was Jewish or Gentile or a mix.

Image credit: Domenico Maggiotto (1713-1794), “Christ Healing a Deaf and Mute Man” (Public Domain)