Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.  -Jesus the Christ.

Here we go again, time to pull out the God card.  You know, when Jesus says something that seems strange or does something you don’t want to do because you are chicken, you just write it off to him being God.  “Oh well he could do it, he was God.”  But if you do it you are evil and unloving.  Jesus just walked around with his future glasses on, looking in people’s hearts and knowing what they were going to do, then he played the part accordingly.  It was all a sort of perpetual déjà vu, or like the latest Tom Cruise action-movie version of Groundhog’s Day.  We do the same thing with the apostle’s interpretation of the Old Testament.  “Oh well they could take verses out of context they had magical Holy Spirit powers”.  But if we do exegesis like that, we need to be branded with the scarlet letter ‘A’ for Allegorizer so we don’t hurt anyone.

Striking image album cover from KingsX.

But I think this undermines the humanity of Jesus.  We worked this out at Nicaea, seventeen hundred years ago, Jesus is fully man.  Hebrews 4:15 tells us: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”  Luke 2:52 tells us “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”  It’s the whole point, he didn’t cheat and maintain perfection by on his God powers, or his sinless sacrifice would have meant nothing.  He was a man he did man things.  He grew in wisdom and then he exercised his wisdom.  And we should seek to emulate him.

In this situation, and also with the rich young ruler which is the antithesis in many ways, we can’t just assume that Jesus  was reading everyone’s mind and heart and playing a game for our benefit.  Jesus had hundreds of these conversations.  The nature and fact that these events are recorded for us is for out benefit, but as the events happened there is no reason to assume any God card.  Jesus was often surprised by peoples belief or unbelief (Mark 6:6, Matthew 8:5-10).  Proverbs contains much wisdom, which was available to Jesus as it is to us.  In beautiful parallelism:

Whoever corrects a scoffer gets himself abuse,
and he who reproves a wicked man incurs injury.
Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you;
reprove a wise man, and he will love you.
Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser;
teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning

And so you see these both played out in the conversations with the rich young ruler and the Syrophoenician woman, respectively.  These aren’t just catch phrases, you need both halves.  Jesus’ correction reveals their character– to these people, to the apostles and to us.  There is no magic here, we can do the same today.  I know we don’t like conflict these days, we take any conflict as a sign that we are acting in sin.  But conflict is inevitable when people are at war with God.  Bringing that to light is not sin, it can be a valuable tool, in evaluating people.  It can be valuable in revealing people’s character to themselves.  We are told to bring people into shalom, peace, with God not to make shalom with everyone at every cost.

I think this fear comes from overreacting to the ‘vengance is mine’ verse (Romans 12:19).  We think any act of judgement is reserved for God in the end.  But value judgements are not vengance, they are wise.  And Matthew 18:18 makes it clear, judgements we make on earth are binding in heaven.  It is good to set things aright on earth, even though it is not the final righting that will take place in heaven.  In reality we have veered into shirking our duty because we are too cowardly to step up and make the difficult call.  But we can and should, Jesus shows us how, Proverbs gives us the tools.  This is our job, his will on earth as it is in heaven.

A good teacher is one who doesn’t do for his students what they can do for themselves.  He puts truth one step away from his pupils and then gives them the choice to take that step or not.  This is the purpose of the parable, the truth is there for the taking.  There is no guarantee (oh how the Socialists hate that!), the outcome is only as good as the person’s choice.  This is the purpose of Jesus calling this woman a dog. When Jesus pokes you, some women pushed back, and some men walked away.  The same applies today.  There is a sense in which every situation we find ourselves in is of this nature.  Our circumstances are given to us to build and reveal character.  He disciplines those whom he loves he tests men like he tested Job.  He wants us to succeed so he can show us off.  And the wise man knows how to play this game as well.  Like Solomon’s call to divide the baby, we don’t need divine knowledge of people’s hearts we just need to know how to reveal those hearts.

And oh how beautiful the humble heart.  She turns the phrase back to him “yes Lord I am a dog, a dog who just wants some crumbs.”  She passed the test.