Take Heart! God Listens Mark 7:24-30

Take Heart! God Listens Mark 7:24–30

Rev. Rhonda Abbott Blevins

September 27, 2026

From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” And when she went home, she found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone. ______ Let me start with a confession about my temper. I called my insurance company on a Tuesday. I had one question. One. And a woman’s voice, pleasant, unhurried, clearly not a woman at all, said, “I can help with that! Just tell me, in a few words, what you’re calling about today.” So I told her. And she said, “I think I heard you say . . . billing. Is that right?” It was not right. Press one for claims. Press two for coverage. Press four if you’d like to hear these options again (which, let’s be honest, you will). Hold, please. Your call is very important to us. Then the hold music, which is always (always!) a saxophone. Forty minutes in, I was saying one word into my phone, over and over, louder each time, the way you’d speak to somebody who doesn’t know English. Representative. REPRESENTATIVE. Standing in my own kitchen. Yelling at a machine that could not hear me and was never going to hear me, and somewhere in the back of my head a small voice said, Rhonda, you are a grown woman with a doctorate. And then the line went dead. Here’s why I tell you that. Because I think a lot of us, more of us than would admit it in a room like this, suspect that’s what prayer is. A very sophisticated hold system. You say the words. You say them nicely. You say them again. And somewhere deep in the building, all the lights are off and nobody’s home. Anybody? Well. This morning a woman walks into our story who will not hang up. Jesus has gone to Tyre. Tyre is Gentile country. Foreign soil. Outside the lines. And Mark tells us something strange about why he went: he entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. He’s hiding. The crowds have been relentless, the disciples are exhausting, he has just had a long fight with the Pharisees about handwashing, and the Son of God has gone somewhere nobody knows his name to sit down and not be needed for five minutes. Can you relate to that? But the woman finds him. That’s the first thing I want you to notice . . . Jesus is hiding, and she finds him anyway. Mark tells us several things about this woman: she’s a Gentile, she’s Greek (probably means she has money). She’s Syrophoenician, which is to say she’s from the wrong place. She’s a woman, and she’s by herself. No husband mentioned. No brother, no father, nobody to speak for her. In that world, a woman alone approaching a strange man indoors is not just improper. It’s scandalous. Every single social rule in the room says she does not get to be there. She comes in anyway and falls down at Jesus’ feet, because her baby girl is sick at home, and a mother with a sick child at home has run clean out of interest in what’s proper. Now here’s where I have to read you something, and I’m not going to soften it, because I’ve listened to preachers soften it my whole life and I’ve done it myself and I’m tired of it. She asks him to heal her daughter. Here’s what Jesus says: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” What?!?! Our Jesus?!? The one on the flannel board. The one holding the lamb in the picture in the church nursery. The “let the little children come to me” Jesus?!? Saying that. Out loud. To a mother on her knees. Let that be uncomfortable for a second. I think it’s supposed to be. Now, people who have studied this for a living have wrestled with that sentence for about nineteen centuries, and I want to lay out for you where they’ve landed. Not to be clever. Because I think how you handle this verse says a great deal about how you handle God.  “It’s a diminutive.” The Greek word isn’t the one for the feral dogs out in the street. It’s little dogs . . . household pets. Some folks say that takes the edge off. Maybe Jesus is teasing. Maybe there’s a twinkle in it. I’ve never bought this one. That’s not how you handle a desperate mother on her knees.  “He said first.” Let the children be fed first. Which means it’s about sequence, not exclusion. The Gentiles get theirs, just not yet. That’s the same logic Paul uses. To the Jew first, then the Greek. That one has some weight to it.  “He was testing her.” He knew all along what she’d say, and he was drawing it out of her for everybody’s benefit. This is the most popular answer and it’s the one I trust least, because look how badly it wants to get him off the hook. When an explanation is that convenient, it makes me think twice.  “It isn’t about race at all; it’s about money.” Tyre was a wealthy port city that ate off the backs of the Galilean countryside. Grain went out of poor Jewish farm towns and onto rich Gentile tables. So when Jesus says my children eat before your lapdogs do, some scholars hear the voice of the rural poor, not a bigot. I find that reading genuinely interesting.  “He changed his mind.” Mark says Jesus gives in because of this word, her argument. Her reasoning. Matthew is the one who later changes it to her faith. And here’s an interesting detail: in the entire Gospel of Mark, she is the only person who wins an argument with Jesus. Not Peter. Not the scribes. Her.  “She wins, but look what it cost her.” This is the voice of the marginalized. Scholars reading from the underside—women, and folks whose people have been colonized—point out that she only gets what she needs by first agreeing to be called a dog. That is the oldest arrangement in the world. You can have what you need, if you’ll agree to be what we call you. That’s an fascinating, if difficult, take. So where do I land? I’ll tell you, and you are free to land somewhere else entirely, and we can still have lunch. I think Jesus meant it. I think she changed him. And I don’t believe that makes Jesus less than God. I think it means God is more reachable than I ever had the nerve to hope. Here’s what she does, and it’s the best line in the Gospel. She doesn’t argue with the label. She doesn’t say how dare you. She takes his metaphor and stays inside it and turns it around on him: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Fine. Call me a dog. Dogs eat. She doesn’t ask for a seat. She doesn’t ask for the whole loaf. She asks for what falls. She has figured out something about God that most of us have not, which is that there is no such thing as a shortage at that table. The crumbs of God are a feast. She’ll take the crumbs. Her daughter only needs crumbs. And Jesus—who I believe was genuinely stopped in his tracks—says, for saying that, go. It’s done. Every one of you knows a woman like her. Some of you are her. The mother who knows. Who can’t chart it and can’t prove it and can’t put it in the words the professionals want, but knows. And who gets told it’s probably a stomach bug. Let’s watch it another day or two. Give it time. And who comes back anyway. Who asks for the second opinion. Who asks for the test they said wasn’t necessary. Who is, at some point in the process, described as difficult. She decides, standing in a hallway that smells like hand sanitizer, that she can live with being difficult. That was me several years ago. I was that mother. My firstborn was five years old when he started having a belly ache. Now, I wouldn’t involve doctors for a normal children’s belly ache, but this one persisted longer than a normal belly ache should. His father and I took him to the pediatrician. “Probably nothing,” they said, with advice on how to tend a normal belly ache.This tummy ache was not normal, however. My kid was in real pain. Finding no help at the pediatrician’s office, we took him to ER. “Probably nothing,” they said, with advice on how to tend a normal belly ache. We brought him home. His tummy ache got worse. We took him back to the pediatrician’s office, this time seeing a different doctor. This new doctor performed some different tests, one of them was watching my son walk. The doctor’s eyes grew wide. Without a CT scan, he diagnosed my son right then: appendicitis. With a sense of urgency, he instructed us to get our son to ER stat! As we were driving to the ER, the same one that turned us away just hours prior, the pediatrician called the ER and told them what he had discovered, and that this wasn’t just some normal belly ache. He was right. It was appendicitis. And soon we were handing our beloved son over into the arms of a surgeon we’d never met for an appendectomy, begging him to take care of our baby boy. Which he did. That five-year-old boy is now nineteen, but sometimes I think about what might have happened if his father and I hadn’t been persistent. We weren’t being “faithful.” We were just being parents. Turns out scripture has trouble telling those two apart. Was the Syrophoenician woman pushy? Maybe. Was she a nuisance? Probably. Scripture, however, calls her a model of faith. Because here’s the thing . . . she isn’t out of line. She is standing in a very long line of faithful men and women who argued with God.  Abraham haggled over the fate of the city of Sodom, trying to talk God out of destroying the place.  Moses at Sinai, argued God out of destroying the whole ungrateful lot of them, and Scripture says God relented. Read it. It’s right there.  Jacob at the river, who does not get the blessing until he wrestles all night for it, and who walks with a limp for the rest of his life, and who apparently considered that a fair trade.  And the Psalms. A third of that book is complaints filed against the management. How long, O Lord. Why do you hide your face. Wake up! Why are you sleeping? The rabbis understood something I think we have mostly lost. There’s a story in the Talmud where the rabbis out-argue God on a fine point of the law, and God laughs, and says, “My children have defeated me. My children have defeated me.” Delight. Not offense. Because you don’t argue with a stranger. You argue with people you know well, people you love. Some of us were raised to believe the holiest prayer is the polite one. That you bring God your gratitude and your best manners, and you leave the anger and the bargaining and the this is not fair at the door like muddy shoes. I want to say this as kindly as I know how: that’s not in the Bible. That’s just our upbringing.Back to Jesus and the woman. Jesus says: Go. The demon has left your daughter. And she goes. No proof. He doesn’t come with her. He doesn’t touch anything, doesn’t send a sign, doesn’t give her something to carry. There’s no receipt. There’s no text message from home saying she just sat up and asked for breakfast. There’s a sentence. And an unknowing walk home. Mark gives it to us in one line: she went home and found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. Between the word and the bed there are untold miles of road, and Mark tells us absolutely nothing about them. Did she walk an hour? More? We don’t know. She was alone, on a road, with nothing but Jesus’ word. I think that’s where most of us live . . . not in the asking, not in the finding, but in the walking home. The stretch between the prayer you finally prayed and the answer you can’t see yet. Between the phone call you made and the letter that hasn’t come. Between the diagnosis and the follow-up. Between I said what I needed to say to him and I don’t know yet if he heard me. There’s the prayer. There’s the answer. Courage is every step in between. Sometimes courage is one foot and then the other foot, on an ordinary road, for one more mile, on nothing but a word. She had no idea. She went anyway. And our prayers . . . the ones that seem stuck in some automated phone tree . . . turns out that God has been listening the whole time. Turns out God has been perfectly willing to be argued with by a woman with a sick child and no standing and nothing to lose. God isn’t a phone tree. So bring God your gratitude, sure. Bring God your requests. Even bring God your strongest argument. Take heart, dear friends. Our God listens.