I wonder what you did the last time you won the panhandler-at-a-stoplight lottery. What tends to be your response? You’re the first car in line waiting to turn left at a red light, and there’s a man outside your window, with a cardboard sign, or with a dog, or with a child; he’s searching your car for eye contact, and he is asking you for your help. What are we, as Christians, supposed to do in such circumstances?
Some years ago I was in the habit of attending a men’s Bible study every Thursday at 6:15 in the morning. We would sit in a circle on folding chairs in our church foyer, eat donuts and coffee, and week by week read through the Gospel of John. At the end of these meetings, we were always confronted with the same problem — what to do with our surplus coffee. (There were not usually surplus donuts.) After a few weeks, I had an idea. Driving home week after week, I noticed that the same homeless man was panhandling at the same street corner near my house every Thursday morning. The solution to our predicament seemed obvious, and so was added to my weekly routine the delivery of Hank the homeless man’s coffee.
Seeing Hank soon became one of my favorite moments of the week. At the time I was a seminary student, which meant that almost every moment that I didn’t spend eating or sleeping, I spent reading or writing, and, especially as someone who was studying to go into ministry, I felt self-conscious about spending so much time on myself and so little time concretely serving the world, serving the poor. And so I really looked forward to seeing Hank each week. He was at a stoplight, so the length of our interactions was determined by fate — some were a good 2 to 3 minutes while others were more like a handoff between quarterback and running back. Though short, it felt like a genuine moment of Christian ministry that, week after week, brought a smile to my face. I brought Hank coffee for several months.
On one Thursday morning Hank and I found ourselves with an unusually long red light. So we covered our normal conversational territory — which was, almost exclusively, Duke basketball-related prognostications — but then found ourselves with time to spare. The silence became uncomfortable. Finally I said, “You know, Hank, I’ve been bringing you coffee all these months and I’ve never even asked you how you take it. Do you take cream or sugar? I’d be happy to doctor it up for you.”
To which Hank responded immediately, “Oh, I don’t drink coffee.”
It was one of the most mortifying and most illuminating moments of my life.
In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus is similarly undressed by the unexpected reply of someone on the margins. And the Syrophoenician woman, as we call her, is on the margins in just about every category. That she’s a woman and he’s a man only tips the iceberg of her disadvantage. In this story, Jesus has traveled well beyond the bounds of Israeli society. He’s in the region of Tyre and Sidon — a land full not of Jews, not even of Samaritans, but of Greeks, Syrophoenicians even, meaning Gentiles, pagans. So there’s additional religious and cultural distance between her and Jesus. As we read, we can infer that she’s unattached to a husband — a massive economic curse in the ancient world — so we can assume there’s an additional discrepancy in social class.
Jesus, we’re told, “entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there”—getting some much-needed rest, we can presume, after the tiring work of feeding 5,000 people. In this Ancient Near Eastern context, it would have been the height of scandal for an unknown, unrelated woman — much more so for a poor, unmarried, foreign, and unrelated woman — to approach any man in the privacy of his home; much more so if it was a single, Jewish, religious leader of a man.
So Jesus’ apparently dismissive reaction ought to be read within this context. True, it is not the over-accepting, over-abundant hospitality that we’ve come to associate with Jesus, but his world was very different than ours. His response is how most reasonable Jewish men would have reacted in that situation. One can’t help but wonder if that’s precisely why he reacted the way he did, stage-managing this interaction, drawing in those who share those culturally inherited instincts, just so he can flip them on their head a minute later. But whether it is Jesus’ gut reaction or clever plot, the narrative force is that this woman is someone whom Jewish society has officially sanctioned as ignorable, as look-passable.
That this woman is never given a name in this story tells us all these things at once.
This is the mistake I made with Hank. Even though I knew his name, I saw him not as an individual, not as a person entitled to his preferences, tastes, and talents, but simply according to his status as a poor person. For me, his individuality was washed out by his poverty. Therefore our interactions operated exclusively within the boundaries of established social expectations. He was the poor person who needed things. And I was the comparably rich person who could give it to him. It was a one-way relationship. He was defined by his lack, and I by my abundance.
Both my relationship with Hank and Jesus’ relationship with the Syrophoenician woman shift precisely at the moment that the person on the margins resists playing the role assigned by social status. The Syrophoenician woman was a lot less subtle. She gives Jesus an ultimatum. (It’s amazing how having a suffering child rearranges how much you care about societal expectations.) She says to Jesus, in essence, there’s only one rule that you need to take a stance on now — does the table in this new kingdom of yours have room for me and my child?
Jesus’ answer, of course, is yes. When Jesus moves beyond the social expectations of the moment, when he recognizes this person as more than yet another mouth to feed or illness to heal, he reveals to us an individual with a story. He shows the world a beautiful child of God. He heals her daughter.
But we can’t stop there. Any human being with a beating heart would agree that it’s good to see beyond people’s poverty to see individuals with unique stories, tastes, and talents. That Jesus has compassion on someone in need is not what’s unique about this story. That happens on every other page of the Gospels. What’s unique about this story is not what the Syrophoenician woman gets; it’s what Jesus gets, or at least appears to get. What was unique about my interactions with Hank was not that he got anything special out of it. It’s what I got.
So what does Jesus get in this story? Jesus is surprised by her. Jesus, as strange as it sounds, appears to learn something from her. This doesn’t really happen anywhere else in the Gospels. The woman’s daughter is healed, sure. But because of the woman, because of her boldness, Jesus gets to make this beautiful, radical statement about the exhaustive lengths to which his grace extends, a statement made not only to that household, but to that whole region of Gentiles as rumors of their interaction spread, and then further to the whole world through this story’s telling in Scripture.
I received something similar from Hank. I received a revelation. It’s a lesson I’ll never forget and that has affected not only every stoplight interaction I’ve had since, but how I think about and engage with issues of poverty generally.
Our reading from James helps us understand what’s happening here on a deeper, theological level. James starts by covering ground we’ve already covered: “Do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please,’ while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there,’ or, ‘Sit at my feet,’ have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?” According to James, God does not show favoritism to the rich over the poor, and therefore neither should we. So far, so already covered.
But then James takes it one step further: “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” Did you catch that? According to James, while God does not show favoritism for the rich over the poor, God does show favoritism for the poor over the rich. God has chosen the poor to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised.
It’s been this way since the beginning. God chose a nation of slaves to be his people in Egypt. God chastised his people when they became too rich and powerful, but then remained faithful to them scattered in poverty and exile. The life of Jesus is further evidence of God’s preference for the downtrodden. Jesus chose to spend most of his time with those on the margins of society — with prostitutes, tax collectors, beggars, and lepers. The poor are, quite simply, those with whom God tends to hang out. His words in Matthew 25 take it one step further still: Jesus says to his disciples, when you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and welcome the stranger, you do those things to me. Jesus was and continues to be present to the world in the poor.
Now, at the very least, we have an imagination to best describe our interactions with the poor as a two-way exchange. We can share with the poor material goods out of our comparable wealth. This is important. Giving alms to the poor is a good and beautiful part of our church tradition.
But with James, with the Syrophoenician woman, we see that, if we know to look for it, we can receive back something too: We can receive a revelation from God. And more, we can receive faith. We can meet Jesus himself.
Our temptation is to think that since we’re those giving the grocery store’s gift card or the granola bar or the $5 bill, God is on our side of these exchanges, but the Bible says it tends to be the opposite.
Let’s go back to the stoplight: Is it possible that those eyes that are scanning your car for connection are the eyes of God?
Is it possible that we need the poor more than the poor need us?
The Rev. Zac Koons is rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Austin, TX.
