The Humble Faith of the Syrophoenician Woman

Mark 7:24-30
Gregory Perry | Sunday, July 12, 2020
Copyright © 2020, Gregory Perry

We are going to look at the humble faith of the Syro-Phoenician woman. My subtitle is “Jesus Loves Dogs.” The church father Augustine said: “For those who would learn God’s ways, humility is the first thing, humility is the second, humility is the third.” We will look this morning at one of the great examples of humility in the gospels—the Syro-Phoenician woman, who came to beg Jesus to heal her demon-possessed daughter. Mark 7:24–30 marks the beginning of the section known as the retirement ministry of Jesus. During this time, Jesus looked to get away from the crowds in Galilee and in Jerusalem, and to spend time alone with his disciples. To get away, Jesus went forty miles northwest of Capernaum to Tyre, a city in Phoenicia, which is part of Syria. This is Gentile territory.

Not accidentally, Jesus goes to the land of the Gentiles on the heels of his teaching about clean and unclean foods. Not only did Jesus declare all foods clean, but the risen Lord later taught the apostle Peter in the context of the ministry to Cornelius the Gentile. In Acts 10 he said, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” He used this teaching about not calling God-given food unclean to teach about God extending salvation even to unclean Gentiles.

Jesus went to Tyre to get away from the crowd. The text says, “Yet he could not keep his presence a secret.” We are told that, in spite of the attempt at secrecy, God ordained that a desperate Gentile woman heard that Jesus was there and came to him. So we learn from a Syro-Phoenician woman the importance of a humble and persistent faith. That is the heart of what we are looking at—the humble and persistent faith of this woman.

She came to Jesus with a humble request, was at first denied, then persisted in her request, and finally saw her prayer answered. We are going to look at four points: request, denial, persistence, and answer. Then I will make an application after each of these points.

Request

Let us first look at “request” from verses 25 and 26. The Syro-Phoenician woman requested that Jesus exorcise a demon from her daughter. The text says, “In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.”

The woman comes to Christ because she has a desperate need. Her beloved daughter is possessed by an evil spirit. Mark calls her a little daughter, indicating one who is very dear and precious to her. In Matthew 15:22, the parallel passage, the woman tells Jesus that her daughter suffers terribly. This mother is suffering in behalf of her child; that is, the one she loves. And this is what love does. When we love someone, we feel their pain. We would rather suffer than to see someone we love suffer.

The daughter is possessed by an evil spirit. We know that the whole world is under the control of the evil one, according to 1 John 5. Demon possession is just a more direct manifestation of the devil’s control over unbelievers. This daughter is particularly possessed by a demon in order to torment the girl and to torment her mother and to torment those around them.

This event gives an illustration of the power of intercessory prayer. This woman becomes an intercessor for her demon-possessed daughter. She comes to Jesus and she falls at his feet. In doing this, she is humbling herself before the Lord, hoping to be shown mercy.

This reminds us of how Jairus came to Jesus interceding for his dying daughter. Mark 5 says, “Then one of the synagogue rulers named Jairus came there. Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him.”

But unlike the Jewish synagogue ruler Jairus, this woman was a Gentile. Isn’t Jesus the Jewish Messiah? Many Jews in the first century did not see the Gentiles as part of the plan of redemption for the Messiah. This expectation, however, was not based on the Scriptures. The Old Testament frequently prophesied salvation being extended to the Gentiles. From early on, all the way back to Genesis 12, to the first call of Abram. And God says to Abram, in making his covenant, “I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

And you see this many other times, especially throughout the prophets. Look at Isaiah 11:10: “In that day, the root of Jesse”—that is speaking about the Messiah—“the root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his place of rest will be glorious.”

Not only did most Jews not see the Gentiles as entering into God’s covenant, but they had active animosity and hostility toward the Gentiles. In fact, in the parallel passage in Matthew 15, this woman is referred to as a Canaanite. Now, people like the Moabites and Edomites have at least some traditional friendly connection to Israel. But the Canaanites have always been Israel’s sworn enemies. Jews in the days of Jesus despised Gentiles and commonly referred to them as unclean dogs. Israel sought deliverance from the political power of Rome, and they saw pagan Greek culture as threatening both Jewish traditions and sovereignty.

This text tells us that the Syro-Phoenician woman “begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.” She was not too ashamed to beg. This is earnest, desperate, humble prayer. For lifeless, perfunctory prayer will never be effectual, especially in interceding for others.

Notice the faith of this woman’s appeal. She has no doubt that Jesus is both willing and able to drive out the demon. She wholeheartedly believes that he has the power and authority to do what she is asking. But think about it. On what was she basing this faith? It is unlikely that she had seen Jesus work such miracles before. After all, he was in a strange land, and there was very little reason for a Gentile woman to ever have visited Israel. No, she most likely believed based only on what she had heard from others. In fact, it tells us that she had heard he was coming. Someone had brought to her the good news of this Jewish Messiah, who had the ability to heal and to work miracles. It reminds us of what Paul said in Romans 10: “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” (Rom. 10:14). Like this Syro-Phoenician woman, we are to believe in Jesus based on what we have heard about him through the preaching of the gospel.

Mark does not record what she specifically says, but in Matthew 15:22, we see that she cries out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Notice the orthodoxy of her address to Jesus. First of all, she rightly calls him “Lord.” This is his proper title. She does not address him as “Teacher” or “Doctor” or “Healer” or “Exorcist.” She recognizes him as being Lord. He is God. He is Yahweh. And to call Jesus Lord is to make the most basic Christian confession of faith: Jesus is Lord. To assert that Jesus is Lord is to declare yourself to be his slave. It is to affirm that you are ready to do whatever your Lord says.

She also calls him “Son of David.” In this, the Gentile woman shows surprising understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures. She recognizes Jesus to be the Messiah, the fulfillment of God’s promise, especially in 2 Samuel 7, where King David is told that there will be a Son of David to come, a Messiah to come. Calling Jesus the Son of David also emphasizes his authority because this is the idea of the kingly Messiah, the King of kings.

Finally, notice this woman’s humility. She does not come to Jesus proudly demanding justice, as if God had owed her something. Instead, she sees herself as wholly undeserving and comes humbly, asking only for mercy. Think about it: Because we are sinners before a holy God, to demand justice from God is to demand our own damnation.

In application of this point, we see the Syro-Phoenician woman’s prayer as a model for us, as an excellent example of earnestness, orthodoxy, and humility. So we need to approach Christ in earnestness. In Jeremiah 29 the Lord says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” Our half-hearted, drowsy, apathetic prayers are not answered by God and they are an offense to God. We need to come to him with the zeal and reverence that is fit for the occasion.

We need to approach Christ with a right understanding. We must pray in accordance with the word of God. The Word describes for us the one to whom we are praying and the Word directs us in what we should pray. And we need to approach Christ in humility. Above all else, this is what we learn from the Syro-Phoenician woman. As sinful human beings, we are naturally proud. As Americans, we are proud. And fill in the blank for whatever else contributes to your pride. It could be your lineage, your job, your looks, your house, your car, your achievements, your degrees, your race, your athletic ability.  All these things irrationally contribute to our pride. I say “irrationally” because often these things are inflated in our own minds. In other words, we are not as well off as we think we are, we are not as successful as we imagine, and we are not as good-looking as we picture in our own minds.

And even if we do have something, the logical question is, what do we have that God has not given us? The condition for receiving grace from God is to humble ourselves before him. So let us look at the second point: denial.

Denial

Jesus first denies the request of the Syro-Phoenician woman. The Matthew version highlights that Jesus first denies her request through her silence. Matthew 15:23 says, “Jesus did not answer a word.” As Martin Luther once said, “Jesus here is as silent as a stone.” In many ways, there is no answer so seemingly cold and harsh as silence. But as she persists in her pleading, Jesus goes on to say in Mark 7:27, “First let the children eat all they want, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”

When Jesus says, “First let the children eat,” he is asserting that he has first come to the Jews. In the parallel passage in Matthew, Jesus states that he has been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. It is not that God has a plan of salvation only for the Jews. He sent his one and only Son into the world not just to the Jews. No, Jesus is declared in John 4 to be the Savior of the world. But he has come for the Jews first. Jesus is the Jewish Messiah for the world.

This principle of the priority of the Jews was also articulated and practiced by the apostle Paul. In Romans 1:16 Paul says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes,” and then it says “first for the Jews and then for the Gentiles.” It says the same phrase later on in Romans 2 as well. And it was Paul’s regular practice that even when he went to leading Gentile cities throughout the Roman empire, he would first bring the gospel to the Jewish synagogues. He did this in the cities of Antioch, Iconium, Thessalonica, Berea, and Corinth. And Paul even practiced this principle of Jewish priority in Rome, the very heart of the Gentile world. The first thing when he does when he arrives as a prisoner is to call together “the leaders of the Jews” (Acts 28:17) so that he can first declare the gospel to them. It is only after they reject them that Paul declares that he will then go and speak to the Gentiles. And he says, “They will listen.”

None of this is arguing for inherent Jewish superiority. After all, God’s favor to his people is never meritorious. His salvation is, always has been, and always will be by grace alone. And in Jesus’ response, people tend to jump to the implied reference to the Gentiles as being dogs, and we will get to that. But do not miss that Jesus first refers to Israel as his children. He says, “Let the children eat all they want.” This crucial doctrine of adoption is the height of God’s expression of his love for us. God does more than forgive us. He does more than justify us. He does more than redeem us. (GWP) He does more than reconcile us. In Christ, we are brought into God’s family. He adopts us as his children. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” (1 John 3:1).

And the bread is for the children, he says, not for the dogs. Bible scholars often fall all over themselves, wanting to sugarcoat what Jesus is saying here. They want to excuse away what is clearly being intended here as an insult. Their version of Jesus, the saccharine sweet Jesus, would never think to utter an insult at someone. They point out that the word used here is for housedogs, or literally, little dogs, not for wild dogs that roam the streets. And while there is an element of truth there—it is a less harsh term for dogs—nevertheless, there is no question that there is a clearly implied insult here. In the time of Jesus, Jews often referred to Gentiles as dogs. And it was clearly meant to be a term of contempt and highlighted their uncleanness. When Jesus speaks of her as a dog, it was known to be an insult.

The Bible frequently uses the term “dogs” as an insult for unclean humans. So in Psalm 22:16 we read, “Dogs have surrounded me.” That is not talking literally about dogs. “Dogs have surrounded me, a band of evil men have encircled me. They have pierced my hands and my feet,” and he goes on to say, “Deliver my life from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs.” And Psalm 59:6 says, “They return at evening, snarling like dogs, and prowl about the city.” And in the New Testament, the apostle Paul says of his enemies in Philippians 3:2: “Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil.”

The faint of heart may not approve, but Jesus here is undoubtedly giving a hard denial to the Syro-Phoenician woman’s earnest request. Now the right question is, why does he do this? He certainly did not do it because he despised her. That much is clear. The text does not explicitly tell us his purpose, but it appears that he is testing her faith, seeing if she will persevere in her faith. Of course, Jesus as the God/man, is the great heart-knower, and he knows that she will pass this test. That did not stop God from testing us. But he is both building her faith and he is using her faith as an example to show others; even to show us here today.

Seeing the way Jesus seemingly snubs the Syro-Phoenician woman reminds us that we must not put God in a box. Be careful to base your ideas of God on what he has actually revealed about himself in the Scriptures. It is a wretched crime to paint your own picture of what you think God should be like, and then pretend that your idea is somehow valid because you thought it. You do not make God; he makes you. And God does not always answer your prayers in the time that you expect him to or in the way that you think he should. I thought we should go to Coloma, and I prayed for that. He said, “No, you should come here and have the junior retreat here.” He had a better idea.

A part of being humble before God is waiting on him and accepting his will, and his will to be revealed in his time.

Persistence

So now let us look at persistence from verse 28. “‘Yes, Lord,’ she replied, ‘but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’” In a shocking display of humility, this woman readily and quickly agrees with the Lord’s evaluation of her as a dog. Certainly, the temptation for anyone would be to argue back: “I am no dog.” When our pride is insulted, we are usually prone to answer back with maybe a little name-calling of our own. As C. H. Spurgeon said, “Most men, if they had been called dogs, would either have turned on their heel and gone away in sullen despair, or else would have blazed into a bad temper and replied to the Master, ‘I am no more a dog than you, and if I come to ask for charity, can you not at least give me a civil refusal?’”

But real faith begins with agreeing with God’s humbling, unflattering evaluation of us—we who are dead in our transgressions and sins and by nature are objects of God’s wrath. Listen to this unflattering evaluation of us in Romans 3, starting in verse 10: “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away. They have together become worthless.’ ‘There is no one who does good, not even one.’”

It is not easy to say “Amen” to God’s unvarnished view of sinful man. It takes God-given, Holy-Spirit regeneration, and God-given humility to see the unpleasant truth about ourselves. People are offended at God’s low view of man, which is why so many ministers refuse to preach about sin. They want to tell people only what their itching ears want to hear so that they can be liked by the people. The truth of matter is that to call us dogs is actually an insult to dogs. In some ways, at least, we are actually worse than dogs. After all, dogs are at least morally neutral. They are not the ones who sinned against the holy God; we have. Human beings, not dogs, stand in need of God’s forgiveness.

People today seem to be looking for the slightest thing to be offended at. But the Syro-Phoenician woman is not easily offended, nor is she easily turned away. She displays true humility in her acceptance of the dog-moniker that Jesus gave to her. She humbled herself. As we know, God opposes the proud but he gives grace to the humble. In 2 Chronicles 7:14 God says, “If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and will heal their land.”

The Syro-Phoenician woman imitated the humility of Mephibosheth long ago who called himself “a dead dog” before King David in 2 Samuel 9. In agreeing with Jesus, she again addresses Jesus as Lord. She says, “Yes, Lord.” She did not just say, “Yes.” She said, “Yes, Lord.” By reiterating and calling him Lord, she again humbles herself and puts herself under him.

Another remarkable thing about the Syro-Phoenician woman’s response is that she comes equipped with an argument. She reasons with Jesus that even dogs eat the children’s crumbs. In other words, even the dogs are still fed by the master. When our pastor preached about this long ago, he said that she all of a sudden became an animal rights activist. She is not arguing with Jesus in some combative, rebellious way. Instead, she is respectfully using divine logic to make a case for why Jesus should grant her request. And we will soon see how God responds to such sanctified reasoning.

The Syro-Phoenician woman displays the kind of faith that will not take “No” for an answer. She is like Jacob, who while wrestling with the Lord asserted, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” Jesus is teaching us through the Syro-Phoenician woman’s example to persevere in prayer. He famously taught this same lesson in the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18. It says, “Jesus told his disciples this parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:2). In that parable, he tells about a wronged widow who beseeched an unjust judge, a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. She demanded justice against her adversaries, but for some time the judge refused. But because she kept on bothering him, he finally granted her request. Then Jesus concludes in this parable, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:6–8). Will he find such faith as he sees in the Syro-Phoenician woman?

Notice that this woman does not come insisting on Jesus giving her what she deserves. In the parable, the persistent widow petitioned for justice. But this Syro-Phoenician widow cries out only for mercy. She knows that she does not deserve to have her little daughter healed by the Lord, but she appeals to her compassionate Lord to do for her what she does not deserve.

The Syro-Phoenician woman is a clear example of such persistent and earnest faith. Jesus holds up her faith and puts it on display for all of us through the centuries to see and ascribe to emulate.

The application of that point is that it takes serious humility to hear God’s evaluation of you and accept it. And God often makes the evaluation known to us through the delegated authorities that he has established in our lives. So I ask you: Children, how do you receive it when parents address you in your sin? For all of us, what about when a church leader addresses you in your sin? How about when your boss at work corrects you? Do you agree, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, or do you kick against the goads? Do you make excuses? Do you shift blame? Do you quickly assume that the authority does not really understand? Or even worse, do you turn around and attack the person who graciously brought you the correction for your good?

Now, listen carefully. I am not asking if you manage to bear up under it. Oftentimes, kicking against authority does not end well. Kicking against your boss is not going to end well. I am not asking if you just manage to bear up well under it. I am asking if you agree from the heart and then implement the change that is demanded of you. It takes true, Holy-Spirit given humility to hear and do the word given you, and it takes even more humility to persist in doing so.

The Answer

Finally, let us look at the answer in verses 29–30. Then Jesus told her, “‘For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.’ She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.”

The Syro-Phoenician woman humbled herself before the Lord and received a gracious response. This is not surprising, for God gives grace to the humble. The woman’s reply demonstrated true faith, and God answers her prayer of faith.  In the Matthew version, Jesus declares, “Woman, you have great faith!” (Matt. 15:28). He similarly says to the centurion in Matthew 8, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith” (Matt. 8:10). Ironically, he was another Gentile, the centurion—a man of great faith.

This all points to the truth that God responds particularly to believing prayer. We see this spoken of elsewhere, in Mark 11, starting in verse 22. Jesus said, “Have faith in God. I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” James says similarly in the context of praying to God for wisdom, “But when he asks” – that is, the one who asks for wisdom – “he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like the waves of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind” (Jas. 1:6).

When Jesus tells the Syro-Phoenician woman, “The demon has left your daughter,” it could very well be that he had answered her prayer even before she had come. This reminds us that God knows our needs even before we say them, such as in Psalm 139:4, where we read, “Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.”

Our prayers are not giving the omniscient God information that he does not already have. In fact, he knows our needs better than we do. That is not why we pray. No, we pray because prayer is God’s ordained means through which he has determined to give us more grace as we humble ourselves in prayer.

Jesus sends her away with a word of assurance. He says, “The demon has left your daughter.”  I had not thought about it this way before I studied it to prepare for this sermon. But when you think about this, this is another test of faith. He did not go with her and put his hand on the daughter and heal her right for her to see. He said, “Go, your daughter has been made well.” She had to take that by faith. She had to believe what he was saying.

How does she know that Jesus was not just trying to get rid of her again? The silence did not work. The calling her a dog did not work. So now just say this and get rid of her. No. She knew. She believed in Jesus. She knew that if he said it, it was done, for he is not only her Lord, but he is the Lord of all. She exercised her great faith in Jesus by trusting that what he says is true. And when she gets home, she indeed finds what she expected, that the demon has left the child healed from that very hour.

The final application: God indeed gives grace to the humble. Like the Syro-Phoenician woman, you must humble yourself before God if you want to receive his grace. James 4:10 says, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” If you are outside of Christ, if you are not a true Christian, if you are not born of God, if you are still dead in your transgressions and sins, without hope and without God in this world, I say this day, humble yourself before God. Cry out to the Lord, “God, have mercy upon me, a sinner!” Repent of your sins and surrender your whole life to the Lord Jesus Christ. When you humble yourself and come to Christ, you can rest on his promise, the promise of John 6:37: “Whoever comes to me, I will never drive away.”

And even if we are in Christ, we need to remain humble and even grow in humility. It is the tragic truth in many examples in the Bible and in church history that some who started seemingly humble grew proud over time and destroyed themselves and shipwrecked their faith. King Saul is an infamous example of this. He began by humbly insisting that he was unworthy to be a king. Remember, he said he was the least in the least of clans? And yet that same man eventually was building monuments in his own honor and disobeying the Lord in his pride.

Or think of King Uzziah. When he young, he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. He was instructed in the fear of God and he sought the Lord. We are told all these things about him in 2 Chronicles 26. But then we come to a most tragic verse, 2 Chronicles 26:16. It says, “But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall.” May this not be the tragic summary statement of your life.

We are a people in need of God’s grace. And to receive his grace, we must come to God in humility and keep on coming in humility. We must be ready to hear whatever God has to say, agree with it wholeheartedly, and then faithfully do it. We must humble ourselves and confess our sin and repent of it. When we humble ourselves this way, we will experience true Holy Spirit revival. And so I will close with this well-known verse, Isaiah 57:15, which says this: “For this is what the high and lofty One says—he who lives forever, whose name is holy: ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit.’” That is the humble: contrite and lowly in spirit. For what purpose does he dwell with them? God says, praise the Lord, “to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.”