Bishop Barron explains the correct theological reading of the Syrophoenician Woman story
A solo sermon by Bishop Robert Barron on how to interpret a challenging Gospel passage.
Summary
Bishop Robert Barron delivers a sermon for the 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time, addressing what he considers a widespread misreading of the Gospel story of the Syrophoenician Woman. In the story, Jesus initially ignores the woman, then tells her he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, and finally makes a remark that seems to compare her to a dog — before ultimately healing her daughter after her famous comeback. Barron argues forcefully that the popular psychological interpretation — that Jesus was tired, cranky, and needed to be corrected by the woman — is theologically untenable because it makes Jesus a sinner, which would undermine the entire structure of Christianity. Drawing on Augustine, Aquinas, and the Church Fathers, he offers what he presents as the correct reading: that Jesus was deliberately testing and deepening the woman's faith through progressive resistance, a principle he illustrates with three personal anecdotes from his own life.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: The Story and the Problem
Bishop Barron: Peace be with you. Friends, the title of my sermon for this 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time is "How Not to Read the Story of the Syrophoenician Woman."
You know the story well — you've heard it, I'm sure, over and over again. Jesus wanders into this country outside the borders of ancient Israel and he runs across this woman, a Syrophoenician woman, who has a request: could you please help my daughter? She's possessed by a dark spirit. And then Jesus sort of famously puts her off. First he ignores her, doesn't say anything to her. And then when she presses, he says, "No, no, no — I've just been sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, not to you foreigners by implication." And then when she keeps pressing, we get this line that just seems almost cruel: "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs." So first, a kind of indifference, then "look, I'm just for Israel," and then finally, "I'm not throwing food to the dogs." It's pretty off-putting stuff. And then she has one of the most famous snappy comebacks in literary history: "Well, at least the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table." And then Jesus comes around — okay, I'm going to cure your daughter.
The Wrong Reading
How not to read the story — even though maybe you've heard a dozen homilies in this regard. The wrong reading goes something like this: Jesus is tired out after a tough day of ministry and travel, he's kind of cranky, and this somewhat annoying woman comes along. So he puts her off, throws out an off-putting remark, and finally insults her. He's just difficult with her. And then she's so clever and has this plucky comeback line, and he says, "Oh, okay, I'll do what you want. In fact, I've really learned a lot from you and from your persistence. I'm a better person for having come across you."
Look, I've been involved in pastoral ministry for much of my life. Talk to any priest, anyone involved in pastoral work — sure, we all get cranky sometimes. It's been a long day. Sometimes people are kind of annoying and we lose our temper and we're short and difficult with them. Okay, when it comes to us, I get that. But the problem, everybody, is that you cannot turn Jesus into a sinner. That he's tired, okay, and maybe psychologically cranky, okay — but you can't turn Jesus into a sinner who is being aggressive toward this woman. If he's a sinner, he needs a savior. If he's a sinner, he's not the Savior himself. And the whole structure of Christianity falls apart.
Now, besides that, it's a great interpretation — I'm saying so don't read it that way. I know it's trendy. I know it appeals to our psychological experience. But it's not the way to read it.
The Church Fathers' Reading: Faith Grows Through Resistance
The Church Fathers had a much, much better and more convincing reading of this. It is actually spiritually much more helpful than saying, "Hey, cranky Jesus had a bad day and a plucky gal from Syrophoenicia straightened him out." Forget that.
What is this about? It's about the testing of faith, so that faith might grow. The principle — and we all know it — is that powers in us grow, deepen, and develop in the measure that they are opposed, that they find some resistance, and it is in fighting against that resistance that we grow.
Three Personal Illustrations
Let me give you some examples — maybe they're simple ones, but they're from my own experience. Once you see the principle, you can see it in your own life.
Here's the first one. When I was a little kid I was a good baseball player. I played all the main sports — basketball, football, and so on — but baseball was my best game. I was a good defensive player, I did a little bit of pitching, and I played shortstop usually. But I was especially a good hitter. One year — I must have been in seventh grade, maybe Little League — my batting average was in the 600s, and I kept track of it very carefully. In those days, before I read all these books, I had good eyesight, good hand-eye coordination, and Little League pitching is not exactly world class. So I was able to hit the ball really well.
One year — maybe the following year — I made the all-star team for our Little League. And I find myself at all-star practice. The better players are there, and I'm up at the plate during practice just hitting line drive after line drive against a fellow Little League pitcher. Well, there was a coach — it was the all-star team, so I didn't really know him that well — and he came to the mound. He saw that I was hitting really well and he said, "I'd like to show you something." He got up to the mound himself — if I remember right, he had been a college player, a pretty accomplished player. And so I'm at the plate, just used to Little League pitching. He winds up and threw the first real curveball I had ever seen. In Little League, they're throwing medium-speed fastballs at you, the easiest kind of pitch. Well, I stood up there and this pitch is coming at me, and it was so shocking — I'd never seen the real movement of a curveball, that kind of curves and drops. I stepped out of the box because I was so convinced the ball was going to hit me, and then it breaks right over the plate. To this day I remember that experience.
Look, if I had just stayed at the level of hitting against Little League fastballs, yeah, I was a good hitter, but I'd never have gotten any better. What did the coach do? He saw the reaction I had and he started working with me on how to wait on a pitch, how to see the spin of the ball, how to anticipate a curveball, how to discern that difference, how to stand in there and not jump out of the batter's box. And he made me, by this resistance, a much better hitter. By putting up an obstacle in front of me — throwing me a real curveball — he made me better.
Let me give you an analogy from my academic life. A couple of years later, I'm a freshman at Fenwick High School outside Chicago and I take an English class. We had a great teacher — he died not long ago, just a few years ago — and his name was Mr. Langenderfer. We all made fun of his name, of course, being high school kids, but Mr. Langenderfer was an outstanding teacher. He taught English grammar and composition and he was a tough teacher. The ones you remember are the tough teachers. Every week he made us write an essay, we'd hand them in, and he'd grade them. But then he would choose what he thought was the best essay and what he thought was the worst essay. He wouldn't give the names — he wouldn't humiliate us that way — but he would read what he thought was a good essay and tell us why, and then he'd read a bad essay and point out what was wrong with it.
Well, I remember one time — I still remember it vividly, and it was fifty years ago — he's reading this bad essay. It was mine. It was my essay. And even though he didn't give the name, I was so embarrassed, so humiliated. He was ruthless going through the syntax, the grammar, the spelling, the sentence structure — everything — just pointing out how terrible this essay was. Look, I've spent most of my life as a writer. I have a doctorate, I've written thirty books, and I write almost every day. I almost every day think of him and think of something he taught me. I would have been the worst writer in the world unless he had resisted me, had put up an obstacle to me, had humiliated me even — and he did humiliate me. But I wouldn't have gotten any better if that hadn't happened. He wouldn't have called forth the power of writing unless he had opposed me.
I'll give you one more example. A few years after that, I'm at Catholic University in Washington studying philosophy. I love philosophy, I find my way to reading these great texts, and in class I could understand what was being said. I would raise a question and get an answer. Well, one day — I think it was my second year at Catholic U — it was a class with Dr. Dan Dahlstrom, who eventually became my master's thesis director. Wonderful man. He was a very young man at the time, a Hegel and Heidegger specialist, and we really admired him — a brilliant fellow. Well, in class we were talking about the famous problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom: how can we be free if God knows what's going to happen, and God is omniscient and infallible? It's a classic old problem in philosophy. He was teaching, I asked a question, he gave an answer, I asked a follow-up question, he gave another answer, and then I answered back. I remember he looked at me — he was used to teaching undergraduates — and he kind of winked at me and said, "Okay, make your case." At that moment, the class is watching, this professor I really admired was challenging me: don't just ask a question, but you seem unhappy with the answer I'm giving, so make your argument.
And so I did. And then he resisted me and answered, and then I had to answer back. I remember to this day — it felt like wings coming out of my back, that I was flying for the first time. I wasn't just learning philosophy or asking a question. I was actually philosophizing — poorly and in a junior manner, sure — but he was putting up a resistance to me that was calling forth a deeper capacity and made me a better philosopher.
Faith Grows the Same Way
I'm sure by now I'm belaboring the point. You get it — our powers grow through resistance.
Now, faith. What is faith? It's trust in God. Do you trust in God? Yeah, I sure do, and that's why I'm asking God for this and I expect to get it. Okay. What if you don't get it right away? You're pretty mad about that. How come he's not doing it? I keep asking. I trust in God and I'm still not getting what I want. Okay, one option is to give up — say, "I'm done with this." Like I could have said when that curveball came at me, "All right, I'm done with baseball, I can't handle that." Or when Dan Dahlstrom said, "Make your case" — "Oh no, I'm not up to making a case." But in both of those instances, I responded to the challenge by deepening my capacity to hit and my capacity to make an argument.
So faith — trust in God. Does God resist us? Not out of capricious dislike of us, not to show off his power, but he resists us precisely to draw out our trust more and more. Remember, I've quoted before that line from Augustine about petitionary prayer. When you ask God for something and you don't get it and you get frustrated — why wouldn't God just give it to me? — his answer is: because your soul has to expand so as to receive the gift that God wants to give you. It is by resistance that your faith grows.
You see it in the spiritual and monastic tradition. The idea of someone coming to a monastery: "I want to join the monastery." "No, no, wait outside." Do you have an answer? "No. Just wait outside." The whole day, maybe the whole night. Next morning, the monk comes out: "Oh, you're still there?" "Yeah, I want to become a monk." "All right, we'll get back to you." "What do you mean, get back to me? I've been waiting all night." "We'll get back to you." What's the idea? They're testing to see whether this hunger for the monastic life can grow to the point where you're really capable of it.
By the way — watch the movie Fight Club, one of my favorite movies. Remember, these guys want to join this little society and they stand outside, and Brad Pitt comes out: "No, no, no — go away. You're too fat. No, you're too old. You're too young." He puts them off, puts them off, puts them off, until he knows: okay, they've got what it takes. That's an old monastic move.
The Correct Reading
You see my point? The Syrophoenician Woman is not convincing a sinful Jesus to see it her way. Rather, Jesus — the Messiah, the Lord — is testing her through these three levels of resistance: first, ignoring her; second, putting her off; and thirdly, insulting her. But at each level he is drawing forth a deeper faith.
Now listen, and I'll close with this. After her snappy comeback — "even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table" — Jesus replied: "O woman, great is your faith." Her faith expanded. Her faith became great precisely in the process of being resisted.
May I humbly suggest — and I'm in line here with Augustine, Aquinas, and the whole tradition — that that is a better way to read the story of the Syrophoenician Woman. God bless you.