Father Snort

Brad Sullivan Proper 18, Year B September 6, 2015 Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17 Mark 7:24-37 Jesus didn’t want to heal a little girl who was possessed by a demon simply because she wasn’t Jewish. That’s a hard point for us to accept, and this is a difficult passage to wrestle with. Many have said that Jesus was just testing the Syrophoenician woman’s faith, and that he really intended to heal the woman’s daughter all along, but that doesn’t really seem to follow the story. Jesus had traveled north of Israel to the region of Tyre. This was gentile country, and the woman is named as a gentile. There was no reason to test her faith. I think we can take Jesus’ dismissal of the woman on face value. “Let the children be fed first,” Jesus said, “for it is not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs.” I was sent for Isra