Whose Table Is It, Anyway?
Intersectional Commentary on Mark 7
A while back, I was scrolling on YouTube, my poison of choice, and I came across a video by Ray Lau, a stand-up comedian. Immediately I felt a deep sting as I was watching this, can you see it too?
My mother is from Indonesia, as in she moved from Indonesia to the Netherlands in the 50s when she was little. Her mother was Indonesian, and her father was from Papua New Guinea by way of the Maluku Islands.
My father is a run-of-the-mill mixture of several European countries and is Jewish. Obviously, they were not European enough, though, because the Nazi’s came for my grandmother as well. She fortunately survived.
I’m also not Asian enough, according to this video. I literally cried after watching it, and I was reminded of a long conversation I had with Angie Hong about being Indo and the struggles that come with finding connection with my fellow Asians. I mean, no one doubts Henry Goulding being Asian, nor do I hear anyone doubt if Obama is black, while both of them have white parents.
Just because I don’t look a certain way, other people feel the need to tell me that I don’t belong. I’m either too white or not white enough. It’s a lose-lose situation.
That moment reminds me of Mark 7. Because the whole chapter is essentially one long argument about who gets to decide who’s clean enough to be at the table. And the answer Jesus eventually gives, after a woman who had no business being in the conversation forces it out of him, is a lot more radical than most Sunday school curricula would have you believe.
Pull up a chair. We have some things to talk about.
The Handwashing Police
Mark 7 opens with a delegation of Pharisees and scribes who have traveled all the way from Jerusalem to watch Jesus’s disciples eat lunch. And their complaint? The disciples didn’t wash their hands according to the tradition of the elders.
I want to be careful here, because anti-Semitic readings of this passage have done enormous damage and I refuse to add to that pile. The Pharisees weren’t petty bureaucrats making up rules to torture people. The purity codes were sophisticated, communally meaningful, and deeply tied to Jewish identity in the context of Roman occupation. Keeping yourself ritually distinct was, in many ways, an act of resistance.
What Jesus is actually pushing back on is something more specific: the weaponization of tradition to avoid accountability. He quotes Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” And then he turns it around and catches the religious leaders in their own contradiction: they’ve found a way to use the korban law (dedicating your wealth to God) to avoid financially supporting elderly parents.
Don’t we see this all the time? “Lana, you can’t be gay here” while they don’t welcome the stranger. Or “Lana, speak out more against wars” as they invest their 401k in Palantir.
The issue isn’t tradition. The issue is when tradition becomes a wall that protects the powerful from having to reckon with the vulnerable. I’ve seen this pattern enough times that I could write a book about it. (Oh, wait.)
What Actually Makes You Unclean
After the confrontation, Jesus pulls the crowd aside and says something that, if you hear it with first-century ears, is genuinely scandalous: it’s not what goes into a person that defiles them. It’s what comes out.
On one level he’s talking about food, which is already pretty radical, since the dietary laws were central to Jewish identity. But Mark’s gospel is always doing more than one thing at once. The list Jesus gives of what defiles from within reads like a catalog of harm: “evil intentions, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.” (7:21-22)
Notice that this list is entirely about what you do to other people and who you choose to be. None of it is about what kind of body you have. None of it is about what you eat, who you love, or what gender you are.
I find it more than a little bit ironic that the church has spent centuries obsessing over bodies, what they eat, how they express sexuality, what gender they present, when the one time Jesus gives an actual list of what defiles a person, he doesn’t mention any of that. What defiles you is what you choose to do, particularly to the people around you.
Which makes it all the more ironic how so many people, Christians in particular, have so many opinions about my body. I’m a degenerate who has fallen to social contagion, and at the same time, I’m the mastermind of a trans agenda.
The Woman Who Changed Jesus’s Mind
Here’s where the chapter gets really interesting.
Jesus, having just finished a whole teaching about what doesn’t make someone unclean, gets up and travels to the region of Tyre, which is Gentile territory. He’s trying to stay under the radar: “When he went into a house, he did not want anyone to know.” (7:24 NET) Jesus needed a break, honestly. Who can blame him?
And immediately (because it’s Mark and immediately is Mark’s favorite word) a woman finds him. She’s described as a Syrophoenician Greek. She’s a Gentile woman in Roman-occupied territory with a daughter who has an unclean spirit, and she falls at Jesus’s feet and begs him to cast the demon out.
And Jesus says something that, at face value, is kind of awful: “Let the children be satisfied first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and to throw it to the dogs” (7:27 NET)
The “children” are Israel. She’s one of the “dogs.”
People have been tying themselves in theological knots trying to explain this away for centuries. Jesus was testing her faith, Jesus was using the word for a pet dog, not a feral dog, Jesus was just playing devil’s advocate. I want to sit with the discomfort a little longer than that.
This woman has three strikes against her in the social order of her time: she’s a woman, she’s a Gentile, and she’s coming to a Jewish rabbi with an audacious request. She is, by every metric that mattered to the people watching, on the outside of every table that counted. And Jesus’s initial response reflects the conventional wisdom of who gets the bread first.
And she doesn’t accept it.
“Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” (7:28 NET)
She doesn’t perform submission. She doesn’t apologize for her presence. She takes his own metaphor and she turns it: even in the world you’re describing, there is still something for me. And if there is still something for me, then give it to me.
Jesus changes his mind. “Because you said this, you may go. The demon has left your daughter.” (7:29 NET)
I don’t think we let this land enough. Jesus, in the middle of his own ministry, was confronted by a woman who arguably had no standing to confront him, and he listened to her and changed his response. His understanding of the scope of his mission expanded as a result of this encounter.
She taught him something.
Let’s be real here: her body was not something to be debated, just like my body is not debatable. Jesus, in his privilege, didn’t even see the value of helping this woman, just like a large chunk of the church doesn’t feel like serving me.
Be Opened
The chapter ends quietly. Jesus heals a man who can’t hear and has a speech impediment. “After Jesus took him aside privately, away from the crowd, he put his fingers in the man’s ears, and after spitting, he touched his tongue. Then he looked up to heaven and said with a sigh, “Ephphatha” (that is, “Be opened”)." (7:33-34 NET)
That word has stayed with me. Ephphatha. The Aramaic was preserved in the Greek text, I think, because it was too significant to translate away: Be opened. The author of Mark could have simply used the Koine term Διανοίχθητι, which is used in Luke's Emmaus road story ("their eyes were opened") and in Acts for Lydia's heart being "opened." It was preserved, I think, because it’s a beautiful word to say with a deep, deep sigh… Ephphatha.
After a whole chapter about who gets defined as clean or unclean, who gets a seat at the table, whose bread is whose, the chapter ends with Jesus privately, tenderly, opening the ears of someone who couldn’t hear and loosening the tongue of someone who couldn’t speak.
I think about all the people whose ears have been closed to them. Closed by doctrine, by shame, by the sheer exhaustion of fighting to be heard. I think about all the voices that have been bound by purity culture, by complementarianism, by the accumulated weight of being told their experience doesn’t count as theology.
Ephphatha. Be opened. This is not addressed to the person who can’t hear. It’s addressed to the situation. Be opened. Let this person hear. Let this person speak.
Some questions I’m sitting with
When have you been told, explicitly or implicitly, that the table wasn’t set for you? What did you do with that?
The Syrophoenician woman didn’t argue that the hierarchy was wrong. She worked within it and won anyway. What do you make of that as a strategy? Is it enough? Does it bother you?
If Jesus’s understanding of his mission could be expanded by an encounter with someone his tradition told him was outside, whose voice might be expanding your understanding right now? And are you listening?
What needs to be opened in you?
Next time in my Intersectional Commentary: Mark 8 — “Who do you say I am?” Peter gets it right and immediately gets it wrong, and Jesus says something about picking up a cross that nobody in the room is ready for.