Teaching Jesus

 I was sitting in the kitchen Wednesday when I overhead on Zoom the pastor at my wife's church tease the next week's Bible study with a question: Is it possible for someone else to teach Jesus?

As questions go, that one’s a no-brainer. I haven’t seen set foot in the church for two years, but I couldn’t help myself. I answered immediately.

“Yes.”

The proof lies in Mark 7, and in a parallel passage in Matthew 15. Mark explains that a Syrophoenician woman came to Jesus to ask him to heal her daughter, whom the distraught mother said was afflicted by an unclean spirit.

If you've been paying attention to the gospels so far, you probably can guess how this will play out. Jesus will rebuke the spirit. He'll embrace the girl in a hug and breathe on her. He might be dramatic, or he might be matter-of-fact, but this story is going to end with the girl better and her mother relieved and grateful. One thing that will not happen, is Jesus will not say no.

Except no is exactly what Jesus  does say. In fact, he doesn't just give the poor woman a paper cut; he pours lemon juice on it and delivers a biting insult.

"It is not right to take the children's bread and feed it to the dogs."

This is the sort of thing that can sink a political campaign. Over the years I've heard lots of attempts at damage control by God's PR team. None of them has been especially convincing.

"Dogs are beloved pets," goes one. "Jesus was basically calling this woman a member of the family."

Except the gospel comes from a culture without $70 bags of Purina dog food for small breeds. Jesus was not comparing the Syrophoenician woman to a toy poodle named Fifi. Dogs in ancient Galilee were unclean animals that inhabited the city dump. They known for their viciousness. not their adorable penchant for sitting on your lap.

"Jesus was testing the woman's faith."

By calling her a dog? We've already seen Jesus heal lepers and blind people without such tests. Luke reports that a woman simply touched the hem of his robe and was healed with no effort on his part.

Here's the simple explanation, in Jesus' own words: "I was only sent for the lost sheep of Israel." He wasn't going to provide the healing because the woman and her daughter weren't Jewish.

But this woman was determined. Her daughter needed help,, and she was confident Jesus was the one to help. Don't give your children's bread to the dogs? OK, then. She had a quick wit and a  ready response.

"Dogs can eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table."

One imagines Jesus stopping, stunned. Of course she was right. The Bible was filled with stories of favored Gentiles. Ruth the Moabitess, a woman from a people so reviled that the book of Genesis recounted a crude ethnic joke about their origins. Rahab of Jericho, who hid Israelite spies scouting out the land. Naaman the Aramean. whom Elisha the prophet had healed of  leprosy.

Blown away by the response, Jesus turned and fed the dog a whole loaf of bread, straight from the oven.

“For such a reply, you may go," he said. "The spirit  has left your daughter.”

It's a stunning moment, mostly because it goes against our notions of Jesus as a perfectly enlightened bodhisattva, but the gospels note that Jesus' whole life was an odyssey of learning. It began with his birth , when he had to learn to latch on to his mother's breast in order to eat. From there he had to learn to crawl and then to walk, and somewhere along the line he picked up Aramaic, along with Hebrew, Greek and probably some Latin. The evangelist Luke notes that Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah, while John reports that he could write as well. Someone had to teach him these skills, along with the trade he learned at Joseph's knee.

This should be no surprise to us. The gospels describe Jesus as one with the Father, and to look at God in the Hebrew Bible is to see a God who is eager to try new things, to see what happens.

God plays in the dirt and sculpts a man. Then he breathes life into this new creature and names him Adan, (There's a first time for everything.)

He brings the animals by. What's Adam going name them? ("Well, this one is a frog. I'm calling this thing a badger. This one is an oliphaunt, and this useless lump over here is called Kevin.")

Any suitable companions to be found? ("Well, the capybara is kind of funny, the way it eats watermelon and soaks in the hot tub; and it's really cute the way the hamster stuffs its cheeks just before we say grace. But the bananaquit seems kind of vicious, and none of them is a big conversationalist...")

The adventure plays out over the years. "Come, let us make bricks," man says, and God drops in for a closer look. "Well, what have we here?' he asks, and then he finds out.

God learns.

Sometimes what we teach him isn't what he wanted to know. "You're doing things that never even occurred to me!"

Sometimes God is impressed by our ability to change, and a great city (and its cattle) are spared judgment.

Sometimes it even seems people manage to teach God about himself.

"Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is right?" Abraham asks. And God blinks, and he changes his mind.

God, it appears, is always willing to learn about showing mercy. The real question is whether we have anything to teach him.