Reflections (Syrophoenician woman)

If you find yourself bored and in need of some light entertainment today, I can highly recommend googling videos of cats seeing their reflection for the first time. Watching an unsuspecting kitten accidentally catch sight of themselves in a mirror as they explore their house is certainly an amusing alternative to doom-scrolling your way through the evening.

Because, of course, cats – in company with most other animals – don’t recognise their own reflection. Humans, on the other hand, CAN recognise our own reflection in a mirror from the age of about one year old.

And, as a trait we share with dolphins, monkeys, elephants and (oddly) ants, humans at least like to think that this level of complex self-awareness gives us some superiority in the created order.

But whilst humans are pretty good at recognising, and utilising our reflected visual image, our capacity for reflection in other areas can be somewhat limited at times.

What we say to others, how we behave, the way we conduct ourselves and how we come across in social interactions can be areas of which we are largely unaware, until they are reflected back to us. And in the reflecting back, our words and actions are also often mixed with a heady cocktail of cultural assumptions, interpretation of our body language, tone, and other subtle cues as to our intention, and the other person’s particular history and (what we might colloquially call) ‘triggers’.

We can think we present in one perfectly innocuous way, but the other person experiences us very differently, and sometimes in ways that betray traits or prejudices that are so deeply ingrained in us or our culture, that we simply don’t see them for ourselves. This is one aspect of what leads to ‘unconscious bias’, and it takes someone else – often with considerable courage, to reflect those bias’s back to us before we realise quite what we’ve said or the impact it might have had on others.

So, we find, reflection to be a simple but an incredibly powerful tool for transformation and learning.

Observational comedy is joyfully disarming precisely because it uses reflections on everyday events and behaviours to make us laugh at ourselves whilst also challenging us on their appropriateness. But self-reflection isn’t always veiled in comedy.

Some of the most pivotal moments in my spiritual journey have been in therapeutic contexts or spiritual direction, where the person has simply reflected-back to me just one word or phrase that I have used. And in hearing myself back, I realise for the first time, just how strongly I feel about that thing, or perhaps how my words or actions may have come across to others.

This can be a great springboard to growth, but reflective feedback doesn’t always come cushioned by humour or the safety of a trusting relationship. 

And when, like the cat in the mirror, it comes as a surprise – we tend to react in one of two ways:

We either get defensive, and try to bat it away

Or

We get scared and try to avoid it

But there’s a third response which cats exhibit once they get used to seeing their own reflection … that is that they simply ignore it.

And we do this too.

On one extreme is vanity and the unhealthy obsession with curating the perfect reflection and on the other is deliberate ignorance or perhaps wilful obliviousness which chooses to ignore the reflection of anything uncomfortable in ourselves or in our culture until we simply get so used to the discomfort that we stop registering its existence.

In the Gospel reading we just heard, Jesus and his disciples encounter a woman who embodies much of what is considered to ‘mar’ the image of God in a person.

She is a mouthy female who dares to bother the Rabbi as he’s trying to take a well-earned rest from his holy business;

She is described as a Syro-phonecian Gentile – an allusion, perhaps to a pagan or non-God-fearing background. And in the parallel account in Matthew, she’s described even less-charitably as a Canaanite, with its historic allusions to being a people opposed to the people of God; both have somewhat racist overtones.

She has a demon-possessed daughter and she also has the audacity to throw herself at Christ’s feet and seek something the prevailing culture tells us she doesn’t deserve: grace.

I don’t know about you, but I desperately want Jesus to just turn round and say something nice to her, to heal her daughter and make it all ok.... to diffuse the tension. But he doesn’t do that straight away, and instead enters into an exchange with her that makes him seem not only intent on raising the tension but also being rudely dismissive.

Jesus is on a mission to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and, being a Canaanite, she’s not one of them so he responds to her plea for healing for her daughter with bafflingly harsh words:
‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs’.

Now Jesus was probably only saying what the disciples around him were all thinking, but did Jesus really just compare this woman to a dog?

It’s language that should shock us, because it dehumanises and diminishes someone in whom the image of God dwells. She may be from the wrong side of the track, she may be speaking out of turn, she may even be really irritating…. But surely she didn’t deserve to be spoken to like that.

And THAT is exactly the point of this interaction.

• She didn’t deserve to be called (or treated like) a dog.

Like the arts of comedy, therapy, and even political satire – Jesus appears to use this pejorative language and tone, not to condone, but to infact expose the negative cultural assumptions and dehumanising treatment of this woman, by reflecting to his disciples, just how damaging it is to fail to see the image of God in others and how disastrous it can be to fail to treat them as fellow beloved children of God.

This woman didn’t deserve to be treated according to the cultural, hierarchical, and religious norms of the day.
She deserved to be treated like a loving mother who would do anything to see her child delivered from affliction and safe and well once again.

In this way, the woman herself becomes a reflection of God’s own heart for us: that God loves us so much that she would do anything – even die on a Cross – to see her children delivered from affliction and to know salvation, healing, restoration, and God’s embrace once again.

So Jesus uses this woman and her clever rebuff of his harsh words, to hold up a mirror to the disciples and to show them what true humility and faith can look like in action and how sometimes the healing we seek is not only a private phenomenon, but it is in fact our society which needs to be healed so that all can flourish within it.

As Jesus then goes on to heal a man that is brought to him, we find that the blindness from which we need healing is not so much of the body, but of the soul.

The deafness and muteness that Jesus heals in the man in our Gospel, is not only a physical alleviation of a socially stigmatising affliction for the individual involved,
but it is a sign to their, and our, society of the healing and salvation which is on offer for those who open their minds and hearts, as well as their ears, to receive God’s living Word.
And it is those who change their own words and actions and lives in the light of their encounter with Jesus, who find themselves released from the bondage of sin, and able to see, more clearly, the image of God reflected in every person – even in the ones society writes-off; and – if we look hard enough - perhaps even in ourselves too.

Amen.