Progressive reflections on the lectionary #33

Monday 2nd September 2024

Mark 7:24-37: Reading the story of the Syrophoenician Woman with Strain theory

Today’s brief write up is a reflection on the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, which forms part of the gospel reading set for this week.

Jesus was, according to ‘Mark’ a ‘tektōn’ - a word now widely translated as ‘carpenter’. This translation, while strictly ‘accurate’, doesn’t communicate his standing in society very well, in 21st century terms at least. A ‘better’ translation now would be something like ‘day labourer’ or as Sally Mann recently put it: “gig economy worker”. All translation is interpretation, after all. To be a tektōn in first century Palestine meant enormous distance from the structures of power, it meant no land rights, it meant a social status similar to that of an enslaved person. A tektōn ranked lower than a peasant farmer, having most likely been forced off their traditional lands by some combination of the economic pressures of debt, disease, or drought.

This status wouldn’t have made Jesus unusual, the vast majority of people would have been in a similar situation, leaving swathes of people dependent upon the patronage of the much smaller elite class. Such people had no access to the levers of social power.

‘Strain theory’ - developed by the sociologist Robert Merton - says that when someone doesn’t have the ability to achieve ‘normal’ cultural goals (e.g. wealth or status) by ‘acceptable’ means (e.g. work or inheritance) they will basically take one of five different options. They may choose to still aim for the same cultural goals, and try to do the impossible - achieve them using acceptable means. Merton called this ‘conformity’. Alternatively they may maintain those goals and look for alternative means to achieve them (e.g. crime) - he called this ‘innovation’.

On the other hand they may decide that it is not the goals that are important, but the means - so become rigidly affixed to the value and importance of something like work, regardless of the fact that it is not going to deliver the results others are looking for. This Merton described as ‘ritualism’. A fourth group of people abandon both the goal and the acceptable means of achieving it, these people, he said, were ‘retreatists’.

There is one more category of people in Merton’s scheme: the rebels. These are those who reject the acceptable cultural goals, and reject the acceptable means of achieving those goals, but who, instead of ‘retreating’ choose to ‘innovate’. They invent new goals, and new ways of achieving them.

The relationship between Merton’s ‘innovators’ and social class, is clear. Innovators are people who find themselves locked out of the power strictures of society, oppressed and marginalised. Someone like a landless tektōn, for example.

Regular readers of this substack will know that I take Mark’s stories as symbolic - when he talks of Jesus casting out ‘demons’ for instance, I think he’s talking about Jesus fighting the powers of the time, priestly, legal, military, etc. I think it’s generally a mistake to see the individual characters as representative of individuals, instead they represent something bigger. In a similar way, then, I think that the woman in this story is intended to be symbolic, but symbolic of who or what?

Readings of who or what the Syrophoenician woman might symbolise vary greatly. I claim no special insight, but I think one good, and coherent, reading is to see her as representing the wealthy gentile class, the sort of people for whom day labourers like Jesus would have worked, the sort of people who bought up the produce of struggling peasant farmers. If that is a good reading, then it presents this character as an embodiment of the urban elite. This puts a different slant on Jesus’ statement: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.” In this light, this is the statement of a rebel.

What the story becomes, when read in this way, is a dramatic reversal of the social order. This is not some weird and anachronistic bit of callousness from Jesus aimed at a woman and her child, but instead it’s a rebel’s move against the prevailing system of power and wealth embedded in his society. The way that ‘Mark’ structures the story also gives rise to some hope that even these two opposite forces may find ways to dialogue - if only they can each learn to move away from the demands of prevailing social convention.

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Image: Photo by Ikrash Muhammad on Unsplash