DOG

See the dog.

See the dog at the table.

See the dog run around the table.

See the dog on the table. (Bad dog!)

See the dog under the table eating the crumbs.

 

Prepositions.

Where is the dog in relation to the table?

A primer in grammar and a primer in faith.

 

Being called a dog has always been an insult, all over the world, for different reasons it is meant at best to shock or at worst to insult.

Even dog lovers consider it an insult for a human person to be called a dog, though they consider it an insult to the dignity and honor of their four footed friends.

 

The people of Israel just didn’t have much use for dogs. They weren’t allowed in their homes. The dog had a place in the world, it just wasn’t around here, it was part of how God intended the proper ordering of the Universe.

The word “dog” for a first century Jew, was a term used for those without any sense or dignity or respect for how God created and ordered the world, disrespectful, irreverent and foolish. As proverb 26:11 states, “Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to folly.”

It was a term reserved largely to the vile and the ignorant and especially for Gentiles.

Gentiles are that large segment of humanity who are not Jewish, who are not chosen by God as an instrument of revelation to the world, who are not aware of God’s words, God’s commandments, God’s worship, God’s place in this good creation.

A gentile dog is something to pity and scorn for their ignorance and foolish waste of the holiness of being God’s creation.

Dog is a big word, especially when used by a Jew to refer to a Gentile.

It is a four letter word, with a deep and ancient theology leashed around its neck.

 

What is at stake in this one word is the whole calling to be God’s people, to be set apart, to be holy, to be in the world but not like the rest of the world.

What does it mean to belong to God? To serve God? To love and worship the Holy One? We have been the recipient and witness to miracles, wonders and blessings beyond measure. How can we not live a life that is defined by the gratitude of belonging to such an Almighty God.

If we don’t then we have no more sense than a dog.

 

But how do we do that?

Scripture is full of the struggle to answer that question.

 

Whether it is Jonah saying God cannot forgive the Ninevites, a Gentile nation, and God saying, “Oh yes I can.”

On the other hand we have Zephaniah which is very clear on the limits of God’s mercy and the call of Israel to be set apart from other nations and how they do things.

The Old Testament is full of commandments to be hospitable to strangers and visitors from other nations while at the time having commandments prohibiting their presence and practices.

There is the rub.

How do we be generous and hospitable, as gracious as God who has been and continues to be gracious?

How do we reach out and welcome the world in God’s name, while at the same time not becoming like so much of the world which lives without any sense of God’s holiness or gratuitous graciousness? Worldliness is contagious, it rubs off.

 

And that debate within Israel continues down to this story about a Gentile woman, a Canaanite, begging Jesus to save her child from demon possession.

And Jesus says, “No”, he is here for Israel.

Yet she persists, she argues with God like Abraham, she strives with God like Jacob, refusing to let go.

Jesus says it would not be fair to take food from desperate and lost children to feed dogs.

And she answers, “Yes, Lord, yet even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”

Jesus says she has great faith and her child is healed instantly.

A thousand years of prophesy and arguments play out in a few short brutal sentences. There is nothing polite about what Jesus says. It is as abrupt and biting as it sounds. Yet the woman’s piercing answer and her persistent stubborn faith cross over the ancient divide.

 

It doesn’t really answer the age old debate of how to be in the world without being of the world, except perhaps to err on the side of generosity rather than on the side of stinginess, which says plenty.

It says faith looks a lot like arguing, going to bat for someone else.

But, what it really says is that God’s graciousness can handle the hard questions that we can’t see past.

It says that even a dog can have faith.

Yes, a dog can go to heaven.

 

The prepositions of faith are not so much about where we are in relation to the table as it is that the table is there over every one, and for everyone. There is more than enough.

And all God’s dogs said, “bark!” and woke up the whole neighborhood.