GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 7:28
Don’t Feed the Dog from the Table
We had an inside dog when our boys were young—a miniature dachshund named Tiny. She pretty much had the run of the house and often slept with one of the boys. There was a strict rule, however: Don’t feed the dog from the table. Yet there were two words in this sentence that didn’t fit well, “strict” and “rule.” It seems like the rule was repeated nearly every meal; that’s how “strict” the “rule” was.
In Mark’s account of Jesus’ conversation with the Greek Syrophoenician woman in Tyre, who requested that Jesus heal her daughter, Jesus told her that the children must eat first, and it was not proper to take the children’s food and toss it to the little puppies. In his book, The Gospel of Mark, William Barclay says, “In those days, people did not have either knives, or forks, or table napkins. They ate with their hands; they wiped the soiled hands on chunks of bread, and then flung the bread away, and the house-dogs ate it.”
According to Mark, “But she answered and said to him, ‘Lord, even the little dogs under the table eat from the crumbs of the children.’” (Mark 7:28)
Another writer quotes Cornelius à Lapide (1567-1637), a Jesuit exegete, who beautifully elaborates on this story: “Feed me, then, as a little dog. To me, a poor Gentile, let a crumb of thy grace and mercy be vouchsafed; but let the full board, the plentiful bread of grace and righteousness, be reserved for the Jewish children. I cannot leave the table of my Lord, whose little dog I am. No; if you spurn me away with your foot, or with a blow, I will go away; but I will come back again, like a little dog, through another door. I will not be driven away by blows. I will not let thee go until thou hast given me what I ask of thee.”
If Tiny was near the table in her “please-feed-me” stance, she’d often be driven away. Before long, however, she’d quietly come back to the table. It wasn’t that she didn’t have plenty of food in her own bowl; no, she wanted some scrap of food from the hand of one of the boys, who often handed her a morsel under the table. And sometimes the mother of the house would pass some gift to the “poor” puppy. But the father of the house never gave the dog food from the table—no, never. Well, maybe not “never.” There was, after all, a “rule.”
Beside this story in one of my Bibles, I wrote, “A crumb from Jesus’ table is better than a banquet at the devil’s table.”
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