Bread for Indigenous Lands and Peoples: an Aboriginal interpretation of the story of the Syrophoenician woman

Texts: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125; James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

Amongst the most common metaphors in the Scriptures for the loving action of the divine is the distribution of staple foods to the poor and the broken.  Proverbs 22.9 says, for example, that the generous are blessed because they give their bread to the poor. Bread was a staple food in the ancient far-West, just as it is a staple in many other places today. For Aboriginal peoples from Melbourne and coastal Victoria that staple was not bread, but the murrnong or daisy yam. Its cultivation depends on a loose soil structure that is easily permeable by air and water. When colonists arrived in these lands they brought with them millions of cattle and sheep whose grazing compacted the soil and drove our native food-crops to the brink of extinction. Consequently, Aboriginal people have gone from comfortably being able to sustain our families in health and well-being over many millennia, to now being amongst the most poorly nourished people on the continent. Because colonists stole our lands and all but destroyed the ways in which we traditionally fed ourselves, most of us now live as beggars in a brave new world of industrial farming and globalized food distribution networks. I doubt that the captains of such industries have even read these verses from Proverbs,

Do not rob the poor,
or crush the afflicted at the gate;
for the Lord pleads their cause
and despoils of life those who despoil them.

Jesus, we are told, was someone who bucked the trend. Instead of stealing the people’s food, as the Romans did through their cruel land management systems, Jesus shared bread with everyone whom that system crushed. In the gospel according to Mark, even before we arrive at the text we are reading today, there are feeding stories. Most prominent amongst them is the ‘feeding of the five thousand’ (6.30-43) where Jesus feeds a hungry crowd of Jews by miraculously multiplying the meagre offering of just five loaves and two fish. By giving them staple food to eat, he also returns to them their dignity as God’s beloved people. The 12 baskets of food left over at the end of the feast signify the 12 tribes of Israel, God’s chosen people. The number 12 here functions as a confirmation that God is honouring the covenant God has with them from of old. It is as if Mark is saying, ‘the Romans may have stolen and exploited your land, but you are still beloved of God. God will feed you, even if this colonised and exploited land cannot’.

We arrive, then, with Jesus and his disciples, at the city of Tyre on the Phoenician central coast of the Roman province of Syria. This is unambiguously Gentile, that is, ‘non-Jewish’ territory. But you need to know that it was once a territory of Israel, a territory taken by conquest from the indigenous Canaanite tribes by Joshua. Here Jesus is petitioned by a local woman whose daughter, we are told, has a demon. Now I want you to know that ‘demons’ likely refer, in the gospel of Mark, not to disembodied spirits of evil as we would imagine them in western culture, but to a disruption of wellness caused by Roman imperial occupation. This is made clear in the story of the healing of the demoniac who lives amongst the tombs at Gerasa (Mark 5.1-20). When Jesus inquires after the name of the demon who afflicts the man, it replies ‘we are legion’, in the plural. ‘Legion’, of course, is the name of a highly trained and heavily armed company of Roman infantry, usually numbering five to six thousand men. They were used as both shock-troops who took territory from others, but also an occupation force to keep conquered people under control. In the ancient far-West, they were everywhere, and their word was law. So, the demon afflicting the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter is most likely one of the many forms of unwellness—both physical and psychological—that can afflict a colonised people.

The woman and her daughter are doubly colonised. First by Israel, under Joshua, and now by the Roman Empire. They are poor, their way of life has been repressed, they are hungry and desperate, and they want things to change. That is why the woman is willing to break all manner of cultural and religious taboos to petition Jesus for what she needs. She falls at his feet, a sign both of desperation and of respect, asking that Jesus heal her daughter. Note that there is no buttering up of Jesus in this version of the story. In Matthew’s version, she calls him the ‘Son of David’, a name for the messiah. But here she simply calls him ‘Sir’. ‘Sir, can you heal my daughter please?’

Note that, at first, Jesus appears deeply offended at the very idea. ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ The children who should be fed first are, of course, the children of Israel, the children whom Jesus apparently believes to be the only worthy recipients of God’s love and care.  ‘Dogs’ was a racist name that Jews at the time, especially Jews from the upper echelons of society, used to describe non-Jews. So, lest anyone in this church think that Jesus would not be capable of being both sexist and racist, allow me to translate what he says here into the Australian vernacular. ‘You won’t be getting anything from me, bitch. God’s love is not for the likes of you.’ Shocking, isn’t it.

Thankfully the woman, who is apparently used to such treatment, is not put off. She retorts, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ Or, if you will allow me to translate into an Australian vernacular once more, ‘even us bitches eat the food that falls from our betters’ tables.’  As I watch this scene unfold in my mind, I imagine Jesus pausing and drawing breath at this point. I imagine him thinking. And feeling. I imagine him considering carefully what the Syrophoenician woman has said, and why. For Jesus then responds.

And what Jesus says shows that, unlike many of us who enjoy a modicum of respect or power in our societies, he is teachable. He is open to learning new things, even theological things, from women and from people whom he regards as of lesser status and importance than himself. Jesus says, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ Which, if I may again translate once more, says ‘You’re right. God’s love is not only for the children of Israel. It is for you and your daughter, too. Go back home and find your daughter well.’ I hope you’ve caught the significance of what is happening here. The Jewish rabbi, Jesus, has been tutored in theology by an indigenous woman from the conquered and colonised lands of Phoenicia. And he has accepted her teaching so completely that he is willing to so widen his understanding of God’s love that now even the ‘dogs’ of the worlds are worthy of compassion. So, Jesus is here changed, both in mind and in heart.

For those of you who are worried about the son of God needing to be taught in this manner, ask yourself why the evangelist who recorded this story might have done so. Is he not leaving an example here for those of us, especially us men, who believe we are entitled to belittle others? Is not Mark teaching such men to be humble, and to listen for the instruction of the divine in the mouths of those we so regularly ignore or perhaps abuse? Is not Mark also encouraging the colonists of the world to stop their colonising, their stealing away of the lives of indigenous people, and instead return some of their stolen bounty to our hungry mouths and hurting hearts? In this all of us who enjoy both respect and power are encouraged to follow Jesus, a man who was willing to humble himself and change his behaviour when he is shown to be wrong.

The Syrophoenician woman is an example as well. An example of every colonised woman who cannot get what she needs for herself and her children. A woman who is willing, out of sheer desperation, to break all kinds of social rules in order to obtain the staple foods that are necessary for life. Don’t let the bastards keep you down, says St Mark. Ask, and keep on asking, ask in your religious community and ask in your society, ask for the love and the care which ought to be yours. For you, too—as much as anyone else—are worthy of the love and compassion of God.

Let me conclude this brief reflection by suggesting that this suffering woman’s pleading may also be read as the pleading of the land itself, our suffering, colonised land, the land that we Aboriginal people call ‘country’. As I have noted on many other occasions, every genocide is accompanied by an ecocide. Whenever a people are subjugated, their annexed land is devastated as well.  We are witnessing this, right now, in Gaza. But we have witnessed it here in Australia as well, for we are now reaping what was sown by colonists as they compacted the soil and gave the land over to sheep and cattle. Native ecosystems have all but collapsed in many parts of the continent. The soil has become salt, the rivers and the forests are deeply unwell, and a hundred native species have already become extinct.  The land cries out in pain and longing as it suffers its own form of crucifixion, its own form of colonial subjugation and abuse.

This would not be the first time that a women’s voice stood in for the lament of a colonised land in Scripture. Native American scholar Jace Weaver points to daughters of Zelo-phehad, in Numbers chapter 27, as a case in point.* There the soon to be conquered land of the Canaanites is being allocated to the tribes of Israel. But just as the process is nearing its conclusion, five women step forward, women who name themselves Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. They claim an inheritance in the land through their father, a member of the people of Israel, who is now deceased. Later on in the story, when the conquest is all but over and Joshua is going through the allocation once more, those same women step forward to claim their inheritance (Joshua 17.1-6). This time we learn that the names of the women are also the names of five Canaanite towns in the coastal region of Hepher, which is also, very significantly, the name of their grandfather, clearly identified as a Canaanite.  The daughters, in other words, are also the land. The land making its claim for inclusion in the covenant between God and God’s people, even and especially when God’s people are inclined to forget or deny its claim.

So let us learn from the advocacy of these women of Canaan, and the advocacy of the woman of Syrophoenicia. Let us hear in them the claim of both indigenous lands and indigenous peoples for a right and equal portion in the bread that is given us all as a sign of God’s covenant of love. And let us with Jesus, the representative of God in our stories, learn that it is right and proper to both recognise this claim and to do something real and practical about it. 

Garry Worete Deverell

Sept 9, 2024

St Paul’s Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne

* Jace Weaver, ‘Premodern Ironies: First Nations and Chosen Peoples’ in Mark Vessey, Sharon V. Betcher, Robert A. Daum, Harry O. Maier (eds), The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 300-301.

Is tea a worthy substitute for wine at communion?

The Uniting Church's National Christian Youth Convention in January 2009 celebrated the Eucharist using billy tea instead of wine, apparently under the leadership of pastors from the Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress. I was not present, but I gather it was a moving occasion. This ceremony was again conducted last week at a gathering of Uniting Church youth pastors in Sydney.  Again, tea was substituted for wine and again (I am told) it was a moving occasion.

The idea of using staple foods for communion has been around since the beginning of Christianity. That is, apparently, one of the reasons bread and wine were chosen by the early Christian churches. These were relatively cheap and common staples for Mediterranean-rim communities. Commonness speaks of the very ordinary places in which God chooses to dwell and act. Good theology.

It should be remembered, though, that (unleavened) bread and wine were not chosen only because they were common. They were chosen because of their particular Jewish history as symbols of exodus and of atoning sacrifice. The (not yet risen) bread reminded people of the haste with which they fled the oppressor. The wine reminded them of the blood of the lamb by which the Angel of God's wrath recognised their homes and passed over or by.

The early Christian communities also learned from Jesus that the bread and wine were to symbolise his body and his blood at their ritual meals, a body broken and blood poured out in atoning and liberating sacrifice. Wine was chosen not simply because it was common, but because it was red like Christ's blood, and because it was a drink of celebration already associated with the salvation history of the Exodus.

For that reason, I find it rather difficult to accept that common billy tea could really function to carry all those meanings. It is not red and, as far as I know, carries no liberative or salvific meanings in either Indigenous or migrant Australian cultures.  That said, I'd be happy to consider the use of other red-coloured drinks such as some Indigenous Christian communities actually do - some of them derived from native plants - but not common billy tea.

One other reason I'd balk at using tea is because of its colonial history. It was very often one of the substances which colonial authorities used to 'buy' Aboriginal land. It was very often exchanged for land, at least in the understanding of whitefellas. For that reason, tea is not a neutral pan-Australian symbol. It is one of the instruments by which the country was stolen.  I have a few misgivings about the use of damper in Indigenous contexts as well, since flour was also one of those colonial buying tools. I am not as concerned about this as about tea, however, because flour can at least keep you alive by providing nutrition - and it did keep many Aboriginal communities alive as more traditional food sources were driven away or destroyed. Tea, on the other hand, had and has very little nutritional value. But there are Indigenous alternatives here too, and they are as various as the clans and where they come from. I am a supporter of moves in every community to use whatever is the basic staple at communion [And what is bread, anyway, if not the staple food in any given culture?]

Some have argued for the use of tea on other grounds. Tea can be seen, for example, as a symbol of hospitality, welcome, and an open table.  I would agree. In Christ we learned, of course, that God is a hospitable God who would ultimately long to welcome all people to the banqueting table of heaven.

My difficulty with using tea remains, however, because surely the symbols we use at communion need to carry ALL the meanings associated with the meal, and not simply SOME of them. While tea can indeed speak of God's hospitality (in some cultural contexts) it cannot, I would argue, carry the crucial meanings of reconciliation through atonement and of God's sacrificial, costly, love - themes that stand at the heart of the Christian message.

I also have a difficulty with any theology of Eucharist that sees the table of communion as open to absolutely everyone, without remainder. From the beginning, Christians certainly welcomed everyone to their ordinary meal tables, whatever their beliefs or lifestyles. Here they followed the example of Christ himself. But they did not welcome everyone to the ritual meal known as the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist. This meal was reserved for the baptised, for those who had 'signed up', as it were, to the Christian life - with all its beliefs and practices. Why? Because the meal was seen as a weekly reaffirmation of the covenantal promises made in baptism. Now, you can't RE-affirm what you've never affirmed in the first place. In that context, it made no sense to welcome those who were not signed-up. And it still doesn't.

So the invitation to the table is indeed for all. But the mode by which Christ's invitation may be accepted is by passing through the waters of baptism, which (in Christian understanding) is our death to the basic principles of this dark age, and our rising with Christ to a new (de-colonised) way of life.

Let me conclude by noting that the use of tea instead of wine (or another blood-coloured drink) is not something that has been proposed or practiced at any official Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress gathering that I have attended. Certainly not at the national theological forum we held about worship and the Eucharist in Jabiru during 2010.  As one of the Aboriginal theologians helping to form both policy and practice on these things, I would strongly resist any such move.