Hush...Puppy...

"What are we to make of this strange and wonderful story, this encounter Jesus has with a foreign woman, this talk of dogs and outcasts? The story is told, once again, to reinforce a constant and primary theme of Jesus’ ethic and ministry: He is breaker of boundaries; literally and figuratively. He intentionally moves into the foreign places; into the marginal places; out to the borders; out to where we his followers are often incredibly uncomfortable. Jesus is always pushing the religious limits, always critiquing the institutional rules, always expanding the horizon, always making space for those regarded as incompatible or unacceptable. Jesus has a soft spot for fools, drunks, little children, for starving puppies begging under the table; the poor, the rejected, for those whose noses have been bloodied by a hundred slamming doors; for the weak, the down and out, the stained, the marked, the failures. Jesus is always out there hanging with the crowd we wouldn’t be caught dead with.

 

"For the life of me, I can’t figure out where today’s church came up with this prim and proper, tame and courteous Jesus, who is little more than a mascot for middle and upper class respectability. This man was a revolutionary in the truest sense of the word, come to welcome all who would come, even if it alienated those who thought that they were the ones who had cornered the market on faith and belief in God; even if his words and way was seen as an affront to the religious establishment" (See Mark 7:24-29).