Crumbs Under the Table, and the Word That Meant Be Opened

A group of Pharisees came to him one day, and some teachers of the law came with them, and those ones had come all the way down from Jerusalem to have a look at him. And what they noticed first was the hands. Some of his followers were sitting eating their bread with hands they had not washed. Now this was nothing to do with dirt. It was a small careful pouring of water over the hands before you ate, and there were rules for how you held them while you did it. There were rules like it for cups, and for jugs, and for copper pots, and even for the couches people lay on to eat. None of it was written in the law God gave to Moses. It had been handed down from the teachers of long ago, and holding on to it was how a careful man showed he was serious. So the Pharisees and the teachers of the law asked him, “Why do your followers not live the way the teachers of long ago said? They eat their bread with hands that have not been washed.” He did not answer about hands at all. He answered with a line out of Isaiah that they all knew by heart. “Isaiah was right about you play-actors when he wrote: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is a long way away from me. They worship me for nothing, teaching rules that men made up as if they were commands of God.’ You have let go of the command of God, and you are holding on tight to the traditions of men.” And then he gave them one example, and it was a sharp one. “How neatly you push the command of God out of the way, so that you can keep your own tradition! Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of his father or his mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if a man tells his father or his mother, ‘Whatever help you might have had from me is Korban’ — which means, given to God — then you do not let him lift a finger for his father or his mother after that. You cancel the word of God with the tradition you have handed down. And you do a great many other things just like it.” A man looks at the money he ought to be spending on his old father and mother. He says one word over it — Korban, given to God — and keeps it. His parents get nothing. And these were the men who had come down from Jerusalem to ask about hands.

Then he called the crowd over — the whole crowd, not just the twelve, so that everybody standing there would hear it — and he said, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand this. There is nothing outside a person that can go into him and make him unclean. It is the things that come out of a person that make him unclean.” Every single person listening had grown up knowing which foods were clean and which were not, and had been taught since they could walk that you could lose your cleanness by touching the wrong thing, or eating out of the wrong pot, or standing too near the wrong person. He had just turned the whole of it around and pointed it the other way. Later on, indoors, away from the crowd, his followers asked him what he had meant by it — and he was not very impressed. “Are you as slow as everybody else? Do you not see that nothing that goes into a person from outside can make him unclean? It does not go into his heart. It goes into his stomach, and out again into the drain.” And with that one sentence he made every food clean. “It is what comes out of a person that makes him unclean. For it is from inside, out of people’s hearts, that the bad thoughts come: cheating, stealing, killing, breaking a marriage, wanting what belongs to somebody else, meanness, lying, doing shameful things, a jealous eye, speaking against God, thinking far too much of yourself, and plain silliness. All of those come out from inside, and those are the things that make a person unclean.”

After that he went right out of the country. He walked north, up the coast, into the region around the city of Tyre, where the people were Greeks and hardly anybody worshiped his God. He went into a house there and wanted nobody at all to know he had come — and he could not manage it, because somebody always heard. A woman heard. Her little daughter had an unclean spirit in her. And the woman came and fell down at his feet and begged him to drive it out. She was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia; she was not one of his people, and she knew it. And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first. It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.” That is a hard thing to hear, and he meant her to hear it. The children meant his own people, whom he had been sent to first. The little dogs — not the wild ones out in the street, but the small ones that live in a house and lie under the table while people eat — meant everybody else, and it was a word people used about foreigners when they were not being kind. She did not argue with the word. She took it and stayed exactly where he had put her, under the table, and asked for what you can get from there. “Lord — even the little dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” And he said to her, “Because of that answer, go. The demon has gone out of your daughter.” And she went home, and found her little girl lying quietly on the bed, and the thing gone out of her. He never went near the house. He never saw the child at all.

It was not the first time he had done that. Once before, a good while earlier and a long way south of there, he had healed somebody he never came near. He had come back into Galilee then, to Cana, the village where he turned the water into wine at the wedding. And there was a man in the king’s service, an official, whose son was lying sick in Capernaum, about a day’s walk away. The boy was dying. When the man heard that Jesus had come up into Galilee he went the whole way to find him, and begged him to come down and heal his son before it was too late. And Jesus said to him, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never trust.” And the man did not argue about that either. He said, “Sir — come down before my little boy dies.” And Jesus said to him, “Go. Your son lives.” And the man believed what Jesus said to him, and turned around, and went. He asked him to come; Jesus did not come; and the man walked home anyway, on nothing but the sentence. He was still on the road the next day when his own servants came up it toward him, looking for him, to tell him the boy was alive. He asked them what time it was that his son had started to get better. They said, “It was yesterday, at about one in the afternoon, that the fever left him.” And the father worked out that one in the afternoon was the very hour when Jesus had said to him, Your son lives. And he trusted him after that — and so did every single person in his household.

From Tyre he came back the long way round: up through Sidon, and then down and across to the lake of Galilee, through the middle of the country they called the Ten Towns. And there some people brought him a man who was deaf, and who could hardly get a word out when he tried to speak, and they begged him to put his hand on him. And what he did next was careful and strange. He took the man away from the crowd, off on his own, where nobody was watching the two of them. He put his fingers into the man’s ears. He spat, and touched the man’s tongue. Then he looked up at the sky, and let out a deep sigh, and said one word in the everyday language they both spoke: “Ephphatha.” Which means: Be opened. And the man’s ears came open, and whatever had been tying his tongue let go of it, and he began to talk properly. The man could not hear one thing that was going on, and Jesus told him all of it anyway, without a word: fingers in the ears — this is what I am going to mend; a touch on the tongue — and this; a face turned up to the sky — and this is where it comes from. And then the only word in the whole business, and by then the man could hear it. He told them all not to tell anybody. The more he told them not to, the more they told everybody, and they could not get over it. They kept saying, “He has done everything well. He even makes deaf people hear, and people who cannot speak, speak.”

In those same days a huge crowd was out with him again, out in an empty place, and they had been there three days and had nothing left to eat. He called his followers over and said, “My heart goes out to this crowd. They have been with me three days now and they have nothing to eat, and if I send them home hungry they will give out on the road — and some of them have come a very long way.” And his followers said to him, “Where is anybody going to get enough bread out here in the middle of nowhere to fill this lot?” And he asked them, “How many loaves have you got?” And they said, “Seven.” So he told the crowd to sit down on the ground. And he took the seven loaves, and gave thanks, and broke them, and kept handing the pieces to his followers, and they kept carrying them out to the people. They had a few small fish as well; he blessed those and had them handed round too. And everybody ate, and everybody had enough, and when they picked up what was left over it filled seven big hampers. There were about four thousand of them. And he sent them home. They had watched him do this once already, with five loaves and five thousand people. This was the second time. And his own followers had still asked him, out loud, where the bread was going to come from.

He got into the boat and crossed the lake, and as soon as he stepped out on the other side the Pharisees came out to meet him and started arguing. What they wanted from him was a sign from heaven — something up in the sky, something enormous, something nobody could explain away. They were not asking. They were testing him. And he sighed. It came up from somewhere right at the bottom of him. Then he said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? I tell you the truth: no sign is going to be given to this generation.” Four thousand people had eaten out of seven loaves a boat-ride away, three days before. He left the Pharisees standing on the shore, and got back into the boat, and went off to the other side again. And in the boat his followers discovered that between the whole lot of them they had forgotten to bring bread. There was one loaf. And while they were working out whose fault it was, he said, “Keep your eyes open. Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees, and the yeast of Herod.” And they started muttering to one another that he must be saying it because they had no bread. He knew exactly what they were muttering about, and he turned round on them. “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see it? Do you still not understand? Have your hearts gone hard? You have eyes — can you not see with them? You have ears — can you not hear with them? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets of pieces did you pick up afterwards?” They said, “Twelve.” “And the seven loaves for the four thousand — how many hampers of pieces did you pick up?” And they said, “Seven.” And he said to them, “Do you still not understand?”

They came in at Bethsaida, and the people there brought him a blind man and begged him to touch him. So he took the blind man by the hand and walked him out of the village — the two of them, all the way out past the last house, the way he had taken the deaf man aside. Then he spat on the man’s eyes, and put his hands on him, and asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people — but they look like trees, walking about.” It was the only time he healed anybody in two goes. So Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes again. And the man looked hard, and it came right, and he could see everything clearly, all the way out to the far distance. And Jesus sent him off home, and said to him, “Do not even go into the village.” So he walked home along the road with his eyes wide open, past the village he had been told to keep out of. And that was what those few weeks looked like from the outside: an argument about hands in Galilee, a foreign woman’s answer in a house in Tyre, a deaf man taken quietly aside in the Ten Towns, four thousand people fed on the grass out of seven loaves, and a blind man at Bethsaida who had to be touched twice before he saw.