Jesus gets out of line.

WHAT MOST people remember about the Book of Jonah in the Hebrew Bible is that Jonah spent three days in the belly of a great fish, an analogy for death and rebirth not overlooked by the gospel writers when speaking of Jesus' Resurrection.

But the main "bite" of the book of Jonah comes from what it has to say about the kinds of ethnocentrism and prejudice that led some Jews to misunderstand that the idea of being God's "chosen people" entitled them to some kind of automatic place of privilege rather than challenging them with an awesome responsibility.

There is a brief and little-known story about Jesus in the gospels that drives home a similar point and in the process may provide us with a glimpse into the humanity of Jesus.

The story in its earliest form is found in the Gospel of Mark (7:24-30). Jesus and his disciples have just crossed the Sea of Galilee and are beginning their tour of the villages in Galilee's farthest northern reaches.

The story tells us that Jesus is in the vicinity of the city of Tyre when he meets a woman who begs him to heal her daughter of her possession by an evil spirit. Tyre is a very ancient city that was one of the key trading posts of the Phoenicians, whose lands are now incorporated partly by northern Israel and mostly by modern Lebanon.

The cities of Phoenicia were located within the Roman province of Syria, the governor of which was the highest Roman official in the Roman Middle Eastern provinces. The Phoenicians were probably direct descendants of the Canaanites, the original inhabitants of Palestine, who developed a thriving seafaring empire founding colonies throughout the Mediterranean. Going back at least to the time of King Solomon, Phoenicians and Hebrews generally enjoyed peaceful relations but remained two distinct cultures.

This background information is significant to the story because the majority of people living in the regions of Tyre and Sidon in Jesus' day were sharply differentiated from the Jews of Galilee both ethnically and in their polytheistic religious beliefs. We are explicitly reminded of this fact in verse 26 when we are told that the woman who will appeal to Jesus in this story is both a "Gentile" (non-Jew) and a woman born "in the region of Phoenicia in Syria"--thus, not a native to Galilee. Either designation would be sufficient to indicate that the woman's origins are outside of the Jewish world. Including both is Mark's way of emphasizing that this woman is without question outside the bounds of Judaism.

What is Jesus doing here, a Jew on the remotest fringes of the Jewish world? The story suggests that Jesus and his disciples may be off for a bit of rest and relaxation, or perhaps on a spiritual retreat--verse 24 mentions that Jesus doesn't want anyone to know he was in the region. But the original purpose becomes moot when the unnamed woman seeks Jesus out and makes her plea. And Jesus refuses to help.

Jesus' rationale, according to verse 27 of the story, is that he has been called to "feed the children" first--that is, his Jewish countrymen and women. Jesus' call as he understands it is to be a prophet to Israel. To expend any of his precious time and energy to minister to those outside of Israel would be, in Jesus' words, like "throwing food to the dogs." (It's clear that Matthew was as uncomfortable with such words coming out of the mouth of Jesus as we are. The author of that gospel slightly alters the Greek into its diminutive form so that the last word could also be translated as "puppies.")

The thought of Jesus refusing to help anyone hits the modern reader in the face like a cold splash of water. Christians understand that the "Good News" proclaiming Jesus as Messiah extends to every human being, and this understanding is well grounded in the gospels. In fact, this belief became one of the reasons for the break between Christianity and Judaism during the first century when Christian missionaries led by Saint Paul and backed by the apostles proclaimed to the Gentile world that it was not necessary to become a Jew in order to be a Christian.

But this view is a post-Resurrection understanding; it is certainly reasonable to conclude that during the lifetime of Jesus his almost exclusively Jewish listeners saw his ministry as a purely Jewish matter. And it's at least plausible to think that Jesus, in the fullness of his human nature, could have initially seen his ministry in the same way.

But even if all of the above is true, why would Christian writers possessing the fuller post-Resurrection understanding include this seemingly anachronistic tale in the gospels? The answer to that question can be found in the story's conclusion. Rather than being put off by Jesus' words of dismissal, the Syro-Phoenician woman turns them right around in her favor: "Sir," she answered, "even the dogs under the table eat the children's leftovers!"

I picture Jesus smiling at this response, because the woman has just engaged in a classic Middle Eastern debate technique, one that Jesus uses on a number of occasions in answering the charges of his own opponents. This response gets Jesus thinking, and he relents and sends the woman on her way with the assurance that her daughter has been cured, an outcome that is verified in the final verse of the story.

IN ITS VERY SPARSENESS, THIS STORY OF JESUS' ABOUT-FACE makes two powerful points. If there is a strong historical core to this story, then we are receiving a glimpse into the humanity of Jesus as circumstances force him to confront his own preconceived notions about his ministry and be open to the possibility that God may have other plans. In other words, he is learning. This ability to change in order to be able to respond to the needs of another human being is a pretty effective model of the kind of discipleship Jesus always preaches.

The second point returns us to the story of Jonah. In that book, the reluctant prophet Jonah is forced to face the fact that God's mercy extends beyond the confines of Israel--in this case, to the vilest of all of Israel's enemies in the centuries before the birth of Jesus, the Assyrians. Most commentators place the composition of the book a century or so after the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon, an event that occurred in the sixth century B.C., a time when the Jewish homeland was under the control of the Persian Empire and becoming more and more influenced by the spread of Greek culture into the eastern Mediterranean.

These significant cultural and political developments caused some Jews to embrace a more radical nationalism that stressed the privileged and exclusive place Jews held in God's plan of salvation and caused others to critically challenge the idea that ethnic or religious origin could determine God's favor. Both trends meet in the book of Jonah.

A similar dynamic lies behind the creation of the gospels four centuries later. During the life of Jesus and in the century following his death, Palestine was occupied by the Romans and Greek culture was flourishing. This time the ultranationalist movement that developed--a group known as the Zealots or Sicarii--advocated the political liberation of the Jewish homeland by any means necessary, including violent revolution.

As Christianity began to move beyond the borders of Palestine into the Roman world during that first century A.D., the time in which the gospels were written, many of the original Jewish Christian believers began to insist with increasing stridency that an acceptance of Jesus also meant an acceptance of all things Jewish. What better way to challenge such beliefs than by placing them in the mind and on the lips of Jesus and then having Jesus repudiate them by his actions?

The church has traditionally believed and taught that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. Probably as a result of the effects of heresies such as Gnosticism, which denied the inherent goodness of the flesh, Christians have often been reluctant to portray Jesus' humanity in any detail.

Stories such as that of the Syro-Phoenician woman help us to see and experience Jesus engaging in the same human struggles that we do. He succeeds in surmounting the struggle not because he has overcome his human nature, but because he has brought it to its fullest expression.

JAMES PHILIPPS, a freelance writer and teacher of theology living on Long Island, New York.