"While Jesus was staying in a house in that area, trying to keep a low profile, a woman described as Syro-Phoenician (that is, an Aramaic-speaking non-Jew who came from the ancient coastal region of Phoenicia) found him. She asked Jesus to exorcise her daughter from an unclean spirit (perhaps manifest by persistent bleeding after her period had ended). He refused, 'It is not good to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs.'

"He had rebuffed her with the brutal comparison of female Gentiles to dogs. Expressing that sentiment in Gentile territory was asking for trouble. And the woman gave it to him, gently but to the point; the verbal victory went to her, at the expense of Jesus (Mark 7:28):

But she replied and says to him, Indeed, Lord: even the dogs under the table eat from the scraps of the children.

"The contrast with the story of the centurion in Capernaum is relevant. The woman's location, her designation as a non-Jew with no evident interest in Judaism, as well as her sex and that of her child, all show that she was impure in ways the centurion was not. Yet her instinct to accept any help Jesus might give was stronger even than his reactive refusal of her; he relented and agreed to deal with her daughter's unclean spirit.

"At this point, Jesus was honestly bewildered: the significance of this story is that he repented of his own xenophobia. After all these years, even after his steadfast commitment to his parable that it is not what goes into the person but what comes out of the person that defiles one, we can see his human uncertainty and the limitations that were part and parcel of his own culture. He was ambivalent about Samaritans: willing to accept them as Israelites but wary of their territory. And that ambivalence pales in comparison to his initial rejection of the Syro-Phoenician women. He remained torn between his belief that purity became contagious under the power of Spirit and his visceral antipathy toward non-Jews, a basic element in his Galilean upbringing."