Today blessed Mark, when he commends the prudence of the Syrophoenician woman, reports her faith, extols the ardour of her belief, and raises no small question for anxious hearers, saying: 'And rising up thence, the Lord went into the parts of Tyre and Sidon, and entering into a house, he would have no man know it, and he could not be hid' (Mark vii). He willed and could not: to will and not to be able belongs not to the divine majesty, but to human infirmity; for it is written: 'Whatsoever the Lord willed, he did in heaven and on earth, in the sea and in all the deeps' (Ps. cxxxiv). And the Apostle: 'Who resisteth his will?' (Rom. ix, 20). She succumbs to necessity who is not a free and absolute will. The leper says to the Lord:
'If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean' (Matt. viii); and the evangelist says: 'He willed, and could not.' What does blessed Mark mean? Is the woman's faith so to be exalted that the Lord's possibility and will should be bent to it? Or is the sagacity of faith so great that, though God be unwilling, it can search out the divine secret? Such seems to me also that other saying, when the Lord wishes to bring forth the faith of the woman with an issue of blood as a proof of his power, and to prove it by evidence, asking: 'Who touched me?' To whom the disciples say: 'The crowds press thee, and thou sayest, Who touched me?' (Mark v). It seemed to the disciples that all were touching the Lord, pressing him with the body alone, and that by such fleshly approach all were alike joined to him:
but he, who perceived otherwise and inquired otherwise, knew that the woman had come to his majesty, had penetrated to his power, by mind, not by body, not by common touch, but by faith. Whence not a man, but God cries out; not flesh, but spirit: 'Who touched me?' — that the power of the deed might reveal him whom his humanity was then concealing. But what 'he willed' means, and what 'he could not' means, let us inquire more clearly. Christ, mindful of his promise, had first come for the salvation of the people of Israel, that he might render faithfully paid what he had promised to Abraham (Gen. xxii), and to his seed David (Ps.
cxxxi) and their descendants promised, render faithfully discharged: but because by their faithlessness they showed themselves unworthy, the faith of the Gentiles obtained, seized, and drew to itself what the unbelief of the Jews spurned and lost. Hear him saying: 'I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel' (Matt. xv). But the sheep, already made rabid by the contagion of wolves, and fiercer in their own savagery than the very beasts, always wished to tear and to do violence to their own shepherd: and therefore Christ could not fulfil his will, not by any impossibility of his own, but by the wickedness of the lost, and what he had offered to some he was compelled to confer upon others, as he himself says: 'The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away' (Matt. xi, 6).
The faith of the Gentiles used force, to seize the Father's inheritance, to snatch away that whole inheritance of the sons, as is more evidently shown in the present reading. For the woman, as soon as she heard of him, whose daughter had an unclean spirit, entered in, and fell down before his feet. Now she was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by race. And she besought him that he would cast the devil out of her daughter. He said to her: 'Suffer first the children to be filled; for it is not good to take the bread of the children and to cast it to the dogs.' He did not say, 'It is not good to cast it to the dogs'; but, 'It is not good to take it from the children and to cast it to the dogs': because to give bread to the dogs, even if it does not belong to human kindness, yet belongs to human reason.
The dog, while its masters sleep, comes forth by night as both guard and ever-watchful sentinel against the stranger, troubles the thief, meets the robber, that it may relieve the care and anxiety of the little servants. Yet how did he take the bread from the children, to whom so often and in such wise he offered, granted, and pressed it? But they attempted to trample the offered bread to their crime, not to take it for life; and yet what was crumbled and trampled by the children, the dog hastened with all faith, with all desire, to lick up. Hence it is that she answered thus: 'Yea, Lord; for the whelps also under the table eat of the crumbs of the children.' Deservedly she who confessed herself a dog is changed into a human being, and justly those who refused to be sons are turned into dogs;
deservedly she is adopted as a daughter, is raised up, is honoured at the table, who cast herself beneath the table with praiseworthy and provident humility; justly now she feasts wholly on the crumbs from the bread, who by her own merits understood, and confessed, that she scarcely deserved them. And what more? Hence it is that, on account of his justice, the Lord could neither give to the Jews, nor deny to the Gentiles.