Follow me as I wrestle with some tough questions about need and obligation, about foreigners and dogs.
My wife and I have taken to watching already-run episodes of BBC shows. Our latest fancy has been the most recent version of All Creatures Great and Small. In one of the early scenes, a pup has played mischief in a neighbor’s pasture and a lamb has been found stillborn. The dog’s master calls for the dog to be put down, but the vet, James Herriot, appeals for clemency.
Every time I hear the actor Nicholas Ralph, speak, I am reminded of the voice of Ian Charles playing Eric Liddell in my all-time favorite “Chariots of Fire.” Both the fictional Harriot and the real Liddell are Scottish, and the lilt is as soothing as a warm shower after a hard day of yardwork.
In the fictional All Creatures, the dog is finally permitted to live – after Herriot trains the dog to behave around the neighbor’s sheep. It is a compelling story. Don’t kill the dog without first making an effort to rehabilitate the dog and meanwhile protect the sheep. Viewers, who I presume are all animal lovers, are heartened that the fictional dog’s life is saved.
Not too long ago there was a story in the news about a woman and her children who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande to safety in Texas. Migrants drowning navigating that river are common enough as to not warrant national news coverage. But there was something tear-inducing in this story, at least for me, in that it was reported that there were people who made no effort to help. Even worse, they followed orders not to help.
While the case is still being investigated, early reports are that the Texas Department of Safety and the Texas National Guard, under the governor’s orders, refused requests from the U.S. Border Patrol to help migrants crossing the river. For whatever the reason, that woman and her children were trying to make it across the dangerous Rio Grande that day, and people refused to help them. Or so it is being reported.
Perhaps, one could argue, the victims were beyond rescue, the situation was so perilous. Or maybe to make the attempt would endanger the life of the personnel on duty. Reportedly, the official response was that a rescue would have been too late. None of these satisfy this writer.
For decades, we have been appalled at scenes such as the death of Kitty Genovese on the streets of New York City in 1964, where bystanders did nothing to intervene in her prolonged attack. But these officials on the border are trained to intervene or, at the very least, to allow others better trained to attempt to save lives. The offer of help by the Federal officers was refused.
It could well be argued, as some have done, that the woman and her children were breaking the law, though I doubt anyone righteously minded would say that particular offense was worthy of capital punishment. We’ve seen similar situations in the Mediterranean Sea where migrants fleeing to Italy or Greece have had their boats capsize while captains of other boats refused to help. And we are appalled.
Regardless of all these arguments, and regardless the rightness or wrongness of current immigration laws, my heart has been broken by this story. A woman, obviously desperate enough to flee her situation for what she perceives is a better situation, perishes with her children while others refuse to help.
I am reminded of images I grew up with of attack dogs being sicced on innocent black children in Bull Connor’s Birmingham. I also grew up hearing of the My Lai massacre that saw hundreds of unarmed civilians killed at the hands of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. I’ve read too many stories of lynchings in the Deep South or in South Africa and have asked myself, Were there no church members in that crowd to stop the mob? – knowing full well that the mob was filled with church members.
That people do bad things has never surprised me. That otherwise good people allow such atrocities to happen always does. I am less surprised by the classic Hitler stereotype, for example, than I am by the masses who enabled him.
Were there no God-fearing white people in religious Alabama to oppose Bull Connor? Were there no soldiers of faith that would stand up to their commanders in the face of gang rape, body mutilation, let alone murder in the rice patties of Southeast Asia?
Who can’t be moved by the death and dying in the Middle East, whether Palestinian or Israeli? Who can’t be moved by the loss of so many lives in Ukraine or Northeast Africa or Columbia or so many other places of conflict?
War zones aside, my heart grieves whenever a death sentence is carried out. Whether mistakenly guilty or no doubt at all, that is a human being dying. I grieve when people die on our streets for lack of care, some of them abandoned or abused at tender ages and left to live a miserable life that ends all too early. I grieve when the life of an innocent unborn (is there any other kind?) is taken or when a mother is left without community to raise a child, leaving both suffering and sometimes even dying. And my heart grieved when I heard it said during the recent pandemic, “They were only elderly people who were going to die anyway.”
Sometimes I just don’t want to tune into the news anymore. Sometimes I just want to shut my mind to all the injustices in the world. After all, I am not God who can handle all these appeals for help all at once.
But then I ask myself, Am I like one of those bystanders who refused to intervene?
Jesus is confronted with a similar situation by a foreign woman whose daughter is plagued with a ravaging spirit. He’s taken leave of his exhausting work of healing people and has escaped for a secreted R&R in this woman’s country. Somehow, she finds out he is there and, having learned that he is a healer, she goes to him, begging him to heal her daughter. She is, after all, desperate and will do whatever it takes to rescue her child – even crossing cultural borders.
At first, Jesus refuses. He is exhausted and desperately needs some space. In doing so, he says something that makes modern readers cringe. He tells the woman that it is not right to take what belongs to children and give it to their dogs. Cue: squirm effect. Is he being rude while testing her or just being rude? There is some theological implication embedded here about the right time for the Gentiles to receive the Good News, but that deeper meaning aside, what is going on?
Perhaps he is, as some scholars suggest, using a bit of tongue-in-cheek to test the woman. It still sounds awkward, but, if so, the woman plays along. She replies, “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” (Mark 7:28).
In response, Jesus commends her faith – more highly than he does for anyone else except another foreigner, a Roman Centurion. And, as in that soldier’s situation, he proclaims healing from a distance.
Theologically speaking, we talk about Jesus leaving all his omni powers behind when he is born in Bethlehem. Jesus the Christ is still very much God, but he lays those divine abilities aside like a cloak and comes to live and die as one of us. Whatever he does that is powerish on earth is done with the same power available to all who are clothed in the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s the theology speak.
On a more accessible level, I note that even when Jesus needed to take a break, he remained on duty for the needs of those around him. And this was no one-off. Jesus regularly took time off, but like a mother who is never off-duty, he also regularly allowed those time-outs to be interrupted by human need.
I really don’t know what I could have done about the woman and her children in the Rio Grande. I am two thousand miles away in Oregon, after all. I don’t think I can meet every need in Oregon. Try as I might, I can’t even meet every need I meet.
But I can live my life responding to needs around me as the Spirit leads, regardless of how it impacts me or causes me trouble with powers that be. And whether I think those in need deserve it or not. Even fictional BBC dogs deserve that much.
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