Mark 7:27

‘And he said to her, “Let the children first be filled, for it is not the right thing to do to take the children's bread and toss it to the little dogs.” '

Jesus used a well known picture. The family meal, the children round the table and pet dogs waiting for scraps of food to be tossed to them. In order to clean the hands (there were no forks) they would often be wiped on a piece of bread and this would then be tossed to any pet dogs. But for someone to take the children's bread so as to give it to the dogs would not be right. ‘The children' represented the people of Israel, the Jews, the bread His message and ministry, and the little dogs the Gentiles.

‘The children first.' His point was that His first ministry was to the Jews and that He represented the God of the Jews. It was they who were primarily chosen by God even though they had turned aside from Him (Exodus 4:22; Deuteronomy 14:1; Deuteronomy 32:6; Isaiah 1:2). His first aim was to restore those of them who would come. It was only once this was fulfilled that the Gentiles could benefit as well if they responded to the true God. Thus He confirmed that His first ministry was to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10:6; Matthew 15:24).

Here then it was stressed that Jesus had come first of all to win Israel to God. All His preaching up to this point had been to Israelites (including, rarely, Samaritans, who also worshipped the God of Moses) and He saw that as His basic mission. As the Servant of the Lord He must raise up the tribes of Jacob preparatory to being a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 49:6). But it also stressed to her that it was only in this God that what she wanted could be found.

‘The children's bread.' Bread had early been closely connected with the children of Israel. The ‘bread of the presence', the twelve loaves of showbread in the Tabernacle, which was placed on a table in the Holy Place, clearly represented the people of Israel in their twelve tribes. And it was eaten by the priests in order to demonstrate that they all belonged to God. But it ever continued before Him. To take of that bread and give it to the Gentiles would have been seen as an act of the grossest sacrilege.

But bread was the very staff of life, and when the thought came for His people to be fed (Psalms 28:9), and no picture of the shepherd was in mind, the thought would be of bread. See Isaiah 55:2; Jeremiah 3:15; Micah 5:4 (in Hebrew). Thus did bread represent the word of truth. And when Jesus taught His disciples to pray, ‘give us today the bread of tomorrow' His meaning may well have been the bread of the coming Tomorrow, the Messianic banquet. This is why Jesus could reveal Himself as the bread of life (John 6:35) and finally symbolise the fact at the Passover meal in the Upper Room. That Jesus even hinted at giving this bread to Gentiles would have come as a huge shock to His Apostles, but it did demonstrate that He was ready to do so once the woman acknowledged its source.

‘The little dogs.' The Jews described the Gentiles as ‘dogs', and those dogs were not the little pets in some households but the scavenger dogs who roamed the streets and gathered outside towns in order to find scraps. Nothing ‘holy' must be given to them (Matthew 7:6). They were dirty, disease-ridden and semi-wild. But in His illustration Jesus softened the description, speaking of little pet dogs, while knowing that she would be aware that He had the Gentiles in mind. The illustration left the door open for the woman to come back with a response. All knew that pet dogs would sometimes receive food from the table.