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Pentecost 11A
August 16, 2020
Matthew 15:10-28
INTRODUCTION:
Today’s readings urge us to question what, exactly, makes a person “good” or faithful or worthy of love and grace. (Spoiler, no one is worthy, and also everyone is worthy. That’s what grace means!) More specifically, they bring up the question of whether one’s race or ethnicity, or their adherence to the law, is what wins them God’s favor. Isaiah makes a bold claim that God’s house “shall be a house of prayer for all people,” regardless of their foreign status. Paul’s letter to the Romans astutely points out that we are all disobedient, but that very disobedience is what makes God’s immense mercy such a gift.
Matthew gives us two stories that illustrate this point in different ways. Once again, we are right on the tails of the last few stories – the death of John the Baptist, the feeding of the 5000, Jesus’ desperate attempts to get a moment alone to pray, and the walking on water. Now Jesus begins challenging some of the Pharisees on laws surrounding cleanliness. In short, he says: it’s not what you eat that matters, but what you say that defiles. A timely message for a presidential election year, I think! From there, though, Jesus moves into a foreign country, Tyre and Sidon. This is a land of Gentiles, non-Jews, people outside of the children of Israel. Yet even in a foreign land, Jesus’ reputation precedes him, and a woman asks for help. And well, Jesus doesn’t at first respond as lovingly as you might expect. So, we will get to watch as Jesus learns something about the very Gospel he proclaims!
Judgment of others who are different is rampant in our world – usually, but especially right now. As you listen, consider how these texts can help us to reflect on our own human condition, and what they say to our engagement with those who are different from us. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
My daughter has a book called, She Persisted: 12 American Women who Changed the World. It’s all about women who broke down barriers, despite so many factors working against them. Grace loves it, and dreams about the ways she will change the world someday. The title, you likely figured out, is based on something Sen. Mitch McConnell said about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, after the Senate voted to silence her and her objections to the appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, but after being silenced she kept talking and objecting. McConnell explained later, “Nevertheless, she persisted,” and that line became the new rally cry for the feminist movement, and a pretty effective one!
The Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel is the quintessential “nevertheless, she persisted” woman. I love this woman. I love her insistence that she is somebody, that she is deserving of care, that Canaanite lives matter! The feminist in me loves this story, and points to it as an example of a tenacious woman of faith!
Unfortunately, I’m not as delighted with Jesus in this passage. He does not come out of this exchange smelling like roses. She asks for help, and he ignores her – an experience I know many women today can relate to. The men following Jesus complain about her talking too much (yup, been there). And then Jesus finally talks to her, and he calls her “a female dog.” Yeah, we have that same insult, though in this case I’m not sure if it is a general insult or specifically an ethnic slur reserved for people of her particular foreign background. (It’s worth mentioning that Jews and Canaanites were longtime enemies.) The woman speaks up for herself and her daughter once more, cleverly spinning Jesus’ words to her advantage, and only then does Jesus change his tune, commend her for her faith, and heal her daughter. So, happy ending, but… yeah. Jesus does not behave here like I would have hoped from the Son of God.
This is a challenging text, because this exchange conflicts with the idea that Jesus was perfect. The unblemished sacrificial lamb. He must be, right, if our theology is to make any sense? Many have tried to justify Jesus’ behavior by saying that he was just testing the woman, or using her as a sort of object lesson – but does that really make him look any better, to have used this woman in her hour of need, to make a point? So… is Jesus not perfect then?
I remember asking my pastor dad as a kid if Jesus was perfect, and he pointed out that “perfect” isn’t a very helpful descriptor. Did Jesus stub his toe? Sure. Did he sometimes stink up the bathroom? Probably. Did he feel human emotion? Absolutely. Does any of this make him not “perfect”? Better, Pastor Dad went on, is to say that Jesus is “without sin.” But while I was satisfied with that at the time, this story muddies those waters again. Is this exchange, where he ignores a woman’s needs, then claims she is outside of the scope of his mission, and then refers to her and her people as dogs… is this exchange sinful? Whatever it is, it sure doesn’t seem consistent with the Jesus we know and love, the Jesus who is meant to be a blessing for the whole world, the Jesus who, at the end of this Gospel, will commission his disciples to bring the Gospel to all the nations. What gives, Jesus?
The truth is that while we believe that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, we are often less comfortable when we see him act like a human. And if Jesus truly is fully human, then why shouldn’t he experience one of the most human experiences of all: making a mistake, and having to face up to it. To be clear, I don’t think making an honest mistake is necessarily a sin, but continuing to do it, and not learning from it and using it as an opportunity to grow may very well be. With that in mind, I think the more important lesson to learn from this exchange is not whether Jesus sinned or made a mistake, but what he does when he is called out on it.
I can tell you what I would do in his situation. I would immediately start thinking of excuses to save face. “I didn’t mean that the way you took it.” Or, “I just didn’t know my mission was supposed to include Gentiles yet.” Or, “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night – you see, I was walking on a tumultuous sea.” Or, I might even admit that the calling out was justified, admit my mistake, but then try to frame it in such a way that still allows me to have some power, like, “I’m sorry I ignored you – I was distracted by all the other things on my plate right now. You see, my cousin just died, and I just fed, like 5000 people, and then there was this incident on the sea, and the Pharisees were all getting on my nerves… Anyway, sorry I was short with you, I just have a lot going on.”
But Jesus doesn’t do any of this. And if I’m being honest, even though I know that I do that, I’d be even more disappointed in Jesus if he did. If I were that woman in need, and he started feeding me all kinds of excuses and justifications, I would feel utterly unseen and unheard, which is often the far more painful offense. I mean, don’t you hate it when someone makes an excuse for hurting you? It’s like saying, “Your pain, and our relationship, is less important to me than my own ability to save face and maintain my position of power. My comfort matters more to me than your pain.” But Jesus doesn’t do that. He puts this woman, and the relationship, first. When the woman uses his own words to focus his attention on a part of his mission he had previously not addressed, his mission to those beyond the children of Israel, he hears her, and sees her. He receives her objection with grace, recognizing that Canaanite lives do matter, just as much as those of the children of Israelites. He even commends her for pointing it out. And, he heals her daughter. In this story, we get to watch how Jesus turns what could have been a very embarrassing moment for him, into an opportunity to learn and grow and expand his mission.
We all have such opportunities, though we may not handle them quite as graciously as Jesus does. They happen when we make mistakes that hurt people, when our narrow world view doesn’t allow us to see or hear the pain of a person in need (or to impose our own version of their story upon them), when we get stuck in doing things the same old way, when we are faced with a reality that we have been, willfully or not, unaware of. (For myself, I’m thinking of my growing awareness of racism and white supremacy in our society, and the pain of recognizing the role white people like myself have played and continue to play in it, even if that role has largely been passive complicity.) Becoming aware of, or even being confronted with our own limited perspectives, and the mistakes we make because of them, can be a painful and uncomfortable experience, and it is about as human an experience as there is.
And thanks to this story, we see that Jesus, who was himself fully human, did not escape that very human experience. He had it, too. Yet when Jesus is confronted with a challenge to the way he had always done things, he doesn’t use it as a chance to double down and prove himself right. He uses it as an opportunity to widen his vision, and expand his mission. He uses it as a chance to learn and grow – another beautiful, though sometimes very difficult and painful human experience. When faced with something he wasn’t ready for, Jesus adapts, and his willingness to do this allows him to see that God’s vision is bigger than what he had been seeing. He is better for the experience, and so are we.
2020 has brought one painful challenge to our previous ways of doing things after another. Many of these challenges may make us want to curl up in a ball and shrink our view of the world, focus only on ourselves. I have certainly had days like this, when I have so much on my own plate that I can’t possibly bear anyone else’s pain, and I can’t un-learn or re-learn how to do one more thing, and I certainly can’t completely overhaul yet another of my cherished routines, traditions, perspectives, or expectations.
That is why I’m so grateful for this story today. Because Jesus shows us that he had to do this, too. He had to face up to his blind spots, accept the criticism of another, learn and grow from his mistakes, and in doing that, enter into a new life, a new way of being, a new way of living out God’s mission. No doubt the experience was painful – healing, growth, and new life often are. It always requires the death of old ways, the death of old perspectives, the death of our egos, and for Jesus, ultimately, death on a cross. But from those deaths will always emerge new life – for the tenacious Canaanite woman who persisted in faith, for you and for me as we persist in faith through this challenging year so full of death and loss, and for our very God who died upon a cross to show us the glorious new life that God will, every time, bring about.
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