In the Gospel for this week, just after teaching about what comes from the heart to

Transcription

1 In the Gospel for this week, just after teaching about what comes from the heart to defile, Jesus exhibits such defilement himself by calling the Canaanite woman a dog, a demeaning insult. That s pretty breathtaking, isn t it? When Jesus says to his disciples that he was sent "only to the lost sheep of Israel," and to the Canaanite woman that one should not take "the children s food and give it to the dogs," surely this is wrong. Is he teaching his followers? Is the foreign, unnamed woman his co-teacher? Or is he slipping into evil, as all humans do? What I want Jesus to have said is something like this: "I was sent not only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but to lost sheep and dogs everywhere. In me there is neither dog nor sheep, Israelite or Canaanite, male nor female. I want a Jesus who will uncompromisingly reject the barriers by which people oppress, exclude, and marginalize. I want all to be recognized fully as people of God, or at least to be sheep and for all to feast. Instead we have talk of dogs, and crumbs. In the land where Jesus lived, dogs carried about the same social standing as many of their counterparts in the developing world do today.

2 Remember when Jesus tells the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus? Lazarus lays helpless at the gate, and Jesus gave us that gruesome detail about the dogs that would come and lick his sores? Well, that s about it in terms of the way dogs were regarded. This is the kind of worldview from which Jesus makes his comment to the Canaanite woman. She asks for him to bring healing to her daughter and he says, I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel it isn t right to take the children s food and throw it to the dogs. A prophet ministering outside the boundaries of Israel is like a mother who would deny food to her children and feed it to stray dogs instead. There is no way I can see to make this slur against a nameless Canaanite woman a comfortable remark. Some people have tried- they ve said he was testing her faith; that he was stretching her courage in a way that was good for her. But I m not so sure it can be justified like that. Certainly such harsh words aren t what we expect from Jesus. The analogy he uses doesn t reflect the inclusiveness that is part and parcel of his understanding of God and the world. This Jesus who, most of the time, we find welcoming sinners and tax collectors, touching lepers, and associating with people others wouldn t even

3 give the time of day- here says something that is harsh, discriminatory, and insulting. Yes, Jesus was a person of his time- a first-century Jew born into a world of boundaries, discrimination and exclusion. It can so easy to idealize him in an unrealistic way and forget that, like us, he was a person of his time. What I find valuable is that Matthew lets us see that Jesus is human. This is a Jesus who learns and develops-like any of us. This is a Jesus who has to respond to what goes on around him-like any of us. This is a Jesus who doesn t know everythinglike any of us. This is a Jesus who is genuinely human, sharing in our human nature. But look at the nature of his humanity. Most of us, most of the time, let our personal prejudices, our personal likes and dislikes, rule our responses. It s hard to step aside from those things and see some new possibility outside our own frames of reference. The truth of that is easily seen in the disciples reaction. To them the woman is beyond the bounds; a nuisance they want to get rid of.

4 But Jesus does something different. He actually lets the nuisance engage him. The brave Canaanite woman comes back at him powerfully. Even the dogs she says, eat the crumbs that fall from the table. And in the encounter Jesus changes something we are really good at doing when we are brave enough to take a risk. The woman teaches Jesus something new about God s kingdom- she widens its inclusion to be genuinely inclusive. And Jesus realizes the truth of her persistence when he says, Woman, great is your faith. Somebody once said, the day you can no longer change is the day you stop being a human being. Jesus is a human being, and this day he changes. His outlook is lifted to something new. The good news is that this is what incarnation means. God s encounter with us in Jesus is a sharing in our own limitations, even our mortality. A Gospel with no mistakes and no room to change might not have mere crumbs for dogs, but it has no cross either, no possibility for an offering of love in humility. Jesus encounter with the Canaanite woman isn t perfect that s because the situation in which they meet is not perfect. Yet in their encounter, each of these two speaks from the beginning in ways whose honesty is discomforting for us, because they do not avoid what is unmistakably real for them.

5 The greater error is that of the disciples, who want to send the woman and her need away Jesus will not. Jesus joins in the difficult conversation. He does not however pretend at any point that Canaanites will no longer struggle for Israelite crumbs, when he has gone on his way from the region of Tyre and Sidon. But neither does he deny that a certain woman s faith is great. And for all the verbal sparring, on that day more than crumbs was given, and a child not a dog was restored and healed. During our Eucharistic feast, we commemorate and share with the real Jesus, who apparently makes mistakes; above all, the mistake of becoming a vulnerable person who has a body and blood to spill and share, not just fine a fine meal that is all plenty and no pain. The God Jesus reveals likewise may not run the world the way we might prefer, but has entered into it fully and shared in our reality, with honesty and no qualms. Even God has let go of being right all the time. Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, was no stranger to a divided world in need of healing. In the background of his life were some of the most tragic examples of scapegoating in modern history. At the age of twelve, his family left Germany for Palestine on the heels of the Nuremburg Laws banning relations between Jews and Aryans. He later fought for the Israeli defense forces in the Arab-Israeli War. Witnessing the horrors of battle and the human cost of division informed his

6 poetry. Considered the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King David, Amichai s words from his poem The Place Where We Are Right share a vision of the possibility present in moving past certainty and into the Spirit s loving embrace. Here are Amichai s words: From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the Spring. The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plough. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.

7 God does not ask us to be right today but simply to be open to loving and learning from each other. So when we come to the table and share in the Lord s supper, trusting not in our own righteousness, but in God s manifold and great mercy, may we be fed and empowered to travel together into different and difficult places. May we purse God s uncomfortable conversations about love and justice and healing and wholeness; and be willing to be at least as wrong as he was. Amen.