Matthew 15:10-28
August 20, 2017
I.
Jesus proceeds up north, out of Jewish territory, to the district of Tyre and Sidon, as a kind of retreat. He goes to an area where no one would know or care about him or what he is doing, so he can get a break to catch his breath, and regroup for the next phase of his ministry. But his reputation as a healer precedes him, and he is approached perhaps by many people, one of whom is a woman whose daughter is ill.
The story says she “came out.” Maybe she simply comes out of her house as Jesus passes by. But “coming out” has several meanings for us; usually it has to do with some kind of change in our status or position, as with a “coming out party” recognizing maturity, or a matter of “coming out” by going public with something about us that we had kept hidden.
In order to come to Jesus at all the woman has to come out of her pagan, Gentile culture. Just knowing who Jesus is, and imagining that he could and would do something for her, a non-Jew, is a huge step away from her own background, community, and religion.
Trusting in Jesus necessarily means not trusting in yourself or anything you have. You have to come out of all that. You can trust Jesus or you can trust in your own abilities, rights, skills, gifts, background, ethnicity, religion, class, or that belongs to you. In order to trust Jesus you must “give up all your possessions,” as Jesus himself says several times. “Give up all you have, take up your cross, and follow me,” he says. That’s the recipe for salvation. You have to come out of who you think you are.
Perhaps this is what allows Jesus to see her as worthy of testing. For he doesn’t just send her away explicitly by saying “Go away!” He does ignore her at first, which means she has to show some persistence and dedication, so he can see that hers is not just an idle interest.
Then Jesus quips that he is sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Jesus is sent to the lost. The ones who imagine themselves to be privileged, card-carrying, charter members of the Chosen People were not interested in what Jesus is doing; he is not sent to them. If you think you’ve got it all under control then you have no need for Jesus. Before Jesus can find you you have to realize you are lost.
At the same time, Jesus’ movement begins within the people of Israel and their specific history, theology, and ritual. The word “Israel” is the name given to Jacob by an angel who wrestles with him in Genesis 32. It means, “one who strives with God.” The very name given to Jacob, which is extended to his descendants, indicates this centuries-long cage-match between humans and God. That is Israel’s identity. Maybe Jesus comes into the world first to minister to the casualties of this struggle, those who have been dismissed as “lost.”
II.
Not deterred by this dismissal, the woman kneels at Jesus’ feet and continues to plead for him to heal her daughter. At which point Jesus gives that difficult retort about how “it’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” The actual, literal word used for food here is bread, which connects the story to the feeding of the 5000 a couple of weeks ago. Bread means Jesus’ teaching, it means his new economic reality based on abundance and not scarcity. But apparently it’s not for “dogs” like this woman. That would not be what people normally consider “fair.”
She could have just left in anger or sorrow at this point, figuring Jesus to be just another self-righteous, exclusionary Jewish teacher. She could have given up in defeat. I mean, he calls her a “dog,” which was a racial slur that Jews would often direct at Gentiles.
This part of the story makes a lot of people uncomfortable. First, it makes many Christians uncomfortable because it seems to show Jesus in a bad light. Jesus, who is known for accepting, receiving, welcoming, and healing everyone who comes to him, after not responding to this woman at all, suddenly and inexplicably has downright nasty and insulting words for her.
It is so widely out of character for him to do this, that commentators for 2000 years have tried to figure it out, explain it, rationalize it, reframe it, or just ignore it. Everyone else who comes to Jesus gets healed. Even Roman soldiers. Even his enemies. Jesus is famous for accepting and welcoming people whom the establishment in society rejected. He even forgives his own killers while they are in the act of killing him!
Yet here comes this woman, whose only crime as far as we know, is not being Jewish, who has a daughter at home who is sick and even dying… and Jesus’ can’t be bothered. It is so different from the Jesus we know and love that sometimes our brains just go into a kind of automatic denial mode and we just don’t hear this story at all.
Second, it makes uncomfortable many readers who are members of oppressed and excluded populations. They are offended that Jesus gives away his gracious benefits for free to his own people, but from this poor foreign woman he seems to demand abject groveling. It reminds them of churches that serve their long-time members and their families really well, but newcomers? Especially those from a different racial, class, or generational background? Not so much. They know what it’s like to watch an insider who knows someone go to the front of the line for special treatment, while they have to produce reams of paperwork and live up to much higher standards and requirements to receive the same benefits.
III.
But then she proceeds to deliver this brilliant line about how “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” It is an amazingly humble, submissive and self-effacing answer… but it also indicates at the same time that she will not take no for an answer. So it shows kind of amazing stubborn, in-your-face humility. What she says proves her deep trust in him. She trusts him even when he is showing no sign of being trustworthy! I wonder if the real point here isn’t that profound humility and submission both unlocks and reveals our true nature.
In her response she gives up her pride and ego-centricity… but she is also giving up something else: her exclusion and her marginalization. She doesn’t let Jesus throw her out. She does not let Jesus get away with not healing her daughter. She refuses to let Jesus not be Jesus. She trusts in him too much for that. She shows us that real humility entails a renunciation, not just of the positive, self-important, self-righteous labels we are pleased to wear for ourselves, but also of these negative, degrading labels other people force us to wear.
So she totally reframes the derogatory label of “dog” and turns it inside out. Dogs are not viewed very positively in the Bible. But she remakes it from a term of exclusion and rejection, into an alternative path to the children’s table. It’s almost like she says, “God made dogs too, and gave them as well a way to the table.”
When I was serving the Martinsville church, we did a Blessing of the Animals during the morning worship service. We had about a dozen dogs. The miracle of the day was that there was no growling, no snapping, no “accidents,” not even any barking, just a lot of interestedly looking around and panting. Some even went to sleep during the sermon, so they fit right in. And when communion time came and I lifted up the bread and broke it, several of the dogs jumped up and lunged towards the table. Fortunately, they were on leashes and were able to be hauled back. But I have never witnessed such an enthusiastic desire to receive the Lord’s Body from any humans.
The way of the dog is simplicity, enthusiasm, persistence, and humility. And that is what the woman displays in her response. Jesus is quite satisfied and impressed with her answer. She has suddenly made being a dog into a virtue. She has turned the nasty epithet into a label to be worn with dignity.
And he says, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” Because she is willing to receive only the crumbs like a dog, she finds that even here her daughter receives healing. In effect she is not under the table, but has a seat of honor as recipient of divine blessing. Simplicity, enthusiasm, persistence, and humility are the way to the table. They are expression of deep faith and trust in the Lord Jesus.
IV.
It is one thing to trust in Jesus when he is being all Jesusy, full of love, gentleness, acceptance, peace, and compassion. It is another far more demanding thing to trust him when he appears to reject, ignore, judge, and condemn you. Sometimes that’s what this mortal, temporal existence throws at us. Sometimes we even hear Jesus himself saying things that challenge us, that humble us, that critique us, that even seem to condemn us. Sometimes his words in the gospels convict us at the core of our being. Sometimes Jesus sounds like he is just echoing the taunts of those who hate us.
We can take it that way. Or we can hear him in a new way. We can hear him through the self-emptying love we know he has for us, and enter into that self-emptying ourselves, coming out of who we were, receiving those words not according to the nastiness of our experience, but according to the hope that has been poured into our hearts in him.
For Jesus Christ is the One who is always transmuting evil into good, hate and fear into love, anger into gratitude, darkness into light, and life into death. And everything he does, and everything he says, is all about this transforming, transfiguring blessing.
This Canaanite woman could be thought of as the mother of Gentile Christianity, and thus the forebear in the faith of all of us. She is the one who, even though she does not appear to belong here, nevertheless persists. She comes, not claiming, appropriating, or demanding that Jesus serve her as if she earned some some entitlement. She comes with abject humility, complete submission, and great faith or trust in him. And she finds herself seated indeed at the table of healing, wholeness, blessing, and peace.
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