Return to Recent Sermons or St. Andrews Home page
“Great is Your Faith”
Matthew 15:21-28
August 17, 2008
Don’t Want To Preach on That!
Some preachers pride themselves on how rarely they follow the Lectionary, our three-year cycle of Sunday readings. These colleagues of mine say that the lectionary leaves out too much of the Bible. It skips stories that really should to be preached on. In some ways, I agree with them. But this past week, I would wager that they’re worrying about something a bit different. The lectionary wants us to preach on that, on Matt 15? You’ve got to be kidding! This lection is one of those sticky stories easier to avoid than engage. Bottom line. Many of us in the teaching and preaching business get a little nervous with this story. It’s just so politically incorrect. Jesus would have never gotten elected to office acting the way he does here. He comes across, to me at least, as a silent snob, a racist, an elitist. He is brutal, uncompassionate, and cruel. For us, as 21st century American gentiles, to read this story means risking the uncomfortable discovery that we might be offended by Jesus. Is this the same Jesus we know and love? The Jesus who said, “Let the little children come to me,” who healed the sick, fed the hungry, who taught about love of all things? Surely that is not the same Jesus we find in Matthew 15!
Perhaps before we honestly talk about what’s inside this story, we need to remember where the story is located. It’s context. Our story can be found in both Gospels of Mark and Matthew, and though we don’t have time right now, I encourage you to read them both at home. You will find some interesting differences, largely because the two were written by different people in different times for different purposes.
Most biblical scholars agree that Mark was the first gospel written. Mark’s writing style is simple, his stories bare-bone. We know that Mark’s writings were widely circulated, and that other writers – such as the authors of Matthew and Luke —took Mark’s work and re-published it so to speak, but edited Mark from their own perspective, with their own audience in mind. While the gospels speak of divine things, we can’t forget that they were written by human beings, people like the author of Matthew, who lived in a particular time and place.
Matthew’s gospel is often called the Jewish gospel, because he wrote for the Jewish community. Matthew’s audience was, what one author I read, called the “true blue Jews,” upstanding Jewish men and women and who prided themselves on their religious and cultural heritage. They were educated. They knew the stories and traditions of the Hebrew Bible, what we call the Old Testament. These people were deeply worried about some of the social and political upheaval of their day. Matthew wrote specifically to them, emphasizing above all else, that Jesus was a Jew sent by the God who had made a covenant with the Jews, to bring about salvation for God’s Jewish children.
Matthew appealed to them because he comforted them, assured them of the Jewish-ness of God and the Jewish-ness of Jesus. They had not been forgotten bv God. That was Matthew’s thesis, his sticking point, and we find his Jewish emphasis throughout Matthew. It’s only after we —a group of mostly Gentiles —recognize that we are not Matthew’s intended audience, only after we recognize Matthew’s compassion for the Jewish community, that we can begin to glimpse how very unusual, even radical, is today’s lection.
Hearing the Story Again
Matthew says that Jesus left “that place,” which was probably Gennessaret, located inside the Jewish boundaries. But the place Jesus left wasn’t just geographical. The people with whom he spoke at Gennessaret were also firmly inside Jewish boundaries. They were Pharisees and Scribes and his own Disciples, all people of firm Jewish heritage. But Jesus was frustrated. Neither the easily offended Pharisees, the legalistic Scribes, nor the dense Disciples ever seemed to really hear his words about God and God’s love. Time and time again, Jesus bemoaned their Faith: faith so little, so frail, faith so suspicious.
So, according to Matthew, “Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” Only twice in Matthew’s gospel does Jesus break outside of the Jewish circle. Only twice does he venture into foreign land, and this trip to Tyre and Sidon is one such venture. Of his own volition, Jesus traveled into Gentile land and -- surprise, surprise -- he was met by a Gentile, which would be something in and of itself.
But Matthew goes on to say that this Gentile is a woman, which would have raised a few disapproving eyebrows right away. But -- here’s the clentcher -- this Gentile woman was a Canaanite! This is where Matthew’s audience, all at once, gasped and began whispering in the pews. True-blue Jews, who knew their stuff, knew how bad Canaanites were. In the Old Testament, Canaanites were the evildoers, the peoples who occupied the Promised Land, peoples to be distrusted and destroyed. The Canaanite religious practices were considered disgusting, idolatrous abominations. Canaanites were “religious scum” to be kept far outside the pure circle of the practicing Jewish community.
In today’s age of Western Religious Pluralism, it may be difficult for us to understand this religious animosity. Almost 80% of people in the United States live in metropolitan areas with Jews and Christians and Muslims and Agnostics, people of many diverse faiths, or no faith at all. Younger generations in particular don’t feel as threatened as their parents did when exposed to religious diversity. Nonetheless, I can’t help but recall the first few months after 9-11, when the twin towers fell and the death toll grew, and people around the US, indeed around the world, grieved and looked desperately for someone to blame. And though we were (and still are) very wrong to do so, many people generalized the actions of a few violent extremists to the entire religious community of Islam. I will not repeat from this pulpit the things I saw written on billboards and t-shirts and web sites, words spoken on talk-shows and in parking lots about Muslims. After 9-11, a few students (including myself) from Columbia Seminary in Atlanta met and spoke with a local Imam, the Islamic minister. He said his congregation felt they were treated like the “religious scum” of Atlanta: “They look at us as if we’re all terrorists. We can see the hate and fear in their eyes.” That’s not too extreme an example of the tension between the Jewish and Canaanite people in Matthew’s day. Canaanites were considered immoral, suspicious and foul. They were the Outsiders.
And it was one such Outsider, a gentile Canaanite woman, who walked up to Jesus uninvited, and frankly unwanted. She approached Jesus and his band of Jewish disciples and began shouting out: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David…” It all she said was “have mercy on me,” it would have been a fine story, for she’d have been one brave woman to approach a Jewish man alone, much less request his help. But that’s not all she does. She shouts to Jesus and calls him Lord, which is what his followers called him. “Lord” had become Jesus’ title in a way. But only his people called him Lord, for Jesus was their Lord, their teacher, healer and Jewish Messiah. Not Outsiders, certainly not Canaanite women! But she did, and she knew what she was doing too. She knew Jesus was a Jewish leader of the Jewish community because she calls him not just Lord, but Lord Son of David. This woman wasn’t just brave, she was extraordinary, and the text hints at why.
“Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” We know Matthew’s gospel was written in pre-scientific age. People knew virtually nothing of viruses or genes or mental illness. Sickness was understood as Possession by a Demon, so to heal someone the demon must be cast out. And this Canaanite mother believed Jesus was the man to do it.
To be frank, when I think of sick kids, like the Canaanite woman’s unnamed daughter, I think of doctors and nurses and social workers, but that’s not the first person I imagine. When I think of sick children, my first thought is of Mothers. Maybe that’s because I spent a summer working as a CPE Chaplain in Egleston Children’s hospital, and much of my work was with Mothers. Now please don’t misunderstand. Fathers and Grandparents and Siblings were there often, with smiles and balloons in tow. But when it was late at night at the hospital, or early in the morning, or in the bone-tired heat of the afternoon, you can bet your boots that if the child was there, chances are, the mother was there too. And in my experience, that mother wasn’t interested in socializing with nurses or running home to take a shower or getting lunch from the hospital cafeteria. Nothing was going to distract her. Nothing would scare her away from her mission. She had one focus and one alone: her child, getting better.
I suppose that when I remember those mothers at the children’s hospital, this Canaanite mother is suddenly so much more believable. For even when Jesus ignored her, walked right past her, made no move at all to speak to her, and even when Jesus’ disciples “came and urged [Jesus] saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us,” even then she continued following them and shouting: Have mercy on me, have mercy on my daughter! Here’s the real kicker. Even when Jesus stopped and said to her, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” even that couldn’t stop her. Let us not pretend that she didn’t understand Jesus’ remark. It is not fair to take the children’s food, that is, the food of the children of Israel, the Jewish community, and throw it to the dogs, or some translate it as Pets, those pathetic little Gentiles. No matter how you spin it, that’s no compliment! But that brave mother, showing extraordinary courage, also exhibits extraordinary wisdom. She doesn’t blow up and tell Jesus off, as some of us might. She speaks the truth, “Yes, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Yes…but. Yes Jesus…even still.
I wish I could have seen the disciples’ faces as this woman shouted and followed and begged and argued, unstoppably. I suspect their expressions faded from anger to dismay, and then to confusion, as something utterly amazing happened. Jesus stopped dead in his tracks. Something had happened you see. Words had been exchanged, but something else had shifted in the air. Something had shifted inside Jesus. Jesus this Jewish messiah come to save the Jewish nation, come from Yahweh, the God of the Jews. The most Jewish Jesus, portrayed by Matthew to bring hope and comfort to the Jewish community, to assure them that they were still God’s chosen people, even so, this Jewish man stopped suddenly in his Jewish tracks.
And he said something I’ll never forget. He said: “Woman, great is your faith!” Great! This is just a few paragraphs after Jesus tells the Pharisees, the Scribes, and his own Disciples—all models of Jewish faith-- that their faith is tiny, weak, empty. But here in front of this woman, this foreigner, this Outsider, Jesus says, “GREAT is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish. And her daughter was healed instantly.”
The Wide, Wide Circle of God’s Love
There’s something about Jesus —the real Jesus – not just the Jesus portrayed in any one gospel, but something about the real live Jesus that was so essential, so crucial to who Jesus is, and who God is, that it always bleeds through, regardless of who’s doing the writing: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, me, or you. And I for one believe that something about Jesus has to do with Love, which cannot be contained. That certain something about him has to do God’s love. A love which cannot be fenced in, not with well worded laws or heavily guarded borders. There’s not enough Homeland Security in the world to keep God’s love in check. It cannot be controlled by any one community, any one church or synagogue or mosque, not by any one group of people.
The silliest and most dangerous thing we can do is to leave church today assuming this story is about Jews and Canaanites. It is not. If all Matthew wanted to do was to show that Jesus was a Jew and that Jews didn’t like Canaanites, he wouldn’t have had to write one thing. That was common knowledge. But he does write. In the heart of his gospel, Matthew includes a whole story of how the most Jewish Jesus was taught a lesson, dare I say ministered to, by the most unacceptable Outsider of the day. And why would he tell that story to the true-blue-Insiders, except to remind them that God is at work Outside too.
This story is about me and you, and all of us who are Insiders. Who look the right way: have the right clothes, the right skin, the right dialect. It is for those of us Live the right way: have the right pension, house, nationality, sexuality, party affiliation, or church membership. But this story is also for me, and you, and any of us who have ever had the opportunity to be an Outsider, who have lived some way or some place where the way you look and speak, live and believe is Outside the Norm, the Acceptable, the Decent.
This story is for all of us. It is a promise, Matthew’s promise, that Jesus who was born and lived in a particular time and context, is our Holiest Reminder that God is alive and at work…both in those places we’d expect God, and in those places we cannot fathom God!
God’s love is always pushing, pushing, pushing our little safe circle a little wider, a little wider. God is always assuring us, as Matthew did for his people, that God is here, Inside, right here with us. But God is also nudging us, whispering to us, even daring us to turn and see for ourselves how wide, how very wide is God’s circle of love. Amen.
Copyright 2008 Rev. Shelaine R. Bird