The following sermon has provoked an unusual level of response, both pro and con. The con responses include words like "hogwash" and accusations of heresy. While, a sermon should be a proclamation of the gospel, not an exegesis, I have added an exegetical post-script to this sermon that claims Matthew's Jesus changed his mind about gentiles. For those who are concerned, the postscript may help you understand my reasoning even if you do not agree.
There is a rule of thumb
for figuring that out
who the
main character in a novel is.
It is the one who changes most.
The main character is not
a stable prop in someone else’s drama.
The main character learns
things, grows.
King Lear is called “King Lear” because the old king
eventually sees his own injustice and he repents.
Shakespeare didn’t name
his play after faithful Cordelia
who is good and virtuous throughout.
He named it “King Lear”
after the character who moves,
changes,
makes spiritual progress – and is therefore interesting.
So, who is Matthew’s book
primarily about?
If it’s about Jesus, then
instead of taking everything he
ever said as the final word for all time,
we might look to see if Jesus ever changes his mind.
His first teaching was
the Sermon on the Mount.
Not much grace in that
sermon.
Here’s what Jesus says
about the law.
“Not one letter or stroke shall pass
away from the law . . .
Whoever breaks . . . the least of these commandments . .
.
will be called the least in the kingdom of
heaven.”
Jesus thinks the
Pharisees are soft on sin.
He wants to make the law
more rigorous.
Even doing the right
thing isn’t enough.
You have to get your
heart right. You have to mean it.
Now fast forward to today’s lesson.
The disciples have just
violated a law about hand washing.
The Pharisees cry “Shame.
Not one stroke or letter . . .” they say.
“Whoever breaks one of
the least
of these
commandments . . .” they say.
But now Jesus says, “It’s
no big deal.” His position has shifted.
He explains, “It is not
what goes into the mouth that defiles,
but what comes out it.”
The heart is what
matters. Not legal technicalities.
Jesus began to wonder
what some of the law
has to
do with the heart.
Maybe if your heart was
right,
it didn’t matter if you kept the law perfectly,
so long of course as you were Jewish
and kept the law pretty well.
That teaching drew fire
from the Pharisees.
Jesus, being a bright
guy, knew when it was time
to get
out of Dodge, so he took a little vacation
in the non-Jewish country of Tyre and Sidon.
He had strictly ordered
his disciples
not to even tell non-Jews about the gospel.
They were the wrong race,
wrong religion, “not our sort dear.”
He was in Tyre and Sidon
on a vacation, not a mission.
But along came this
non-Jewish woman begging him
to heal her daughter.
Jesus ignored her. She
persisted.
The disciples said, “One
of the goyim is bothering us.
Do what she wants and send her away.”
But, Jesus told her he
served Jews only.
In desperation, she threw
herself down in front of him.
He called her a dog and
ordered her out of the way.
But she said, “Even dogs
eat the crumbs from their master’s table.”
That rocked him.
She had called him her
master.
It was at once beautiful
and a violation of the taboo
separating Jew and Gentile.
It was so wrong under the
law, so right in the heart.
Jesus repented.
He had just recently said
to his own disciples
-- right race, right gender, right
religion –
“O ye of little faith.”
Now he says to this
foreign pagan
-- wrong race, wrong gender, wrong religion --
“Woman,
great is your faith.
Let it be done for you as you wish.”
Jesus is stumbling toward
a new kind of religion
This nameless woman had
converted him.
And we had better be glad
she did,
because without her there would have been no gentile
mission
and we would still be sacrificing goats to Jupiter.
Matthew’s book still has
a long way to go.
Eventually, it ends like
this:
Jesus says to his disciples,
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . ..”
“Nations” means the
non-Jews.
When Jesus first sent his
disciples out to spread the gospel,
he said, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles
and enter no town of
Samaria,
but rather go to the lost sheep of .
. . Israel.”
This is for Jews only.
But after meeting this
gentile woman,
he began to change his tune.
In the end, he sent his
disciples to baptize all nations.
So, what might we learn
from this story?
The first thing we see is
Jesus modeling an open mind
and an open heart.
His faith was a living,
growing thing.
It changed. It moved. It
morphed.
He wasn’t so stuck in
what he said yesterday
he couldn’t move on to a new truth tomorrow.
Jesus changed. So how
about us?
It’s good to check our
faith from time to time
to see if it has any buds on it, any green shoots.
If not, we might want to
fertilize it a bit
with a new prayer practice, a new book,
a retreat or some act of mercy.
Maybe we need to meet
someone outside our comfort zone
-- some
modern equivalent of a Canaanite woman
–
someone to shake up our stultifying certainties.
The second thing we
notice in this story
is its
ethical trajectory.
Right from the beginning,
the distinctive thing about Jesus
was his gospel of inclusion.
Right from the beginning,
he sat at table with sinners and social outcasts.
But at first, he was
calling them into an even smaller circle
of stricter rules than the Pharisees had drawn.
Then he extended the
circle to include
good
hearted Jews who were a bit lax on the law.
Then he took in lawless
gentiles if they had great faith.
Finally, he sent his
disciples out to gentiles
who didn’t even have faith yet.
It is an expanding circle
of inclusion, an ethic of embrace.
St. Paul kept extending
that trajectory of inclusion.
“In Christ, there is neither Jew nor gentile, neither male nor female,
neither slave nor free,” he wrote.
neither slave nor free,” he wrote.
We have our trajectory
set in the life of Jesus.
Who might be outside our
circle of caring or acceptance?
Who might be the
Canaanite woman for us?
they may
show us the growing edge of our faith.
Not all change is good.
But some change is.
And the good change is as
uncomfortable as the bad.
When our Church changes,
it unsettles us.
But I’ll let you in on
something: That’s on purpose.
It’s because we need a
little unsettling now and then.
We all deserve to be the
main character in our own life.
But we will be that main
character only if we are open to change.
Exegetical postscript
In Mark and Luke, we don't see much change in Jesus as their stories progress. In John, you might say there is no change, except that for most of the book salvation depends on knowledge or belief, then at the conclusion, abruptly it is all about love. But there is no character development in the Johannine story to explain that shift. Most likely, it reflects that the book was written over a long period of time and the theology of the author or authors shifted. John might never have made it into the canon without the change in the latter chapters.
In Matthew, however, it is quite clear that Jesus' message is a work in process. This sermon points out how he changed from being a super-strict legalist (Matthew 5: 17-19) to one who was quite ready to bend the rules to make room for a heart-spirituality. (Matthew 12: 1-14; and more explicitly Matthew 15: 1-11). The shift we are primarily concerned with is from the initial gospel mission at Matthew 10: 6:
Do not make your way to gentile territory, and do not enter
any Samaritan town; go instead to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.
to Matthew 28: 19:
Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations . . ..
He leaves Galilee for Tyre and Sidon. Given what he said in Matthew 10, he would not have been there on the Kingdom Mission. He was there to get away. Right off, we have a Jesus who is not so omnipotent as to not need time away. While there, "a Canaanite woman" (Matthew 15: 22) approaches him. The term rendered "Canaanite" in this verse is not contemporary for Matthew. Syro-Phoeneican would have been the term then. Instead Matthew uses an archaic (even then) Old Testament term that connotes a sinful race fit for extermination as in Joshua. She begs him to heal her daughter. The text emphasizes that Jesus turned a deaf ear. "He said not a word to her." She persisted. The disciples can't take it so they say "Give her what she wants" -- not out of mercy but to get rid of her. Still, Jesus refuses. Why? Not that he is cruel but because he is following the law. As the Samaritan woman put it at John 4: 10, Jews, of course, do not associate with Samaritans (gentiles).
Even when pressed by his disciples to heal the child, Jesus said to the mother, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. (Matthew 15: 25) Compare Matthew 10: 6 (only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel Same words.) Jesus still has the same Jews only vision of the mission that he had five chapters ago. But she begs him again. Then in language that certainly sounds like exasperation, he says, It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to little dogs. (Matthew 15: 27)
People are uncomfortable with Jesus insulting a pathetic mother, so some sermons have attempted to soften this saying this is the term for pet puppies. That totally misrepresents the place of dogs in Ancient Israel. Please see http://www.andreascenter.org/Articles/Dog.htm Dogs might be used as functionally but they were unclean like carrion -- not pets. The term "dog" was used in reference to a person to demean, not endear, and smallness did not mitigate the ritual uncleanliness of a dog. Little dogs were even more worthless than those large enough to herd sheep or keep watch.
The woman persists, admitting to be a dog but still pleading for his mercy and Jesus is converted by her faith in him. That's when he says "great is your faith" in comparison to his recently saying to his Jewish disciples "O ye of little faith." (Matthew 8: 26) In Matthew's gospel, this story is the pivot that leads us from the Jews only mission of Matthew 10 to the universal mission of Matthew 28.
A common homiletic variant is to say Jesus was using this as a teaching moment for the disciples. But there is nothing in the text to suggest that. After Jesus heals the child there is no aha response from the disciples. Actually, they had been urging Jesus to heal the child before he relented. There is no aha moment for the Canaanite woman who has been taught something. There is instead an "O my!!!" moment for Jesus. We may not want Jesus to have thought things we reject -- we reject them because he has rejected them by the end of this story -- but do we really want to imagine he tormented this poor mother by ignoring her and then insulting her to use her as an object lesson to teach the disciples? First, that would be immoral by the basic standard of "never use another human being as a means to an end." Second, there is no Biblical evidence of Jesus ever doing such a thing. The evidence going back to Matthew 10 is that Jesus understood his mission from the beginning as being to Jews only.
There are three basic answers to why Matthew portrays Jesus as moving from a stance of religio-ethnic exclusion toward universal inclusion. First, it could be historically accurate. Jesus lived in Galilee, a region of mixed ethnicity and religion. Judeans called it “Galillee of the Gentiles.” This is why Barhtolomew asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Proxmity to Gentiles could make some Jews lax in their observance; while it could make other Jews hyper-observant (as Jesus appears in the Sermon on the Mount) and especially careful to avoid ritual contamination by their neighbors. It is clear across the synoptic Gospels that Jesus came to a position of inclusion. But it is historically quite plausible that he did not start there.
Moving past exegesis, what is at stake theologically in how we interpret the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman?
Exegetical postscript
In Mark and Luke, we don't see much change in Jesus as their stories progress. In John, you might say there is no change, except that for most of the book salvation depends on knowledge or belief, then at the conclusion, abruptly it is all about love. But there is no character development in the Johannine story to explain that shift. Most likely, it reflects that the book was written over a long period of time and the theology of the author or authors shifted. John might never have made it into the canon without the change in the latter chapters.
In Matthew, however, it is quite clear that Jesus' message is a work in process. This sermon points out how he changed from being a super-strict legalist (Matthew 5: 17-19) to one who was quite ready to bend the rules to make room for a heart-spirituality. (Matthew 12: 1-14; and more explicitly Matthew 15: 1-11). The shift we are primarily concerned with is from the initial gospel mission at Matthew 10: 6:
Do not make your way to gentile territory, and do not enter
any Samaritan town; go instead to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.
to Matthew 28: 19:
Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations . . ..
In case the word, "all" were not inclusive enough, consider that "nations" traditionally meant non-Jews. How did we get from a mission to Jews only to a mission to "all nations"? The shift is really underway in each story where Jesus bends the law that separates people from one another to allow sufficient flexibility for relationship. That culminates in Matthew 15: 1-11. It is not by chance this text about eating what is unclean is placed immediately before the story of the Canaanite woman. Jesus is about to extend this inclusivity beyond unclean food to unclean people.
He leaves Galilee for Tyre and Sidon. Given what he said in Matthew 10, he would not have been there on the Kingdom Mission. He was there to get away. Right off, we have a Jesus who is not so omnipotent as to not need time away. While there, "a Canaanite woman" (Matthew 15: 22) approaches him. The term rendered "Canaanite" in this verse is not contemporary for Matthew. Syro-Phoeneican would have been the term then. Instead Matthew uses an archaic (even then) Old Testament term that connotes a sinful race fit for extermination as in Joshua. She begs him to heal her daughter. The text emphasizes that Jesus turned a deaf ear. "He said not a word to her." She persisted. The disciples can't take it so they say "Give her what she wants" -- not out of mercy but to get rid of her. Still, Jesus refuses. Why? Not that he is cruel but because he is following the law. As the Samaritan woman put it at John 4: 10, Jews, of course, do not associate with Samaritans (gentiles).
Even when pressed by his disciples to heal the child, Jesus said to the mother, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. (Matthew 15: 25) Compare Matthew 10: 6 (only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel Same words.) Jesus still has the same Jews only vision of the mission that he had five chapters ago. But she begs him again. Then in language that certainly sounds like exasperation, he says, It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to little dogs. (Matthew 15: 27)
People are uncomfortable with Jesus insulting a pathetic mother, so some sermons have attempted to soften this saying this is the term for pet puppies. That totally misrepresents the place of dogs in Ancient Israel. Please see http://www.andreascenter.org/Articles/Dog.htm Dogs might be used as functionally but they were unclean like carrion -- not pets. The term "dog" was used in reference to a person to demean, not endear, and smallness did not mitigate the ritual uncleanliness of a dog. Little dogs were even more worthless than those large enough to herd sheep or keep watch.
The woman persists, admitting to be a dog but still pleading for his mercy and Jesus is converted by her faith in him. That's when he says "great is your faith" in comparison to his recently saying to his Jewish disciples "O ye of little faith." (Matthew 8: 26) In Matthew's gospel, this story is the pivot that leads us from the Jews only mission of Matthew 10 to the universal mission of Matthew 28.
A common homiletic variant is to say Jesus was using this as a teaching moment for the disciples. But there is nothing in the text to suggest that. After Jesus heals the child there is no aha response from the disciples. Actually, they had been urging Jesus to heal the child before he relented. There is no aha moment for the Canaanite woman who has been taught something. There is instead an "O my!!!" moment for Jesus. We may not want Jesus to have thought things we reject -- we reject them because he has rejected them by the end of this story -- but do we really want to imagine he tormented this poor mother by ignoring her and then insulting her to use her as an object lesson to teach the disciples? First, that would be immoral by the basic standard of "never use another human being as a means to an end." Second, there is no Biblical evidence of Jesus ever doing such a thing. The evidence going back to Matthew 10 is that Jesus understood his mission from the beginning as being to Jews only.
There are three basic answers to why Matthew portrays Jesus as moving from a stance of religio-ethnic exclusion toward universal inclusion. First, it could be historically accurate. Jesus lived in Galilee, a region of mixed ethnicity and religion. Judeans called it “Galillee of the Gentiles.” This is why Barhtolomew asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Proxmity to Gentiles could make some Jews lax in their observance; while it could make other Jews hyper-observant (as Jesus appears in the Sermon on the Mount) and especially careful to avoid ritual contamination by their neighbors. It is clear across the synoptic Gospels that Jesus came to a position of inclusion. But it is historically quite plausible that he did not start there.
The second answer is that Matthew’s
ordering of the events of Jesus’ life (the synoptic Gospels have significant
overlap of events but decidedly different sequences) deliberately recapitulates
the course of Israel’s history in the Hebrew Scriptures. The early positon of
Israel is anti-gentile to the point of genocide. Joshua recounts how the
gentile inhabitants of Canaan were “devoted to the Lord” for sacrifice, that is
to say extermination. See, e.g., Joshua 6: 21
Then they
utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women,
young
and old, oxen, sheep, and asses with the edge of the sword.
The awkward fact that some gentiles
survived to be the neighbors of Israel had to be explained in Judges this way: The gentiles
were there for target practice so to speak. They were there so that new
generations could hone their skills at war. However, Jewish people intermarried
with those gentiles, which lead to idolatry, bringing down God’s curse. Judges
3: 1-6. Hence, a wall of separation arose and continued throughout the Hebrew
Scriptures, taking a harsh form in the Restoration with Ezra-Nehemiah.
But along the way there was a
rising spirit of inclusion and fellowship, evidenced in such books as Ruth, and
coming to a culmination in 3rd Isaiah, where the Lord says,
And the
foreigners who join themselves to the Lord …
everyone
who keeps the sabbath and does not profane it
and
holds fast my covenant, I will bring to my holy mountain
and
make them joyful in my house of prayer . . .
Isaiah 56: 6
and most crucially for our purposes, My house shall be a house of prayer for all people,” (Isaiah 56: 7), which Jesus will quote while cleansing the Temple during the last week of his earthly life. (Matthew 21: 13)
and most crucially for our purposes, My house shall be a house of prayer for all people,” (Isaiah 56: 7), which Jesus will quote while cleansing the Temple during the last week of his earthly life. (Matthew 21: 13)
There were probably both inclusive and exclusive sentiments exiting in tension in all
eras; but the trend of Israel's history is arguably toward inclusion. That would be the
interpretation of the Scriptures that Matthew sees summarized in the life of
Jesus.
The third explanation for
Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as moving beyond a narrow Judaism to an inclusive
embrace of gentiles is that he is precapitulating what will happen in the Early
Church. Matthew’s Jesus begins in an exlusive mode, rather like his brother
James in Acts, but grows into the universal inclusion espoused by Paul at Galatians 3: 28:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.
Moving past exegesis, what is at stake theologically in how we interpret the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman?
It is principally a question
of whether we worship an omnipotent, omniscient, immutable deity in the Greek style, merely
pretending to be a 1st century Galilean with the worldview and
assumptions of a man of his time – or might we embrace the paradox of
Incarnation, in which God is manifest in a real man? The latter option
threatens to blow open our fixed concepts of both God and humanity. So much
turns on what we dare to imagine about God and ourselves. What we believe about
human nature can constrain or expand our sense of who we might become. The
saying goes, “all religions are sanctifying, so we tend to become like the God
we worship.”
Is
God a set of fixed rules against which we are judged right or wrong? Or is a
God a procreative force extending his embrace into ever-widening circles of compassion? Is God best expressed as a rule book or as an unfolding story?
Some are concerned that the story of the Canaanite woman shows Jesus engaging in morally suspect behavior. That is an understandable concern from our perspective. But if we enter into the story in its narrative context, the situation is quite reversed. For Jesus, shunning the unclean Canaanite was a moral obligation. Showing her mercy was the morally suspect behavior. Given the applicable law, the "sin" was not his shunning, but his act of compassion.
So what is a "sin"? Is it the infraction of a rule? If so, Jesus followed the rule of his culture by shunning the woman and broke it by healing. However, he broke the rule of our anti-racist (in principle) time by the shunning. What if "sin" is not the infraction of a rule but a narrowness of spirit, a hardness of heart, that refuses to grow and change. Here's the crucial question, does our image of Jesus open our hearts and minds or does it close them? Does it make us kind or judgmental? How we see Jesus can make all the difference for who we become.
Some are concerned that the story of the Canaanite woman shows Jesus engaging in morally suspect behavior. That is an understandable concern from our perspective. But if we enter into the story in its narrative context, the situation is quite reversed. For Jesus, shunning the unclean Canaanite was a moral obligation. Showing her mercy was the morally suspect behavior. Given the applicable law, the "sin" was not his shunning, but his act of compassion.
So what is a "sin"? Is it the infraction of a rule? If so, Jesus followed the rule of his culture by shunning the woman and broke it by healing. However, he broke the rule of our anti-racist (in principle) time by the shunning. What if "sin" is not the infraction of a rule but a narrowness of spirit, a hardness of heart, that refuses to grow and change. Here's the crucial question, does our image of Jesus open our hearts and minds or does it close them? Does it make us kind or judgmental? How we see Jesus can make all the difference for who we become.
