August 20, 2023, Welcoming the Unwelcome, Matthew 15:10-28 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ August 20, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

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Is there anyone who doesn’t feel really uncomfortable with the story of the Canaanite woman and Jesus that we just read? It’s always seemed to me one of the hard passages to understand, because it sounds like Jesus is being cruel, and possibly racist. He seems to turn his back on this desperate mother, just because she isn’t a Jew.

In the past, I have pointed out that the word Jesus uses that is translated “dog” is the diminutive – in other words, it’s the word that would be used for a pet dog rather than a run-of-the-mill cur. And that is true, but it really doesn’t help all that much. The fact remains that dogs, big or small, pets or otherwise, were considered unclean animals, and when Jews called Gentiles “dogs” in any way, shape or form, it was a derogatory term, a term of contempt. So what is going on here?

Part of the problem, I think, is that we have expectations for the way we think Jesus talked to people. Most of us have grown up with a false image of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” a Jesus who doesn’t raise his voice, a Jesus who always has a kind word for everyone. We like to worship “nice Jesus,” not a Jesus who speaks his mind or challenges people or – heaven forbid – a Jesus who gets mad at people. But the truth is, Jesus always loved people, and he was always truthful, but he wasn’t always “nice.” Sometimes he got angry, when there was something worth getting angry about, like people buying and selling in the Temple. He called his good friend Peter “Satan” when Peter was refusing to accept what Jesus was saying. And he called the Scribes and Pharisees much worse things: whitewashed tombs, fools, hypocrites, blind guides, children of hell. Jesus wouldn’t necessarily have made a good politician, because he wasn’t a smooth talker, willing to say whatever it took to make friends and influence people.

But “nice” Jesus is mostly a product of our modern sensibilities, and our great desire not to be made uncomfortable. But the “real” Jesus is how John described him in the first chapter of his gospel – full of grace and truth. Jesus’s words cut right to the heart of a person’s thoughts and desires and needs. They lay bare what is hidden. They expose what has been kept in the darkness. They create life and health in the midst of death and disorder. And it is the “real” Jesus that we meet in the gospel today.

So, what is really going on here? Where is the grace? Where is the truth?

We aren’t told how long the Canaanite woman cries out for Jesus to help her. What we do know is the two very different ways Jesus and his disciples responded to the woman. The disciples are annoyed. All they want is for Jesus to do something to make this woman shut up and go away.

Jesus, on the other hand, responds in a very different way. He starts up a conversation with her. Striking up conversations with women is, incidentally, one of the many things Jesus does that always puzzles and frustrates his disciples. It’s just not the done thing. But Jesus does it. This time, it’s more of an argument than a conversation. Jesus tells her his business is with the lost sheep of Israel, not the Canaanites. But the woman won’t give up. “Lord,” she says to him, “Lord, help me.” Then, he tells her it’s not right to take the bread that belongs to the children and throw it to the dogs. Ouch. Now we are squirming, right? But the woman isn’t. “Yes, it is right,” she argues back. “because even the dogs get to eat the crumbs the children drop on the floor.”

And Jesus is clearly delighted with the way she answers him. “Oh, woman,” he says to her, “great is your faith.” And her daughter is healed that very moment. We should note that there are only two times in all the gospels where Jesus praises someone for their great faith, and neither of them is a lost sheep of Israel. One is this feisty Canaanite mother, and the other is the Roman Centurion, who came to ask Jesus to heal his sick servant. When Jesus talks about the faith of his disciples the adjective he uses most often is “little.” “O you of little faith!” he exclaims, on so many occasions. But in this strange, uncomfortable interchange with the Canaanite woman, Jesus has uncovered something true and infinitely important. Faith isn’t something that stops when you cross the border from Israel into Tyre and Sidon; faith isn’t something that is limited by a person’s ethnicity or nationality – or sex, for that matter.

…which came as a real shock to a lot of Jewish people, I think most Jewish people, of Jesus’s day, because they really weren’t expecting God to cross the borders. Their whole identity as a nation, their whole identity as a people, was that they were God’s chosen people, over and against “the nations,” which was everybody else. The inclusion of the Gentiles was something most Israelites didn’t see coming. There were Gentiles from time to time who came to believe in the God of Israel, and who became part of God’s people, becoming circumcised, and following the law of Moses. But no one expected God to welcome the Gentiles as Gentiles, even though God had been dropping hints about it for centuries. When God called Abraham and promised to establish his family as God’s own people, that original promise extended to the Gentiles. God said, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” And we read today, in the words of Isaiah:

“My house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.”

And more:

“Thus says the Lord God,

who gathers the outcasts of Israel”

Not only foreigners are welcome, but also the unwelcome among God’s own people: the poor and the sick, the blind and the lame, tax collectors and sinners, women and children. For everyone living on the outside, for everyone living on the margins of the inside: when God sent his Son, the great inclusion that Isaiah had foretold became a reality.

But I think for us, the inclusion of the Gentiles isn’t something that feels all that relevant to our lives today, or to the life of the Church today, even when we remember that for the most part, we are the Gentiles. When we read this gospel, it doesn’t seem strange, or revolutionary, to us that Jesus healed the daughter of a Canaanite woman. We just wish he’d been nicer about it.

And the reason it doesn’t seem strange or revolutionary to us is that Gentiles – and tax collectors and lepers and all – they aren’t the unwelcome people of our world. We can only really understand what it meant for Jesus to talk to a Canaanite woman, and to heal her daughter, and to praise her great faith, if we understand who the foreigners and the outcasts are in our own society, and in our own church. I think we got a glimpse of the impact of what Jesus did when we saw Pope Francis washing the feet of Muslim immigrants – people on the outside, people we think of as “other” than us.

But we really begin to understand what Jesus did when we face the question of who is welcome to become a part of the church. Because today, just the same as it was in Jesus’s day, the church of Jesus Christ is divided on who gets in, on who belongs, and who doesn’t. Congregations in the United States are very often divided along color lines, or economic lines, or political. And most visibly and publicly, whole denominations worldwide are being torn in pieces over the question of gender. I recently heard someone sigh wearily, wondering when we were ever going to get past this issue. But we never will until we acknowledge that it’s not primarily about interpretations and theology; it’s about people, people of faith, like the Canaanite woman, people God has called. It’s about whether we are going to welcome all those people that God has already welcomed, whoever they are.

And I think the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman can be a guide for us in welcoming one another. Because accepting another person means being willing to do more than just be nice. Being nice doesn’t cost us anything. We can be nice to anyone, without having to respect them. We can be nice to people without the bother of getting to know them. But to welcome a person into our community, as a brother or sister, that means being willing to wrestle with what we don’t understand. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up Black. I don’t know what it’s like to be transgender. I don’t know what it’s like to be an immigrant in this society that mistrusts and marginalizes immigrants. I don’t know what it’s like to be you. But we can welcome each other. We can listen to each other. We can challenge each other. And we can marvel at one another’s faith. +