Matthew 15:10-28
10 Then he called the crowd to him and said to them,
"Listen and understand: 11 it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles
a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles." 12 Then the
disciples approached and said to him, "Do you know that the Pharisees took
offense when they heard what you said?" 13 He answered, "Every plant
that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14 Let them alone;
they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both
will fall into a pit." 15 But Peter said to him, "Explain this
parable to us." 16 Then he said, "Are you also still without
understanding? 17 Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the
stomach, and goes out into the sewer? 18 But what comes out of the mouth
proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. 19 For out of the heart come
evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.
20 These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not
defile." 21 Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre
and Sidon. 22 Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started
shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented
by a demon." 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came
and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after
us." 24 He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house
of Israel." 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help
me." 26 He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and
throw it to the dogs." 27 She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat
the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." 28 Then Jesus answered
her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you
wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.
It’s 2014. Aren’t you just a little
disappointed that no one has invented a time machine yet? I mean, just think of
how convenient that would be; think of all the wrongs that could be put right.
You could simply jump in your handy time machine, and with the turn of a few
knobs, the flip of a few switches, or (given that this would likely be a
modern, advanced machine) the launch of an app, be transported back in time. Just
imagine it: you could go back and keep your younger self from making the
decisions you now regret, or you could wind the dial back to the early nineties
and warn the world about Billy Ray Cyrus and his “Achy-Breaky Heart”(not to
mention Miley, but we won’t go there). You could travel back to the eighteenth
century and tell the founders of this country to be a little more specific when
they write the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; that might actually keep
some folks from fighting and claiming they know exactly what the founders meant
when they said this or that. You could travel back two millennia and find
yourself on the parched terrain of ancient Judea, somewhere between Gennesaret
and the villages of Tyre and Sidon, and when you arrive there, you could observe
those ancient Pharisees and their commitment to dietary laws and religious
requirements related to hand-washing.
You could hear how Jesus calls these hypocrites and cites Scripture
calling them out on their vain attempts at honoring God with their words and
rote actions while their hearts are far from God and God’s intentions. You
could even witness firsthand the words we’ve only heard in transcription and
translation this morning in verses 10
through 20 as Jesus explains that what goes into one’s body is not what
defiles it or makes it spiritually unclean. Eventually, Jesus says, that stuff
winds up in the toilet and in the sewer! What defiles is what comes from the
heart, “For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery,
fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but
to eat with unwashed hands does not defile." If you could travel
back to that time and place, you might even hear one or two of the disciples
say “Oh snap!” as Jesus “left that place and went away to the
[Gentile] district of Tyre and Sidon.”
But if I had a time machine, and I traveled back in time to the original
occurrence of our text this morning, I know exactly what I would do: I’d ask
Jesus: “Jesus, why did you call that woman a dog?”
You see, after Jesus lectures the Pharisees in the first twenty verses of
this chapter, he passed through a Gentile territory when Matthew tells us in verse 22, “Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started
shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a
demon.’" Now, this may seem like your ordinary, “person-shouting-at-Jesus-to-heal-a-family
member” incident from the gospels, but this one is different, especially the
way Matthew tells it. This woman is a triple offender when it comes to breaking
some cultural rules of the day. First, we’re told by Matthew that she is a Canaanite woman. Now, here’s the
thing: there weren’t any Canaanites living in the first century (strictly
speaking),[1] so
why did Matthew use this term to describe this woman? Well, if you were to look
back over the history outlined in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) you’ll
find that the Canaanites were some of the earliest opponents of the Israelites.
In fact, the term Canaanite in the Hebrew Bible can refer to a specific people
group or any of the non-Hebrew people who lived in the land of Canaan (the land
promised to Abraham by God). So, perhaps Matthew is calling this woman a
Canaanite to highlight her racial, ethnic, and cultural difference from the
Jews, in this case, Jesus and his disciples. So, she’s a Canaanite: strike one.
Strike two: she’s a she, or rather, she’s a woman. Now, I’m ashamed to
say that even today in our modern culture, women aren’t exactly treated fairly:
they aren’t fairly represented in decision-making bodies, they make around 70%
of what a man makes doing the same work, they still have to struggle with
antiquated stereotypes of another era, and in many religious circles they are
treated as second-class citizens, but in the Ancient Near East…women were
seldom seen and never heard. For this mother to even make an appearance to ask
Jesus for help was atrocious. She was a woman: strike two. The third and final
strike came in the way she shouted after Jesus. One didn’t do that sort of
thing, especially if one was a woman! It was gaudy, disruptive, and downright
uncalled-for.[2]
This woman, this Canaan woman, this loud, social-more-breaking,
Canaanite, woman shouts out to Jesus in verse
22 "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of
David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." How she heard about
Jesus down in Tyre and Sidon is anybody’s guess; Jesus’ reputation often went
before him in the gospels, but when this woman hears that Jesus is in the area
she seeks him out and calls him “Lord,” and “Son of David.” Now, the word
“Lord” could simply mean “sir;”[3] in
this case, however, with the woman’s use of the title “Son of David” it likely
means much more. She recognizes Jesus as one with the power to exorcise the
demon tormenting her daughter. This sounds like a classic setup for Jesus in
the gospels: a Gentile woman (a marginalized member of society) comes to him
for help, expressing faith and identifying him as lord or messiah. Then, those
of us familiar with Jesus’ actions in the gospels, we expect Jesus to buck
societal expectations and help this marginalized, outcast member of society.
But that isn’t what happens here.
No, at first, Jesus ignores the woman. We’re told in verse 23: “But he did not answer
her at all.” That seems strange;
maybe Jesus couldn’t hear her too well. That theory goes out the window though
when we’re told that “his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send
her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’” She’s shouting after them;
the disciples heard her, so we have to conclude that Jesus simply ignored the
pleading of this woman. What’s worse, though, is what Jesus says next: “He
answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’"
All of the sudden, Jesus is some sort of ancient Zionist, only keeping his
message and ministry for those who belong to the race of the Israelites? Maybe
Jesus is just saying this with his tongue in his cheek, or maybe there’s
something more to what he’s saying, like he is implying that Israel is bigger
and more inclusive than those first century folks may have believed.
Nope, because after she pleads for help a second time, Jesus responds to
the Canaanite woman in verse 26 by
saying "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the
dogs." He is calling this woman (and others like her) a dog! While
others have pointed out that this is the diminutive form of the word for dog
used here by Jesus[4]
(perhaps translated as “puppy” or “pet”), he’s still called this woman a dog
(and Greek is a language of nouns with gender, and anyone who’s ever looked up
cuss word in the dictionary when they were in elementary school knows what we
call a female dog!). This doesn’t sound like the airbrushed Jesus of our Sunday
School pictures. This doesn’t sound like the Jesus who sits and lets the little
children come to him. This doesn’t sound like the Jesus with gentleness in his
voice cleansing lepers and healing the sick. This sounds like a first-century
Jewish man with all of the instilled prejudices and cultural hang-ups that
would have come with being raised a Jewish boy in first-century Judea. It
sounds that way, because that’s exactly what it is!
Now, I know for some of you that may be flirting with blasphemy, but one
of the oldest theological confessions of Christianity is that Jesus was fully
God and fully human.[5] We
cannot read the gospels honestly without witnessing the ways in which Christ
was (self) limited in his knowledge.[6]
Jesus was surrounded by the influences of first-century, Jewish culture, and
his response to this Canaanite woman is evidence that perhaps some of it rubbed
off. But before you’re ready to throw Jesus’ divinity out with his humanity,
before you tune out because of your own discomfort with such an idea as
Christ’s humanness, watch what happens in the rest of this encounter with this
Canaanite woman.
In verse 27 [s]he
said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their
masters' table." Jesus has called this woman a dog, and rather
than balk at his name-calling or slouch back home believing she had wasted her
time with a so-called messiah, she shows even more faith, faith through her
hope and her own humanness. In effect she says, “You may call me a dog because
of my race and relation to the Israelites, but even dogs get to eat the scraps,
and all I need is a crumb—all I’m asking for is a crumb.” Her faith in Jesus’
power to heal her daughter is so strong that all she needs is a crumb from
Christ; she’s not asking for the whole spread, the entire song-and-dance; she
doesn’t need Jesus to walk on water or make enough to feed five thousand. She
just needs a crumb! What faith! What hope! To risk so much, to dare to be so
vulnerable and human as to endure even insult for the sake of her daughter and
the trust she has in Jesus’ power to make her well.
Such hope, such faith, such humanness…those are the kinds of things that
can bring forth love and compassion from even the hardest of hearts. Those are
the kinds of things that can strip away the callouses from a heart worn by the
influence of ignorance. Those are the kinds of thing that do not defile, but
can wash clean from the heart those things that do. For you see, when Jesus saw
the woman’s humanness, when he saw her hope, when he saw her for what she truly
was as a woman, a child of God, not a race, gender, or something to be called
different, when Jesus saw her faith, he said to her, "Woman, great is your faith!
Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed
instantly.
Now, it may be unsettling for you to think that Jesus called a woman a
dog, and it may be uncomfortable for you to think that Jesus could change his
mind, that the Christ could change the way he felt about a person, about a
group of people. But what if he did? What if this encounter with this Canaanite
woman is meant to show us the truth about Jesus being fully human as well as
fully God? What if this is actually a story about our Lord and Savior calling a
woman a dog simply because she belonged to a different race of people? What if
this is actually an account of Jesus changing and growing, perhaps even growing
out of the cultural influences he had grown up experiencing? If it is that kind
of account (and I think it is) what does it then say about us?
What does it say about us whenever we claim about our ignorance, about
our own sinfulness, “Well, that’s just the way I was raised”? What does it say
about us when we look on another person and refuse to see their humanness, when
we refuse to see them as equal to us? What does it say about our own arrogance
when we refuse to grow, to change, to see others we once saw as “dogs,” as
those less than us, even less than human, when the Savior himself was able to
let go of those cultural ideas that had previously shaped his understanding?
Are we better than Christ?! Would we dare claim that we don’t need to examine
ourselves and the possibility of our own ignorance created by our own
upbringing? Can we continue to believe that we can point to “the way we were
raised” as a justifiable excuse for our sinfulness? Can we really think that we
are incapable of growth and change when Christ himself, in his own humility,
has shown us that such growth is part of kingdom of God?
What beliefs do you still harbor in your heart, knowing they are unclean
and unfit for God’s kingdom? What do you continue to claim as acceptable—though
you know it to be wrong—simply because our culture, your upbringing, or your
own comfort says it is fine? May you search your heart and cleanse it of the
ignorance, the hatred, the selfishness, or all the things that truly defile it.
May you see the Lord’s example as one that calls you to follow, and may you
choose this day to stop clinging to beliefs and notions that allow you to
continue in a life of self-driven comfort so that you may grow and be
transformed more and more into the likeness of our Lord and Savior, the fully
God/fully human, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
[1]
Marilyn Salmon, Commentary on Matthew 15: [10-20] 21-28 (August 17, 2008) from
the website “Working Preacher.” https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=125
[2]
Jae Won Lee, “Proper 15 (Sunday between August 14 and August 20 inclusive): Exegetical
Perspective,” Feasting on the Word.
Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, KY (2010) pp.358-9.
[3] The
Greek word here is kurios, which can
often be understood as “sir” when used in the form of an address.
[4] M.
Eugene Boring, “Volume VIII: New Testament Articles, Matthew, Mark,” The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in
Twelve Volumes. Abingdon Press: Nashville, TN (1995) p.336.
[5] John
Anthony McGuckin, “Hypostatic Union,” The
Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology. Westminster John Knox Press:
Lousiville, KY (2004). p.175, (This is but one example of such a confession)
[6]
see Mark 13:32, Matthew 24:36, Luke 8:45 as a few examples
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