By the Rev. Marcia L. Ledford
Year A-Season after Pentecost, Proper 15, Matthew 15:21-28
Jesus, has gone Up North, in Michigan speak. Scholars think maybe he was on a self-imposed silent retreat. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus goes to a house and essentially hides. He has bugged out. He has been rejected in Nazareth in the previous chapter (no prophet is honored in his home town). He is constantly hassled and his movements are monitored.
This story is about borders, all kinds of borders, geographic, emotional, physical, cultural, racial and gender-based borders. Jesus went to a place where it is mostly non-Jews, Greeks, Syrians, etc. Physically and culturally he is in a strange place. In our gospel reading for today, we get a window into Jesus’ mind as he is confronted by a foreign woman and struggles about what to do. It is one of the most extraordinary moments in the Bible.
Is this story relevant now? Absolutely! We live on the margins, spiritually, psychically, sometimes in life, and we struggle with rejecting or acknowledging the pain and isolation of others. Our culture encourages us to stonewall the needs of those who are marginalized compared to us because in some way they have are to blame. They are not “like us,” and so we separate ourselves from them.
Geographical borders are usually easy to recognize and often they are marked by road signs. And, they are almost all made by humans. They separate us by culture, religion, and territory, they are evidence of human government, usually monarchies, democracies and dictatorships. Geographical borders usually morph into psychic or emotional borders we build up in our heads, first individually, and if enough people buy in, a cultural border appears. These borders are almost always based on fear or inconvenience or superiority. Borders show something is about to end and something else is about to begin. Jesus tries to cross the border into the land of anonymity, but the Canaanite woman knows who he is.
Jesus has removed himself from Palestine because his mission is in crisis. Matthew increases the wattage of this story. We cooks up and electrified ethnic stew for us to digest. There should be a sign that reads, “Danger, high voltage!” in bright red next to this passage. Matthew uses Canaanite instead of Syrophoenician in Mark. The word “Canaanite” is a freighted word for a first century Palestinian Jew. God promised to give to Israel the land of the Canaanites as Israel left the desert after 40 years of wandering. Canaanites were considered pagans and therefore impure or polluted. Political animosity between Canaan and Israel was a fact of life. Calling a Canaanite a dog was a common practice in the time of Joshua.
A foreign woman would normally not be acknowledged by a Jewish man. The Canaanite woman stands at the cross-point of many borders based on her ethnicity, femaleness, and her faith practice. She’s desperate. Her child is sick. She is willing to do anything for her daughter. What would it take to be that desperate?
Jesus seems to be defending the social location of Jewish experience under Roman occupation—they are perpetually hungry and poor, uneducated, driven from their lands to become day laborers, glorified slaves. Jewish people are living a subsistence existence while the grain they toil to grow is shipped off to the nearby coast for exportation and profit.
“Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” “Lord, help me,” she says, still honoring him with proper titles, and debasing herself by kneeling before a stranger, a Jewish man, who views her as culturally impure, and impure as a woman. Jesus is silent. The disciples heckle her, “Send her away.” Send her back to where she came from, into her world, and across the border and away from us. She is not intimidated and won’t give up on him. The first thing he says is “I am here only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Jesus struggles with the human impulse to harden his heart, to stonewall her pain and suffering. He says, “It is not right to take the children’s bread/grain and feed it to the dogs.” He uses a heavily charged word, bread or grain because the people are starving. Jesus has stirred up this encounter with the word bread, and now he essentially calls her and her people, dogs. The implication is irrefutable. Is Jesus calling a human being a dog after preaching to care for others and eating with sinners? His behavior is contradictory.
Undeterred, she immediately accepts their different perspectives and reminds him of his divine mission, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs from under the table” even the least of us, the impure, are happy to receive your ministrations, however nominal, and honor you because you are that great. I have no shame in my desperation for you are my great hope. I will grovel in the dirt for crumbs. What might that take to be in such a place?
She is lightning fast, wise, and unrelenting. They are in a verbal fencing match, thrust and parry, until finally she pierces him with her wisdom. She foils his resistance. She has reframed his mission to be open to the gentiles by her words.
The Canaanite woman pulls Jesus across the border from his humanity back into his divinity. Her words empower and invoke the Gentile ministry of the Word, Jesus. Her words have informed the Word. She has stopped him in his tracks, interrupted him, and offered him grace within which to change his mind. And to finally remember himself.
What are our borders? This region has been devastated with economic instability, a border representing the ability to provide family shelter or not. We often struggle with our health or that of a loved one. Some of us hope to have meaningful work. Some of us have to deal with racism and sexism. And there are invisible border struggles like depression and being LGBT.
And yet, as Christians we are called to help others. We look at photos of thousands little children at the southwest American border. Children of desperate parents willing to risk it all, even the lives of those children to improve their situation. Often we are in the same predicament as Jesus was. He was trying to get out of the situation. He had his own issues. But the Canaanite woman redirects his mission! Everything changes from that point. It is a transformational moment…remember Isaiah! “My house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples!”
What does Jesus say as he ascends into heaven and the end of Matthew? “Go therefore and make disciples of ALL nations. Remember, I am with you to the end of the age.”
How do we wrestle with conquering our internal borders that wall us away from others in need? We must continue to allow ourselves to be stopped in our tracks by the marginalized, and to listen for that spark of the Divine within them and ourselves. We must be open to that Voice, to follow Jesus’ mission-altering decision. We must hear, God calling us to encourage and to help those on the margins wherever and whenever we can and not be satisfied that we have finally done enough. We must remember ourselves just as Jesus did.
