The good people of Brett-Reed Presbyterian Church in King William County welcomed me to their pulpit this morning! And this is what I had to say about things that defile and the great faith of a Canaanite woman:
Jesus finds himself in two arguments in today’s gospel lesson. In the first, he quarrels with the Pharisees over the Jewish dietary laws. In the second he quarrels with the desperate mother of a sick child over whether he’s going to accept her child as a patient. These very different arguments have one thing in common: the relevance of Jesus’s ministry beyond the borders of Israel. For that reason, we will explore both arguments.
The Law of Moses, which Jesus and his disciples observed, forbade the consumption of pork, shellfish and other foods. In addition, traditions developed over time about the preparation and consumption of food, the washing of hands and of cooking vessels—traditions which some of Jesus’s contemporaries regarded as equally binding as the commandments in scripture. There are at least two purposes for these food regulations. Obeying them keeps one free from ritual defilement, which otherwise would prevent a person from coming into God’s presence in the temple. The other is that they serve as a cultural marker of God’s covenant community.
So this is not about good hygiene. Nor is it about so-called Jewish legalism. It’s a matter of wanting to obey God in all things and a life-or-death matter of maintaining one’s religious identity. In a world of idolaters, the dietary laws were visible signs of the community’s commitment to the One, True God. In the days of the prophets and kings, the people of Israel had compromised that commitment and blurred their identity through foreign alliances and the worship of strange gods. As a result they were driven into exile. No one wanted that to happen again.
But Jesus and his disciples apparently flouted some of the sacred traditions surrounding the preparation and consumption of food, so the Jerusalem authorities send a fact-finding team to Galilee to investigate—just like the presbytery sending a committee out to check up on the congregations in the hinterlands!
Jesus doesn’t directly address the issue of dietary laws with his interrogators. Instead he accuses the Pharisees of having undue respect for tradition. He cites the example of corban, a vow to bequeath one’s assets to God. Some people were abusing this vow to get back at their parents. By pledging their resources to God they got out of having to pay for the care of their elderly fathers and mothers. Tradition held that the vow was unbreakable, even if undertaken for evil reasons, because keeping promises to God trumps all other considerations. Jesus countered that the traditional respect for vows cannot be abused to evade the plain will of God. “Honor your father and your mother” takes precedence over anything that comes after we say “I solemnly swear.” For Jesus, when a tradition or an age-old interpretation of scripture gets in the way of obeying the will of God, it has to be set aside, no matter how old or venerable. And scholars have noted that rabbis after the time of Jesus came to the same conclusion that he did.
Jesus does address the dietary regulations directly with his disciples. “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” Jesus reasons that food bypasses the human heart, entering the mouth, being digested, and then passing out, as he says, into the sewer. And the human heart is the source of all that renders us incapable of approaching the Lord. The heart beats with lust, which gives birth to infidelity. The heart is full of greed, which breeds everything from shoplifting at the mall to embezzling money at work. Our hearts quake with fear, and fear leads us to strike out in anger, tell lies or even smear the reputation of others. Indeed, it’s not what we chew in our mouths that defiles us; it’s our inability to control that tongue of ours within our mouths that casts us out of God’s presence. That’s a heart problem, not a gut problem.
From this quarrel we learn a few things. First, we learn that some promises aren’t meant to be kept. If it’s a choice between breaking our word and breaking God’s law, by no means should we break God’s law. The best way to avoid this sticky situation is not to make rash or, God forbid, drunken oaths, but when we’ve made promises we can’t or shouldn’t deliver on, Jesus frees us from legalism when it comes to our own words in order that we may joyfully submit to God’s word.
Second, Jesus has taken a tiny but revolutionary step toward redrawing the boundaries of the people of God. For Jesus, what really sets apart God’s covenant community from the world at large are not cultural markers such as diet, clothing, or physical appearance, but a culture of love for the neighbor, which the commandments define negatively as no adultery, no murder, no coveting and no lying, and which Jesus defines as doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. As that old camp fire song puts it, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” not “They’ll know we are Christians by the songs we sing, or the clothes we wear, or the social class we come from.” This cracks open the door to the mission to the gentiles that unfolds after his death and resurrection, and to the Church’s willingness to accept gentiles as gentiles, rather than requiring them to assimilate.
Which is a good thing. Virginia is a long way from Galilee. Had that door not been cracked, we would not have walked through these doors today to worship the Messiah.
Third, this quarrel between Jesus and the Pharisees raises questions about our own quarrels in the church. Just what are we arguing about? Core issues of how to love our neighbors as ourselves, or what color the new carpet’s going to be in the sanctuary, or whether or not we should sing praise songs or Bach fugues in worship? The latter set of issues has more to do with tradition than submission to God’s will. Tradition is important, but it can be modified or set aside if that’s what obedience requires. The protest, “But we’ve always done it this way,” cuts no ice with Jesus when doing it this way gets in the way of neighborliness.
From there Jesus leaves the boundaries of historical Israel, traveling north to the region of Tyre and Sidon. There the mother of a demon possessed girl approaches Jesus to perform an exorcism. There’s nothing surprising about that. People are always seeking healing from Jesus, either for themselves or for their loved ones. What is surprising is Jesus’ response to the request. At first he gives her the silent treatment. When she won’t go away, he breaks his silence with a rude excuse for not healing her daughter. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She’s a Canaanite, a gentile. Sub-human. A dog.
Well that’s not nice! Not only is it not nice, it’s surprising. No sooner does Jesus crack open the door to gentile disciples than he appears to slam it in this woman’s face. And that’s grounds for despair. If a mother at her wit’s end can’t turn to Jesus for help, who’s she going to turn to?
That said, I must admit that I am not always the picture of compassion when I come across people who need help and need it now. In the three years that I have lived in Richmond I have perfected the art of studiously avoiding eye contact with the panhandlers that haunt our intersections. And I am a pro with the remote. If images of starving people in the Horn of Africa flicker across the screen I can turn the channel quicker than you can say “NFL.” I’m in no position to judge Jesus on this one.
But are we in a position to understand him? I don’t think that Jesus is casting aspersions on her because of her gender or her nationality, but he is rendering a verdict on what it means to be a gentile in the most basic sense—that is, a person who does not keep covenant with the God of Israel, and who trusts more in the visible things of this world than the invisible source of all that is. Yes, the woman knows enough about her Jewish neighbors in Galilee to know that their hopes are set on a restoration of the House of David. And yes, she knows enough about Jesus to know that he might be the one. That said, I wonder if she only recognizes Jesus as one source of power among many, which means that there’s still room for growth in her thinking and behavior—as there is for all of us.
At the outset of his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul pens a devastating indictment of what it means to be a gentile. We gentiles put our trust in the works of our own hands, and not in the Creator whose hands fashioned us. We fail to see the forest for the trees by worshiping the things of nature rather than the divine nature that caused them to be. Whether it’s the ancients who worshiped statues of gold and granite, or we moderns who worship the idols of money, beauty, fame and power, it’s all the same disordered thinking. And no matter which form our idol takes, idolatry yields the same bitter fruit. “Full of envy, murder strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless,” he writes.
Talk about things that defile. It is a dog’s life—a sub-human existence—when we turn away from God and in the turning we shatter the image of God implanted within us.
She’s a gentile. A mad dog snarls in the depths of her heart. And we are gentiles as well, and I suspect that the mad dog has not entirely quieted down in the depths of our hearts.
And Jesus calls us on it, just as he called the woman on it. Is this not our experience? When we have no one to turn to but him for help, when we are at the end of our rope or in over our head, is it not revealed to us in those situations precisely how futile our thinking has become, how inadequate to the task we are, and how far from God we have drifted?
What does the woman do when Jesus drops the hammer, when the judgment is pronounced? She presses her case. “Yes Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” She acknowledges that the verdict is true and just, but not without making one, last, spirited, even sassy plea for mercy.
And mercy is what he gives her! According to Mark’s gospel, Jesus grants the woman’s request simply because it’s a quick and clever reply to his own words. “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” Jesus respects snappy comebacks! It makes you wonder if our prayers might be a bit more effective if they crackled a bit more.
But according to Matthew, Jesus casts out the demon in deference to the mother’s great faith. Now what is it about her faith that’s so great? I suppose that in light of this story great faith is persistence in prayer even when God is silent. Great faith stands before the judgment seat of God, and acknowledges the judgment is true, while daring to look the judge straight in the eye. “You owe me nothing, Lord; I admit it. But do this for me anyway. Give me your grace, for that is what your blessings are when they are undeserved—sheer grace.”
There’s only two people in the gospel of Matthew whom Jesus praises as people of great faith: this Canaanite woman and another gentile, a Roman centurion. But when Jesus speaks to his disciples he often begins with, “O ye of little faith!” How can it be that those closest to him have the lowest reserves of faith in him? I don’t know, but perhaps his encounter with this woman from another land confirmed for Jesus his inclination to crack open the door of discipleship to those on the other side. We would do well to crack our church doors open as well, to let in the fresh breezes of great faith and neighborly love.
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