Sermon — August 20, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“She came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’
He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
(Matthew 15:22)
Jesus’ words to the unnamed Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel reading can be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to understand. She comes to him, seeking healing for her daughter. She kneels before him in a posture of humility. At first, he refuses to answer her, and when she persists in asking, his response seems to be somewhere between indifferent and insulting. Matthew’s narration gives no hint of sympathy or compassion. “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus says, as if this weren’t a matter of life and death; as if she and her daughter weren’t children of God of at all, not human beings at all, but “dogs.”
It’s a baffling story, and it’s generated plenty of interpretations.
Some see the woman as the hero of the story, and Jesus’ actions as proof that God can change; that here, unlike most of the Gospels, it’s the Canaanite woman who converts Jesus, and not the other way around. Jesus’ words, in this understanding of the story, aren’t cool or indifferent; they’re angry, disdainful, an ethnic slur, and sexist, to boot. But the Canaanite woman’s persistence in confronting him opens his eyes to see her as she really is, and he leaves the story a changed man. So goes one interpretation.
Another school of thought starts from the other end. Jesus can’t, by definition, they say, be any of these things; Jesus can’t be bigoted, or sexist, Jesus wouldn’t be cold or lack compassion; Jesus doesn’t learn, or change, or grow. He’s testing her. Clearly. And when he discovers her great faith, he grants her her reward: “Let it be done for you as you wish,” he says, and her daughter is healed “instantly.” (Matthew 14:28) She’s passed the test, so the demon can get lost.
Others lean on the old Christian method of making Jesus look good through vicious anti-Semitism. You can’t imagine how many commentaries on this text make off-handed remarks like “Jews frequently insulted Gentiles by calling them dogs” (citing no examples),[1] or “[Jesus] reacts to the woman’s request as they would expect of a rabbi in those days.”[2] (I beg your pardon?) Given the thousands of years of Christian violence against our Jewish neighbors, I’d think people would want to be a bit more careful about this kind of slander, but alas. It’s tempting for Christians to make Jesus look good, especially in his harsher moments, by making the culture around him look bad. But it just doesn’t work. The story of the people of Israel isn’t a story of exclusion or ethnic supremacism. It’s a story in which God chooses one people, not to the exclusion of all others, but to be the instrument through which God will call all the others. And we need to understand what Jesus says and does in this story as a part of that much larger story.
The story of the Bible is a story of false starts in God’s relationship with us. God starts out by creating humankind in a Garden, by giving Adam and Eve just one simple rule. What could go wrong? Well, things go wrong. Very wrong. But humankind continues to grow outside the Garden, and things go even worse, until it’s so bad that God has to wipe it all out with a Flood, and chooses one family, the family of Noah, through whom to rebuild.
It doesn’t quite work out. After the Flood, we return to our usual ways, trying to build a tower up to heaven so that we can become like gods. God won’t destroy us again, but God scatters us, confusing our languages and dividing us into different nations and peoples. And later, God chooses one family from among one people, the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and promises them that through them and their offspring, all the nations of the world will be blessed. (Gen. 22:18)
The story follows the descendants of Jacob, the people of Israel, as they go into slavery in Egypt and come back out of it; as they enter the Promised Land and struggle with the people living in it; as their kingdoms are destroyed and their homes taken away and the fraction who remain are sent into exile in Babylon, and then return. And yet the prophets promise, again and again, that though God’s people’s are small, and weak, and at the mercy of others, nevertheless, they are the ones through whom God plans the redeem the world. And so the prophet Isaiah, rejoicing in the prospect of a return from exile, receives this message from God: “Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel; I will gather others to them.” (Isaiah 56:8) The foreigners, the Gentiles, all the nations of the world will be joined with God’s people, and “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” (Isaiah 56:7)
Jesus sees his own life as part of this process; maybe even the central part. It’s in and through him that the good news will finally reach all the nations. And the message that he teaches prepares the way.
The first part of this Gospel reading is about Jesus’ disagreement with some of his contemporaries about the markers of Jewish identity, about the food laws and ritual practices that distinguished his people from their neighbors. Some of his contemporaries thought that the way forward was to emphasize the practices that separated them from the nations around them, the food laws and purity regulations that marked them as a distinctive people with distinctive beliefs, and even to expand them; to apply the same rules of purity to a meal at your own table, for example, that would apply to a sacrifice in the Temple.
Jesus disagrees. What really defiles you in God’s sight, he says, is not your dirty hands, but your dirty hearts. Ritual practices are markers of belonging, things that distinguish one nation from another. But when it comes to “evil intentions,” to “murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander…” these things cross every line of nation, race, or class. And if these are the true markers of purity, then there can be Gentiles who are as pure in heart as any of Jesus’ fellow Jews. People who are not among God’s chosen people and who don’t adopt their religious practices can still become a part of God’s beloved community.
Later, the apostle Paul asks whether this inclusion of the Gentiles means, in turn, the exclusion of the Jews. “I ask, then,” he writes to the Romans, “has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham!” (Romans 11:1) God has not rejected God’s chosen people, not at all. God’s grace hasn’t been moved from one set of people to another. It’s grown to include us all.
So where does this leave us, as we grapple with this strange story?
Well first: remember that Jesus knew this story of God’s universal love. If you believe that Jesus was the Son of God, then Jesus the plan and his own part in it. But even just on a human level, Jesus was a teacher who was well-read in Scripture and accustomed to interpreting it. He knew the promise that God’s kingdom would expand to include the Gentiles. He knew that God was calling this Canaanite woman. And in fact, he’d just caused a stir in the next town over by teaching that the things that separated her from him were not so important after all. It can be appealing, in a way, to see this story as a story about the Canaanite’s woman’s agency and her powers of persuasion. But it comes as a relief, at least to me, to hear that Jesus doesn’t need to be persuaded that you’re worthy of God’s love; that this was, in fact, the plan, all along.
I can’t explain Jesus’ tone, when he says these words, when he asks this woman whether he should give the children’s food to a dog like her. But I do know that human beings sometimes treat one another like something less than human. That we divide, constantly, between us and them; insiders and outsiders; the respected and the scorned. And I know that Jesus’ answer, when we make these kinds of distinctions, is that yes, it is right to take the children’s food and give it to the ones we call the “dogs.” That it’s what it is in the heart that makes the difference to him. That if there is ever a time in your life where you’ve been insulted or reviled, called a name or treated like you’re less than someone else—that Jesus condemns “false witness” and “slander,” but God promises to “gather the outcasts.” (Isaiah 56:8)
We do not need to persuade God that we are worthy, or prove that we deserve God’s love. We do not need to be born in the right place, or be a part of the right culture. The only test we need to pass is faith, the only thing we need to do is trust that God is gathering us in, whoever we are and whoever we have been—that Jesus is leading us to God’s holy mountain, “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” (Isaiah 56:7)
[1]Lane T. Dennis and Wayne Grudem, eds. The ESV Study Bible. Accordance electronic ed. (Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2008).
[2] Richard Ward, “Commentary on Matthew 15:[10-20] 21-28,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-20/commentary-on-matthew-1510-20-21-28-6