Pentecost 9
August 14, 2011
Matthew 15:21-28
If there was ever a 100% human portrayal of Jesus within the Gospels, there are three main examples which pop into my head, Jesus cleansing the temple, Jesus in the garden, and Jesus in his interaction with the Canaanite woman that we heard this morning. Now many attempts have been made to try and clean up this interaction between Jesus and this woman. It’s almost as if we would prefer that Jesus was not 100% human sometimes, especially where a text like this is concerned, and so we try and create a kinder, gentler Jesus than the one that Matthew portrays in this text. So maybe Jesus was just testing the faith of this woman, maybe he wanted her to act more like a proper woman and not address him in such a bold manner…a manner which was stereotypical of prostitutes of that time. But what if Jesus interacts with the Canaanite woman in this way because he’s just telling it like he sees it at that moment?
When I was reading the text this week, the plot of the movie Gran Torino popped into my head. It’s about a man named Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet from Detroit. He was a widower who neither trusted in the young priest who frequently called on him after his wife died, nor his neighbors, a Hmong family who had recently moved in next door. Walt really wished they would just go away, along with the rest of the people who had caused such a change in the racial diversity of his neighborhood. But things took a twist for Walt when the youngest of his neighbors got caught trying to steal Walt’s car. All Walt asked for as punishment for the crime was that the boy do some chores for him as Walt decided to reform the boy and do what he could to keep the boy out of his cousin’s gang…and as their relationship developed, Walt became more and more involved with the Hmong family that he originally despised. The neighbors became family and in the end, Walt made the ultimate sacrifice in order to save the lives of his neighbors from the gang that threatened their safety.
Within this movie, Clint Eastwood captured very accurately the continued racial tensions that exist within the city of Detroit and its suburbs. But what I like about it is that it demonstrates what can happen when we look beyond ourselves and dare to see our neighbors beyond the stereotypes that seem, all to often, to define us. It is a portrayal of a broadening worldview…one that also takes place in our gospel text this morning.
At this point in the journey, Jesus and his disciples were in the district of Tyre and Sidon, a land formerly known as Canaan. The folks who lived there were considered to be the enemies of the Jews since the time of Noah. The Canaanites, later called Syrophonecians, were descendants of Noah’s son Ham, the son that Noah cursed for having seen Noah naked. They were also pagans who worshiped Phonecian gods and had been slaves to the Jews for sometime, as was promised to Abraham by God. So the fact that Matthew refers to the woman as a Canaanite rather than a Syrophonecian seems to play off the adversarial nature of the relationship between these two groups of people. So, if it is surprising to Jesus, or to the disciples, that a Canaanite woman would approach Jesus and ask for his help while he was in the land formerly known as Canaan, it should really only be because the Canaanites did not take too kindly to the Jews.
It is obvious, though, that this woman knew exactly who Jesus was and knew of the miracles that he had performed. And it would seem, given the relationship between the Jews and the Canaanites that her willingness to cross the divide signifies the desperate nature of her daughter’s situation and the depth of concern that this woman has for her daughter.
The reaction of the disciples and of Jesus to this woman, however, is quite shocking when you think about it. Instead of being warm and welcoming, the disciples wish to cast her off back where she came from and Jesus first ignores her…twice, then he refers to her and her people as dogs, which were at that time seen as unclean in that cultural framework. And this is the part of the story that we wish to clean up a lot of the time. We like the part where Jesus praises the woman’s faith…though she never actually confesses anything…and we like the part where the woman’s daughter is instantaneously healed. But it’s the initial reaction of Jesus to this woman that makes this story difficult to read and to interpret…and so we try and interpret it by seeing Jesus in the kindest light possible and sometimes this leads us to portray the woman as the bad guy.
But we miss the point when we try and clean this story up a bit to locate the kinder, friendlier Jesus in this interaction…Matthew didn’t sweep things under the rug and neither should we.
When we try and clean this story up and look for the nice Jesus in this story, we miss out on the human aspect of Jesus that Matthew was trying to show here…as well as the divine aspect that is also on stage…with Jesus, they are one and the same. In Old Testament times, we see a God who was known to change his mind from time to time. And what we see when we look at this story is a fully human and fully divine Jesus who also changes his mind…a very human Jesus whose figurative sight is broadened to a greater vision of what God’s kingdom really is…who God’s kingdom encompasses. In this interaction we see a man on a mission from God to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel who realizes that maybe more than just the house of Israel needs to be saved…maybe they…maybe we…all need saving.
Two weeks ago, we heard the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 men plus women and children and there were 12 baskets of food left over…one for each of the tribes of Israel…and at the end of this chapter of Matthew we hear of the feeding of 4,000 with there being 7 baskets of food left over…7 being the number of completion in the Hebrew tradition. And in between these two stories is the tale of a woman from a group of outsiders…a woman from a group of people that were considered the enemy, having the boldness to remind Jesus of the leftovers …how there is still enough to go around even after all the children have been fed. And it is because of her testimony that we see a shift in Jesus’ mission…a shift from a mission to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel to a mission to save all of the lost sheep.
When Jesus died on the cross, he didn’t just die for the sheep of the house of Israel, he died for all of us. His worldview broadened to see the grand scope of the inclusive nature of the kingdom of God…his arm open not just to some, but to all.
Jesus may not have been a grumpy old man like Walt Kowalski in the movie Gran Torino and certainly Walt Kowalski is no Jesus, but in the end, both Jesus and Walt were willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good…Walt for the family that he had become closer to than his own family and Jesus, not just for the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but also for the Canaanite woman and her daughter and for you and for me and for all of humanity.
Amen
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