Jesus and Foreigners

I suspect it won’t come as a surprise to any of you that a sermon about Jesus and foreigners would emphasize Our Lord’s compassion for any and all people of all nationalities and ethnic groups. Surely this is what we believe Jesus to have exemplified and the gospel to teach.

It might be more of a stretch to begin to understand that Jesus might not always have been quite so open to non-Jews. The story we have in the gospel reading for today [Matthew 15:21-28] is, I believe, one of the most significant in the entire gospel record, although I suspect that if we were to give a little test to even the most biblically literate Christians, few would point to it as being anything other than one of the many healing stories.

We find versions of the story in both Matthew and Mark. Mark’s is a good deal briefer and lacks certain details such as the presence of the annoyed disciples. Both contain the puzzling comment of Jesus about how children’s bread ought not to be thrown to the dogs. Matthew adds another comment that sheds light on the story. Matthew’s Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.” This is definitely a story about Jesus encountering a foreigner. And as it unfolds, before its happy ending, the picture is not a very pretty one.

First, Jesus was born into a culture that drew very sharp lines—one might say walls—between the children of Israel and non-Jews—gentiles. It was not always so. Many are the stories in the Old Testament of foreigners and Jews dwelling together and even intermarrying. Ruth, a Moabite woman who married an Israelite man, Boaz, became the great-grandmother of King David. But this tradition went underground as a result of the conquest of Israel by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE. After a generation in exile, Israelites returned to their homeland and rebuilt their society, largely on the cornerstone of ethnic separatism. Their understanding of the disastrous defeat and consequent exile rested on the belief that they had polluted the worshiping community by intermarrying and above all by failing to keep their worship of the One True God (as they saw it) pure from secularizing influences and from contamination by other (that is, false) gods. A whole tradition grew up in support of keeping Israelites—Jews—not only from intermarrying but indeed from associating with foreigners if they weren’t themselves Jewish.

Let me hasten to add here an important caution. While it is true that this tradition of separatism is still alive in some parts of the Jewish community, don’t make the mistake that I often made out of ignorance in my childhood, namely assuming that Jewish tradition had remained largely unchanged since Jesus’ time. In fact, Judaism is markedly different in many ways today. Today’s Jewish community should not be misunderstood as necessarily hostile to the teaching of Jesus, no matter how much emphasis the New Testament puts on the divide between Jesus and the religious authorities of his own day.

Jesus no doubt to a large extent bought into the mindset of the culture in which he was raised. An important feature of that was the wholesale dismissal of non-Jews as simply racially and religiously inferior to Jews. When we trace the journeys and encounters of Jesus is the earliest gospel traditions, we see that, although he ventured into gentile territory, he made no overtures to gentiles to follow him. His mission, as reflected in this story, was directed to the House of Israel.

The Canaanite woman implores the help of Jesus to heal her daughter

All the more strange then that, on the heels of a controversy with religious leaders among the Jews that Jesus would strike out for the Mediterranean coast, an area that had long been thick with non-Jewish people and culture. It was a veritable hodgepodge of ethnic groups and had been for centuries. It is there, near Tyre and Sidon, that this gospel story opens. Matthew tells us that Jesus “withdrew” there, suggesting that he was literally on retreat from the thick of controversy with his religious opponents. Mark mentions that he entered a house, perhaps that of a friend or sympathizer, and did not want it known that he was there, though he couldn’t very well hide. Enter this woman, identified by Mark as a Greek Syro-Phoenician, and thus a Gentile, and by Matthew as a Canaanite, and thus one of the ancient enemies of Jesus’ people who resided in the land long before the Israelites invaded them. The woman is desperate. Her daughter has a severe case of demon possession, a general term that encompassed everything from literal possession to disorders like epilepsy to general mental illness.

Jesus’ behavior towards the woman is totally out of character even in the context of the gospel record, not to mention what we have come to believe about Jesus. Why? Why when encountered by a mother desperate for her seriously ill daughter’s healing would Jesus not so much as answer her a word? He seems to agree with his disciples who apparently are most disturbed because of the woman’s persistent pleas. But neither Jesus’ refusal to accede to her requests nor the disciples’ scorn deter the woman. When he answers her by saying, in effect, that she and her kin are but dogs compared to the children of God known as Israel, she soldiers on. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Those are pretty much her words in both versions of the story, so it is quite likely that they contain the point of the matter. It is indeed for this “saying” of hers, according to Mark, that Jesus then addresses her with a term of deep respect, “O woman, great is your faith!”

So the question shifts from why Jesus initially behaved as he did towards the woman to why the sudden change. Clearly he was impressed, moved even. Maybe it was the woman’s chutzpah in persisting until she got what she wanted. Maybe it was her willingness to humble herself. Perhaps it was that here was a socially powerless woman of no account by Jewish standards confronting a Jewish healer, courageously breaking through the barriers between them. Whatever it was, it seems to have been a moment of profound change in Jesus’ understanding of his own mission. If we follow Mark’s geography, the very next place that Jesus goes after this visit to the coast is well over to the east, into gentile territory. The next healing story that we have from Mark is the healing of a gentile deaf man with a speech impediment. In a very real way, that man is the very picture of what one of the psalms says about the gods of the gentiles, and about the gentiles themselves.

            Our God is in heaven;

  whatever he wills to do he does.

           

            Their idols are silver and gold,

              the work of human hands.

            They have mouths, but they cannot speak;

              eyes have they, but they cannot see;

            They have ears, but they cannot hear;

               noses, but they cannot smell;

           

            They have hands, but they cannot feel;

             feet, but they cannot walk;            

               they make no sound with their throat.

            Those who make them are like them,

               and so are all who put their trust in them.[1]

Jesus heals a deaf man with a speech impediment

So there you have it.  The difference between the children, made in God’s image, and the dogs, just like their gods. And that is the point at which Jesus seems to have had a conversion experience. We can but wonder what had preceded it; but chances are all those nights in prayer, the forty days in the wilderness, all that struggling, the continual turning over and over in his mind the question of how to re-write the inherited script of Messiah—all of these must have paved the way for the major shift which awaited a lone woman, a foreigner, a descendent of Israel’s enemies, to effect in Jesus’ own self-understanding. What is certain is that from this point on, he opens himself to all comers, Jew and gentile alike.

Charlottesville, August 13, 2017.  Hate groups display their colors.

Do you see anything in this week’s headlines to which this even remotely relates? I doubt that you can miss it. I will tell you now that this sermon is not about Donald Trump. It is about you and me, and how one of our biggest challenges is to insist on the authenticity of Jesus’ message of inclusion. If he whom we call Son of God can change his mind and focus, this must say something about the necessity of human beings doing so as well. But the people I’m concerned about right now, this very minute, are not the haters in Charlottesville last week, but rather the good Christians gathered here today. Don’t let our faith be hijacked by those who eagerly turn it into an apology for narrowness and exclusion. Don’t sit idly by while the forces of evil burn crosses and wave flags intimidating the vulnerable. Stand up and make your witness. If you can do so without succumbing to the force of hate, more power to you. If you can find the begging Canaanite in your neighborhood and open your heart to her in the name of Christ, go to it. And even more, if you can see, as I can, the residue of race pride or gender pride or traces of fear and distrust of fellow human beings in yourself, recall the example of him who once upon a time abandoned the notion of a limited mission and became open to any and all who cried to him for help. What he did and who he was is our mission and our call. Nothing more.
And certainly nothing less.

At the scene where hatred was fierce:  Charlottesville, 2017

A sermon based upon Matthew 15:21-28.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017

---

[1] Psalm 115:3-8, The Book of Common Prayer.

Desperate Housewife

Prayer and Desperation

Matthew 15:21-28

America’s Four Gods is the name of a book I am reading. It is an intriguing investigation into what we as a people say about God and what that says about us. The authors, sociologists, in their research discovered that there are five types of people in this country when you divvy them up according to what they think about God. There are those that perceive God as authoritative, those who believe in a God who is benevolent, a third group who thinks of God as critical, another bunch for whom God is distant, and the fifth group who are atheists and don’t believe in God at all.

I suspect that, like many typologies, this one breaks down at several points. I simply say so based on the fact that I am not so sure I have only one basic view of God, but rather an image of God that shifts and changes depending on the day of the week. I doubt that I am alone. Still, the authors make a persuasive case that these four notions or images of God are swimming around in the minds of people in our culture, and that they have a great deal to do with the arguments we have in this country generally called “culture wars.”

It is not so much on culture wars that I’d like for us to focus today as it is the question of what idea we have of God and how that affects the way we pray. I should pause to point out to a great many of you who have joined us in the last several months that my year-long project in preaching is to look at each Sunday’s scriptures with a view to what light they can shed on the practice of prayer, a quintessential religious activity that we sometimes don’t understand very well.

There probably is no story in the New Testament that better illustrates the crisis of prayer than the gospel lesson we have today. The Canaanite woman in Matthew’s gospel (15:21-28) has a serious problem. In fact she is desperate. Her little daughter is demon possessed. But on top of that, the woman is an outsider, not in her own territory—that was Gentile and so is she—but because she stands outside Israel, and thus separated from the source of healing that Jesus brings. He is, as her address indicates, “Son of David.” If the woman were American, and were studied by the sociologists Froese and Bader to find out where she landed on the God question, it is quite likely that she would fall in the group that sees God as benevolent, engaged in the affairs of humans, but not a punitive, judging God.

How could we make that guess? Well, if her notion of God were that God is authoritative and thus judgmental, she would more than likely believe that he daughter was demon possessed as repayment for something the daughter or mother or somebody had done to anger God. If she believed in a critical God, likewise she would see that God was judgmental, but she would hardly believe that God had time to intervene on her behalf. If her view of God were that God is distant, God would be neither interested in her plight nor judgmental, but utterly unconnected with what was happening in her life. As it is in Matthew’s version of the story, the woman cries after Jesus and pesters the disciples with her cries and pleas. The disciples want her gone. Jesus does not answer her. Yet the woman keeps it up. Finally she gets a word from Jesus. It is not clear in the story whether it is to the disciples or to her that he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel,” but either way that does not stop her. She comes and kneels in front of him, in the posture of worship and implores him, “Lord, help me.”

There are only three prayers—“help,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” So the Canaanite woman’s is pretty direct. “Lord, help me.” We could make up all kinds of things about the woman that might or might not reflect who she was. We don’t in fact know if she was rich or poor or somewhere in between; whether she was a single parent or not; whether she had other problems and issues or not; whether she had done anything else or seen anybody else to secure help for her daughter. But the point of this story is not to report a historical incident, nor to inspire speculation about the woman. The point is that this outsider, this Gentile woman, this mother, in her desperation takes Jesus on and stands toe to toe with him. So when for reasons best known to himself Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” she is undeterred. She comes back at him giving him as good as she gets from him: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Much else can be said about this woman and her role in Jesus’ life and ministry. But skip all that and simply look at her tussle with Jesus, for that is what prayer is, isn’t it? Is the woman not you in some hour of your own desperation? Is she not one of us, determined not to give up fighting for one utterly dependent on her and whose cause is a matter of life or death? Although Jesus is for us a divinity unseen, our prayers to him—to God—the two are interchangeable for the purposes of our discussion—our problem is that the concealed God is hard to get ahold of, hard to get an answer from, hard to move into action. That is of no great importance perhaps until the situation gets desperate, and then we’ll take whatever crumb we can get. Our Canaanite friend reminds us to beat God’s door down, to pester the living daylights out of disciples and saints and onlookers that stand in the way, or who look at us askance, or who try to shoo us in another direction. She exhorts us to stop at nothing until we get satisfaction from this unresponsive God who seems to mistake human beings for dogs!

OK. That is putting it a bit harshly, I admit, and maybe taking it all a little too far. But I think there is some warrant for believing that the story actually addresses the issue of desperation in prayer. From Luke’s gospel we can take a lesson from the little parable sometimes called “the importunate widow,” who pestered the unjust judge until he granted her request just so she would shut up. How much more, asked Jesus, will God grant justice to the ones who cry to God day and night? That message seems consistent with the Canaanite woman’s experience: keep on and don’t lose heart.

When we are desperate, someone hardly has to convince us to pull all the stops out. And more and more people are getting desperate as they approach the drowning point amid the tumultuous waves of this economy. People are losing jobs right and left. They are short of cash. They are out of food. They have no money for essential medicine. They are maybe a paycheck or two away from being unable to pay their mortgages or their rent or their electric bills. What has all that to do with prayer? Those who believe that God is engaged in the world, who believe God actually takes note of what is going on, whose eye is on the sparrow, have no trouble understanding that this is not a theoretical problem. And those who believe in a benevolent God—whose love is enduring and whose mercy is endless—do not get snagged by the notion that problems accrue because we have somehow angered a wrathful deity, much as one might foolheartedly arouse the anger of a mother bear by threatening one of her cubs. But what if you believe in a distant, impersonal, detached God? Do we need to convince you that prayer works? Do you need me to demonstrate how in your own desperate circumstances God is available and engaged?

The deeper I get into this, the more I realize that the way we pray—especially when we are between a rock and a hard place—is directly related to who and what we believe we are praying to. If you believe that God is actively involved in the world and in our lives; if you can even allow for the possibility that God cares about what is happening to you and me; then it does not matter much which of the four God-camps you belong to, God invites you to grapple with God and pour your heart out doing so. No room for niceties here, the careful phrasing of a collect or the beauty of liturgy. Just go to it. Pray, “Help, Lord, help!” If your God is distant and you have trouble seeing what sense it makes to pray, well, pray in whatever way you can, not in whatever way you can’t.

Maggie Ross, who is an Anglican solitary, wrote a book some years ago that I cannot part with, called The Fire of Your Life. In it she says that when she was living in Manhattan she had trouble praying and asked a friend what she should do. “Oh,” he said, “pray for things like taxicabs when you need them. If it makes you feel safer, don’t ask God for them, but pray to something inanimate like a fire hydrant.” So Maggie says that she spent several weeks experimenting with that and, when she was late for an appointment, she would pray to the nearest fire hydrant for a cab. Taxis would appear from nowhere. If ten people were along the block signaling for a cab, the one taxi that appeared would pull right in front her. She could get taxis at rush hour, in the rain, on the Friday of a three-day weekend. Then there ensued the dark night of the taxicab, and the joke was over.

That may seem bizarre to you, but I think I understand it. The reality of God has little to do with what we think of God—and that is true no matter what one of the groups, including atheist, that you might fall into. Prayer is giving ourselves over, heart and soul, to the great Mystery of the universe, crying out our need, doing what the Canaanite woman did when she interceded for her daughter, clamoring in the darkness for the Bread of Life or for healing. That God would turn and listen, respond, get with us in our weakness, hear our panic and soothe our fears is as improbable as praying to a fire hydrant would produce a taxi. But time after time, person after person, reports that it is true. For those who doggedly stick to their notion of God—whether that God is a strict judge or a critical impersonal deity or a remote force not interested in us—it takes perhaps more of a leap than they are willing to take. In the end, it does not matter what you think or what I think. Reality is reality. And until we throw ourselves on the mercy of the universe tossing ourselves upon the breast of the universe’s God, we’ll never know what works or what does not.

But you and I both know that it is not so simple as all that. At the end of the day we cannot just pray in desperation expecting God to appear out of the sky to rescue us from all our ills. A friend of mine once said that it is easier for the Holy Spirit to get you somewhere if you are already in motion, not inert. If you are hungry, either for bread or for spiritual sustenance, do something about it. Probe, investigate, ask, seek. Keep moving, talking, looking. If you are looking for work, network, talk, do all that you can to keep moving. If the Canaanite woman had sat at home and said her prayers and done nothing else, chances are her daughter would never have been healed. When she got herself up and out and on the street, determined to find the healer who could help her, she found Jesus and eventually got the assistance she sought.

And perhaps that is what prayer mostly is anyway. It is not technique or formula or theology or philosophy. It is simply moving into the Presence with audacity and courage. It is wrestling and struggling with whatever is tormenting us and giving voice to the deepest desires and yearnings of our hearts. It is taking God to task without fear and without groveling. It is letting fly with gusto and doing everything we can with the energy we have. It is when she did that that our Canaanite friend heard his word, “O woman, great is your faith. Be it done to you as you desire.”

Who knows? Will you push on and out of desperation until you hear that too?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011